TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #103: Mauricio Di Bartolomeo & Adam Reeds

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Mauricio Di Bartolomeo & Adam Reeds, the co-founders of Ledn.io, to discuss: - Ledn's loan offerings and expansion into Latin America - Bitcoin mining in Venezuela - Stablecoins - Crossing boarders with Bitcoin - How the Venezuela government buys bitcoin via LocalBitcoins - Sneaking out of the country - The ills of Socialism - much more Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Cash App. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. And if you don't, let me tell you about them. The Cash App is allowing you to stack sats. So you can buy and sell Bitcoin on the Cash App. You can send Bitcoin from the Cash App to a personal wallet, from a personal wallet to the Cash App. And then on top of that, you get the ability to use the Cash App

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If you're going to get $5, then $5 is going to go to Alves La Crosse, a charity very near and dear to our heart. Again, if you haven't downloaded it yet and you're in the U.S. and you're looking to buy Bitcoin, what the hell are you waiting for? Use the code STACKINGSATS. download the cash app from your local app store today what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt we're here in like the d league relegation studio i'm sorry gentlemen uh the the relegation studios my apartment building are filling up tonight for some reason and we're now in the kitchen

It's actually a great setting. I'm happy we're here. We're drinking some native Venezuelan cocktail. We'll get into that in a little bit, but first I'd like to introduce my guests, the co-founders of Ledin.io, Mauricio D. Bartolomeo. Got it. And Adam Reitz, a lot easier. That's right. What's up, gentlemen? How are you? We're great. Doing great, man. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming by.

Oh, it's our pleasure. We've been chatting on Telegram for a while now. I feel like Mauricio and me have been here for almost a year now. yeah man it's been a while close to that um before we jump into what you guys are doing at leaden um let's jump into your story about bitcoin you guys are a very fascinating story in my opinion um and i think it's an important one for everybody here so how did you guys come to find bitcoin be where you are in toronto and starting uh leaden.io yeah that's a that's a great question. I think so for those who don't know I'm Venezuelan and I want to give a shout out to my friends in Venezuela. Salud. We are making diplomatic with Marty.

But anyway so I'm originally from there I was born and raised there my whole family's still there. In about 2003 I went to Canada to the University. I went to the Richard Ivey Business School and that's where I met Adam. But after I graduated my whole family was still down there and you know the economy wasn't really in the shambles that it is today so I was always back and forth my family was always trying to get me to move back and I was in that process I worked for a few years in Canada I worked for a few years in Minnesota that a project with my dad but in 2013 when Chavez died and Maduro wins the or steals better term

the new election and there's you know the country's condemned to six more years of communism, I made the call to essentially spend the next years in Canada. But my family didn't. My family wanted to stay. So as I'm in Canada, my youngest brother was trying to start his own business. He had just graduated from university. And the kind of setup we had in my family was like my dad was kind of always our angel investor. And we had to pitch to him and the brothers were the analysts. And then, you know, he would give us a seat check for whatever it was. And at the time, my youngest, it was my younger brother's turn. So he was pitching ideas to sort of start a business but the way the country was it was like nothing was viable and

i was a finance guy so i got the like you know check or veto whatever the the part of the financial aspect of the investment and uh it's funny because he was getting really frustrated like nothing was really getting the check mark and uh at one point he gets really frustrated and he basically says listen man i'm gonna do this and he presents two options one option was real-time sex toy delivery and the other option was mining bitcoin venezuelans very horny huh well no he wanted to do this in miami i know i know people in miami are very and he wanted to leverage the uber delivery system for it but anyway um so as obviously the two options being compared and i'm starting to take a look

that was my first real look at bitcoin uh just reading his concept of mining bitcoin so to me at the time obviously a was just way better than the other option uh but even better i kind of started understanding what bitcoin was and how mining worked and i saw mining as an essential part of bitcoin with the biggest input being power costs in venezuela having highly subsidized power it was almost like a no-brainer was bitcoin sort of foreign to you at this point when the mining was introduced to you or yeah i was that was my first exposure to bitcoin this is my brother wanting to buy these computers to mine this bitcoin thing and i was like okay well i was analyzing and i became fascinated with how it worked but i i just didn't know how big it was

right i thought this was like a niche thing that he wanted to do and i was working in canada so i went back to canada and i started catching up on how much developing was happening in canada around bitcoin because a lot of core devs like big names live in toronto actually and in canada so i started saying okay this is really not just a venezuelan thing like there's there's value into this and then that was i was getting more and more interested but then i fly back for christmas and when i fly back for christmas my brother has like smile ear to ear and like three times as much computers and i'm like what the hell right what uh what stage are we ever gpu mining or no i think this was uh s5s7s i forget exactly which ones i believe they're s7s like the first f7s um if i

recall correctly but when i went back i saw all these new computers and i was like before even talking to him i went to my dad i'm like did you give him more money like what happened because i didn't believe that this you know i just didn't i needed to understand i wanted to be i wanted someone to explain to me and my dad's like no no he paid me back like this is all his stuff so then i went and chatted with him and uh he showed me how he was mining this and selling this and there was an exchange working in venezuela at the time called sir bitcoin and uh he just sold the bitcoin on the spot and at that moment that was my invitation to the rabbit hole uh i essentially descended from that moment on i got back to canada quit my job and just went full

time into bitcoin um started mining and that that was kind of how i got into bitcoin so i'll stop there it's again it's fascinating right and we'll get it further into your sir adam what is your how'd you get into it yeah so full credit to mauricio for getting me into bitcoin so mauricio comes back to canada uh we're good buddies we've been chatting uh you know on and off all the time he was in venezuela and comes back we start grabbing beers catching up and he's telling me about this ability to hook up your computer to the internet and essentially print money. And I was blown away because my background's in energy. So I had worked in 10 years building wind and solar projects and structuring finance and operations around that sector. And so the

concept of turning electricity into money and storing electricity was just amazing to me. And so So at the time, too, energy storage in the physical sense was really blowing up. And the hardcore, I'm an engineer, and the hardcore engineers will call me out on this and have when I call Bitcoin energy storage, because I know you're not physically storing electrons, but in a sense you are, because you're converting that value that disappears in a second when an electron moves into something that is stored in really perpetuity. So that really twisted my whole concept of how I thought everything was put together, and I was blown away and just got more and more into it and then from there I

said you know what we have to do this and so I was that yet you have to put your your mind and energy into something and go after so we both put some money together invest in a mine in Quebec obviously Quebec having the lowest cost of power in Canada and that was our first introduction to it and we and we did that for about a year this is back in in 2016 and then from there we wanted to get really do something that that better use their skill set so it was is It was much more of, okay, this is interesting mining, but you have to do this on a really, really big scale. And so it was, okay, how do we do something that really adds value to the Bitcoin community?

And what does this sector need? And that's kind of what we'll get into with Latin, but that's kind of the predecessor. Yeah, and so Quebec at the time, because all the miners flew into Quebec for the cheap hydroelectric, right? Exactly. They ramped up the taxes on them, what, like last year? Yeah, so Quebec, so obviously Americans and Canadians know how much Canadians are obsessed about their health care. The thought of electricity is almost that same obsession in Quebec because everything is powered by electricity in Quebec. People heat their homes with electricity in Quebec.

So it's an easy political story to say that these Chinese miners are coming to Quebec to steal our cheap electricity. And it was easy to spin it. So what that did was create political willpower to really, I guess, put a stop on it and really try to figure this out. They actually threw a pretty nasty moratorium on all new mining development, which actually caught us. Because we were in the process of developing this really large facility in Quebec, like three megawatts. That was like our first facility with this very large real estate company. And once, actually the morning, or I believe, so the Tuesday we were supposed to get the drawings approved by our engineers. on Monday Quebec slapped the moratorium for no further developments of any

blockchain data centers so that essentially to us there was a huge blessing in disguise because we had we had continued on trying to develop a large facility with a big complex where Adam used to work and when the moratoriums kind of hit that was basically a blessing in disguise for us to now switch because we had already been talking about lending we knew that we knew that if we figure out a way of financing Bitcoin and allowing people to continue to hold it and be owners of the upside

and not having to sell it to get that liquidity, if we could figure that model to do it cleanly, there were a few people doing it at the time, but we just didn't like how they were doing it. They had either ICO structures or they just had different terms or they weren't as transparent as we wanted them to be. So I, as a user, wasn't comfortable with the offerings

and we just wanted to create something that we would use. essentially that's what we ended up doing so when you wanted people to be able to hold their bitcoin not sell and two you didn't think anybody was doing it correctly at the time at least to the to the level that we wanted to do it or at least not doing that well in canada because there were just there were some isolated companies that were offering it in the states but those those actually it wasn't very practical as a canadian to borrow us dollars if you wanted to invest in canadian dollars uh and everything else was in cash so you just you took this unnecessary forex risk right so we we thought there was huge potential to do this in canada and from there

canada had an amazing brand to to sort of create a global company because canada has this aura of good vibes solid banking good vibes uh and so it it's actually been uh it's been quite a treat because we found incredibly brilliant people to join our team in canada our team is incredibly multicultural actually where over half of us are from that time even though we all live in toronto and uh adam i'm the only one born in canada on our team so we say that a lot i love it it's like i mean it's it's similar in new york but like toronto especially is so multicultural and it's super cool we're all canadian citizens but uh i'm the only one born there half our team's from latam and uh our cto is egyptian um you know many different our other developers croatian so

super cool boss yeah and then from i guess you know just to get into some specifics of certain things that I particularly didn't like about the offerings at the time is that a lot of them were there was a token involved like and that's just not a good user experience just if you have to buy a token to pay interest or if you have to just buy a token for anything that you don't really it's unnecessary for right and and then the other piece was that there were the other people that were doing this in a non-ICO way their lowest ticket was 10k and we saw this in like 10k that's that's a great if you're a very wealthy American but if you're someone in Venezuela trying to buy more equipment 10k is as a bare minimum ticket it's just not gonna cut it right and so i guess

that's a good segue into what is your your i don't want to see your target audience but uh your typical user your average user where are they like miners looking for a 500 well no i mean it's evolved and it's a big mix like so we have very large clients that essentially are financing their business with bitcoin like they're very big holders and they've gone into like the bitcoin industry and so essentially instead of selling they dip into the the bitcoin back loan to essentially fund operations without having to sell the bitcoin um that's that's that's a growing uh market for us uh latam uh so we announced our service in latin america six latin american countries uh in uh june 8th in the blockchain summit in mexico city and since then it's been

growing way faster than than our canada uh essentially side of things yeah so let's uh let's talk about that last time we we saw each other in person was consensus that was may it was like a month before that and we were pre-interview talking you guys said a lot has changed since then what uh what particularly um obviously you've expanded in latin yeah so we launched our savings account uh which was a great which was a big uh moment i guess and and in latin in latin and in canada it really helped people kind of see it as you know savings and credit are two products that you're used to I guess in your in your traditional banking platforms so and a lot of times a Bitcoin back loan is not the most intuitive thing to explain to

people and why it makes sense from a tax standpoint from a opportunity cost standpoint but yeah in essence it's lost material thought here a little bit so yeah you know yeah we're just talking about a how much to change so you guys expanding the lat am you're saying there's a lot more demand down there yeah you guys see that right away and so people are not used to bitcoin financial products but they get credit and savings yeah well no essentially that that helped and when we started essentially telling people what we did a lot of people actually like both products and the savings is actually a much lower friction product because you can try it with you know 0.1 bitcoin at 0.01

bitcoin just get a feel for the platform get it out and uh it gives you both options so when you need a loan you can access liquidity but when you don't need a loan you can still earn some interest while you're waiting i guess well you don't need liquidity and uh when we launched in that time we started working with some uh some content makers in latam which has really uh you know let people know that we exist uh beyond the conference and they're essentially coming over and and the great thing about latam is people come and try us for the 500 feature so our lowest loan denomination is 500 but the same people come back you know weeks later for like five six thousand ten thousand dollars and they grow with us um a lot has changed from us from uh from uh

you know client base uh we have a lot more users now um our users are coming from obviously a lot more users coming from latam we're getting a lot of traffic from spain just because everything is is in spanish uh and there's a lot of overlap in those markets um but uh yeah so it's like yeah that's been really our big focus since we saw you is uh doing our big latin push and i think uh just it's worth like stepping back and looking at the philosophy too of what we're doing everything that we're building is to help people save in bitcoin and save more in bitcoin so just with that itself what we want to do is most people in the world are just starting to learn about bitcoin let alone the services around it so we're trying to create as low as friction as possible and everything that

we do so really the introduction of the savings account was there's no minimum uh so you can deposit five dollars of bitcoin if you choose uh hopefully you'll grow that but we wanted to make sure that there's no friction to get started and then from there you'll learn about the other products you're offering what we're offering one new product that we're launching that we're super excited about that's coming out next week for canada specifically and then we'll be expanding region by region is our uh what we're calling our buy 2x product uh so this will be it's essentially a bitcoin back loan but the way you can think about a bitcoin back loan right now it's it's a mortgage for the bitcoin you already own so you don't want to sell your bitcoin you can take out

some fiat against it uh spend that fiat reinvest it in a different asset uh what what a buy 2x product is is it's financing more bitcoin for you to purchase so you can take a dollar uh we'll lend you another dollar and you can buy two bitcoin so the end state's similar so then you have two two dollars of bitcoin with the dollar loan against it but your use case is different one person wants more bitcoin the other person needs fiat and so that's that sounds pretty dope because that's what usually what people will do right is take out the the the fiat loan and just buy more bitcoin with it and hold it exactly yeah um so let's jump into like the risk of all this this is i feel like uh you guys in this vertical within bitcoin get a lot of scorn uh the the lending and

interest rate and savings in loans part of Bitcoin finance. The risk, a lot of people like to say that you guys are lending this money on the other side of the Bitcoin to short traders who could crash the price and a lot of the knocks on these lending services is that you could develop, just get margin call basically. And so the question on top of people's minds is uh how are you managing risk especially if you're operating with short sellers which you probably may not even know and then uh i guess yeah what are the like the risk systems in place and how how do you protect yourself here's a good question when volatility is is high to the downside yeah so i think the first thing that we we should address is it's important that we don't all rebuild the

existing system that we already have that would be a complete waste of time uh so we think a lot about is how do we use all the amazing attributes that the Bitcoin network provides. And so with that, I guess just starting with the LTV. So we have systems in place where we could lend up to 90, 95% loan to value. But with that, if Bitcoin price moves 5%, then suddenly you're getting margin called. So the reason we lend at 50% is for that exact reason that we don't want to have margin calls as part of the product. Part on the timing that we launched, but we've actually never completed a margin call uh with with our system to date and we can't take credit for that that's the bitcoin price appreciation so uh luckily we have the systems in place to manage that but it's

amazing to our users that all of our users have made money by by using the product and holding their bitcoin uh so that's the first piece uh the other piece that let me talk about is our real-time proof of reserves yeah so one thing that again back to what what we wanted to see when when we We used a product. Before we did this, we were Bitcoiners ourselves, right? So in building this platform, we basically built a lot of things that we wanted to see, one of them being the real-time proof of reserves. So not every lender does this.

Actually a few do. We're actually one of the only ones that do, which is when a person takes a loan with Ledin, we assign an individual unique address for that collateral. That's where that person sends the collateral and they can ping that address as long as their loan is active to see that their funds are there they can set alerts they can check it on their note third-party explorers essentially they can always verify that their their assets are there um that to us is is big because it helps us build trust like we we didn't do an ico and raise millions when we came out of the gates we didn't have a big vc backing us like everything that we

built has been on the back of clean tech and effort and and just our appreciation for the the community so we essentially build what we wanted to see and and on the back of that we've earned the support and and you know i guess uh business of a lot of the bitcoin community in canada and abroad and so that's one one thing um the other piece on the on the lending sorry on the bitcoin lending side so for the savings account uh the way we generate that interest is to your point by lending those bitcoins out to institutions and the way we protect ourselves is essentially taking collateral when we lend out those bitcoins and only working with very select counterparties that have balance sheets that are um you know well uh very well funded and able to sustain

any particular uh you know potential default yeah and then on the shorting side i mean this isn't excuse me anything that we're doing specifically but uh no one is really uh at least from what we hear in the market and articles that have come out recently uh no one's shorting bitcoin right now so and the parties we're lending to are not using it for shorting they're using it for working capital so a simple example is an otc desk trying to manage buyers and sellers so someone shows up to buy bitcoin they don't have the seller lined up yet it'd be nice if they got them bitcoin the same day so we lend it to them and then they're in and out a day of bitcoin and they provide a really good user experience so you can see this is helping create liquidity pools right exactly

yeah yeah exactly um yeah and then on the downside so one of the other neat features about our savings account is. So we have some clients that, for example, have a loan with us and they're going to be away and out of reach for whatever, like a week or so. And they don't want to get margin called. And that's one thing we know. We don't make money on margin calls. We want our users to know that. The last thing people that come to use our service want is to have their Bitcoin sold. So we're very proactive when it comes to that. And in fact, we enable the feature right now with our savings account for if a client knows that they're going to be out of reach for a certain period of time and they just want to be extra safe that they're never going to get margin

call during that period, we basically allow them to deposit additional funds into their savings account and give us authorization to meet a call if it happens from those funds. And that just creates a better user experience. In the future, we're also working through other options. So for example, in a time of high volatility, we could sell you, call it price insurance by way of an option or by way of a temporary short position. So these are features that we're thinking through to make the user experience better and to really let the user know

that they have every tool available to not sell their Bitcoin. What's the word? Valiant. Is it Valiant? Valiant service to provide, helping people hodl. No, it is.

Why do you think people are so scared of these products? I think it is. Some of it may look like traditional banks and that's really where the thesis of what we're trying to avoid. uh and i think it's it's just back to being completely transparent uh not hiding fees and uh you know things that are are painful yeah i should probably uh be transparent here too this podcast is uh sponsored by by another lending company as well i'm not this isn't i'm not here

to show lending products but it is uh no it is interesting just following on to a lot of people get really triggered when people talk about the the savings account in particular yeah no i bet And even with the Bitcoin back loan, right, like, you know, I try to draw an analogy and I wish I was alive at the time when the mortgage was first kind of instituted. But I don't really think that anyone, like the first knee jerk reaction was like, oh, great, I have now a first claim on my home. But essentially the thinking went from I have a first claim on my home to it's still my home. I can just buy a bigger one and I can make use of this credit vehicle as best as I can. And I think a lot of it is time, right? Like, you know, these products are relatively new.

and even when they started being offered there are some stories and we see this in latam like there was a lot of fly by night companies back in 2014 2013 that were doing unsecured lending with bitcoin and they just took a lot of money from a lot of people yeah and that that of course is just a terrible president to have uh and on top of that you have like the guys that came right after were like or ico guys and so it's just not really it didn't really help the narrative as far as transparency, honesty, and like serious players doing this. So I think as more and more legitimate players come and try to do this in the right way, a compliance setup that actually has some longevity to it, people will essentially start noticing that these services are actually not that high risk,

that yes, they can provide a material benefit. In fact, you know, like to Adam's point, we love the fact that all of our clients have done well. The work, the product, quote unquote, is working as we intended it to it's allowed people we have clients that have we have clients that took out loans with bitcoin like 3 500 bucks uh and today they're just you know they're sitting on their their collateral worth you know three four times as much uh and they you know they could pay back their loan with a fraction of what they left yeah and it's it seems like in the otc desk example in particular that uh like it seems like it could work out where it's mutually beneficial for each party involved all three of you right the otc desk is getting better liquidity which

allows them to get more fees you are just in the middle facilitating the transaction between the person putting their bitcoin up as collateral and this otc desk and the person putting up their bitcoins getting a little vague on what the otc desk is paying and you guys get the big on that so what is it it doesn't sound too good to be true it just sounds like right especially if the price of bitcoin is going up well yeah and then the way i think of this is you know every time you you create a new asset which doesn't happen often but when an asset gets created there's always a big talk around distribution right like distribution can never be fair can never be equal there's just going to be some people that have a lot higher amount and some

people have a lower amount so every time you create an asset pool there's the the distribution of it is imbalanced right and and so are the sorts the uses for it and the needs for it and the prices of the cost of money that any opportunity can pay so it's just natural to have these facilities that now aggregate capital from people that have an extra amount of it and then facilitate it to people that have a great opportunity and are willing to pay a yield on it and it just facilitates more development really you're just essentially a liquidity organizer if you want to call it that yes yeah the other thing i'd say too is uh obviously this gets talked about a lot but but twitter as much as active as it is is and all of the you know

discussion that happens around these products it's still a small part of the overall ecosystem because what we find is most time when we're talking to new customers we're introducing lending and savings products for the first time so it's not like they're saying okay well how does this differ from our you know great counterparties in the market it's it's what is this and how does it work uh and um yeah it's just it's interesting so i think bitcoin's hard enough to understand as it is and then when you layer on these other complexities it just takes a while to get to get comfortable with it so yeah yeah i mean we're only 11 years and it's pretty crazy to see if these products even exist right now yeah yeah exactly yeah and it's been great i

mean in in north america we've been somewhat privileged in that we've had a few companies trying to do similar activities and they essentially spent you know some marketing dollars trying to like educate the community and what they're doing and how they're doing this why they are different, why this time around will work because they're compliant, because they're this because of that and I think that's very great for the North American community we're doing a very similar job in LATAM right now

where essentially we're introducing this as the first kind of compliant, good player to come offer these services in their language completely like so that they're completely comfortable for them and for them it's really the first time

they see honest people trying to provide this service and we essentially they come with really great questions uh and we're basically there answering like exactly what you just asked like how do you generate the yield what happens if the price goes down so all these questions that as you answer them more in north america they become less and less frequent uh and the same will happen there but it really feels like it's an introduction it's it's a lot of people just don't even know these services exist to your point yeah and then again there's like a bunch of questions popping up in my mind you guys have like a like a cold storage wallet of reserves like is there reserves behind the lending products

and stuff like that yeah so with as we've mentioned about the real-time proof of reserve so every loan gets its own address and that's all with BitGo so we generate a unique address for every loan and the collateral sits there we don't touch it and so it's it's just great because someone can look at their balance at any time during the loan prove just that the balance is still sitting there So how does that work out like technically like so somebody's supposed to send their Bitcoin to you gets loaned out on the other side but if it stays in this address and doesn't move were you guys just getting Bitcoin from your reserve that you have and then giving it out? Yeah, so sorry to clarify, that's for our loan product. On the savings product, it does get lent out. And that's, yeah, so in the savings product,

it doesn't have a unique, there is a unique address for a deposit for security purposes, but then after it gets amalgamated and lent out. Yeah, exactly. So with the loan product, it sits with the Go Trust, like insured custody, and it sits in a unique address within their vault, and our users can ping it throughout the loan lifetime.

Oh, yeah. yeah and I think the broader important thing is obviously there's ethics involved in all of this and we know that if we ever lose one sat then we're not gonna have you know a business and that'll become public very quickly and it's not at all we want to do so that's I think in a sense hopefully that's that's some protection there and that obviously people talk is cheap but knowing that you won't have a business the day after that happens is a pretty strong motivation to make sure you're operating things correctly yeah right and speedy i mean this is a long-term reputation game right i think exactly that's uh right and we have one and it takes one minute to destroy it

right it's a one set if you will exactly um no but it's something is like in is it like an outside observer watching all of you lending companies try to build these products it's just you guys get I mean but people have these worries for good reasons right I mean especially after 2008 like the whole yeah and it's interesting because people say sometimes they'll talk to investors they say oh well the lending space is is you know it's crowded right now it's like okay there's probably nine that I can name off that that have decent volumes and are building a good name and but if you like how many exchanges are there globally right how many OTC desks are there globally so I think we'll see a lot more lending companies come in and I think

the space can support a lot more so it's just interesting that when something's new someone always says well that other person is doing it or that other company's doing it it's like okay well let's see it evolve and let's see a lot of people do this because it makes sense for the market and I think the other thing you're seeing is you're seeing exchanges onboarding the service because this is a great so it the way the way we see it this is you know the lending and and saving products are just a natural evolution of the asset class and sooner than later i think that you will start seeing these services all offered under one roof uh because people want

to have access to all these tools right and so the the best home for the digital asset technically would be the one that allows you to to access these services and when you don't want them just go back to your hardware right yeah it's just i mean it's the whole i mean it sounds like the the defy dream in and out but on bitcoin and and i i want to say like on the record like we're actually out of for all the talk that goes around we are the only bitcoin only lender uh by the way boss no you guys got the uh the the support of francis i've seen on twitter so yeah he's uh he was our first and best client i want to give him a shout out actually to him and the guys about bitcoin they've been nothing but great to us and uh and we love the the moves that they're making

the fact that they're supporting you as well and essentially everything that they're doing for Canadian Bitcoin ecosystem. We're just happy to be there along with them. Yeah, we're very proud to have them on as sponsors here at TFTC there. I mean, Francis, just incredible. Ben as well, the whole team over there.

For sure. No, just the whole mentality of Bitcoin first. We're going to wasabi all your coins. We're going to stave off the government as long and hard as we can and try to support other Bitcoin businesses. Well, yeah. And one thing I wanted to add actually,

So as we go to LATAM and essentially we start servicing these markets, the people there, not everybody actually is as willing or able even to receive dollar transfers. So, in fact, what we've done before to some of these guys is we're actually locking down the loan and everything and all the terms are down in dollars. But we essentially use the Bitcoin rails to send the proceeds of the loan. And they essentially convert out in local Bitcoins locally and send it to their own bank account or they don't convert right away, but they just keep the balance in Bitcoin. But increasingly, we're having people basically ask us if we support stable coins because this is a big use case there. Really? Yeah. Any in particular?

We've done a lot of research for this. We've been very methodical about why, you know, as you know, we've been Bitcoin only and we're very much that's been very much on purpose because, you know, that's the one we understand and we believe in. But seeing that these other types of digital assets are now solving problems for people in other places, we want to essentially facilitate that if it helps, right? No, we were alluding to it in our pre-conversation with Conversational Rao yesterday. That's what he was saying.

I think he's under the impression that there's going to be... That's what I said in the podcast. There's two schools of thought. Like this Bitcoin adoption happened within a quick five to 10 year period, after which it is a reserve system. and you build a medium of exchange networks on top of it, whatever it is, the currency,

or does it take longer than that? You've got this transitionary period where stablecoins and the such fill in the gap. But listen, as a Latin American, in fact, most people there, just the same way they are here, if you get a windfall of $100,000, and that's your net worth,

I don't think, especially there where people, maybe not everybody understands Bitcoin as much, And we're very bullish on it because we spent years learning about Bitcoin. We're not just putting our careers and our wealth behind this because we just think it's cool, right? Like we've learned, we believe in this. And that takes time. So I would think it's a bit naive to start expecting everybody that gets a windfall now to want to keep their whole balances in Bitcoin. People just want their wealth not to disappear.

That's the main thing people want. And largely the dollar solves that for most people and outside OECD countries. yeah so let's uh let's jump into what's going on latin like what you guys experience is venezuelan like expanding down there as a company um because i because a good example is like argentina this summer they had their currency crisis and i wrote about in the bed a couple times like oh maybe people go and use bitcoin then like argentinian readers reached out like no the u.s dollar still still going down here like most people are not in bitcoin so what does the scene like down there like what is the the attention level like how many people get it if

they do get it they're like oh this is what we need this is our solution yeah i was just gonna say i think you know what we see is just capital controls all over the place right so you have local currencies that are failing and a simple example of this so what we learned in mexico is mexicans with u.s dollar accounts are now getting taxed on an accrual basis as if their u.s dollars are property so let's just say i bought property taxes on their uh well capital gains tax so let's just say I'm you know decently wealthy Mexican and I had a hundred thousand US that I deposited in Miami in a Wells Fargo account and I bought that when the peso was ten to one USD five five ten years ago and today it's 20 to one USD

so the Mexican government says that the Mexican government coordinates with the US government the US government gets Wells Fargo to send all the playing game of the names of the Mexicans with information touching touching the other thing i'm sorry yeah it's like getting some no no it's up top up top yeah yeah that's creating like feedback yeah you're good i'm sorry for interrupting yeah yeah no worries so yeah so you have a hundred thousand u.s sitting in miami and you bought that when the peso was 10 now the peso is 20 so the mexican government tax authority says oh hey you doubled your money uh but they haven't sold the u.s sold sounds funny to say that but they haven't converted the u.s dollars back

to pesos yet they're just holding them for protecting their wealth now they have to pay peso capital gain stacks so this is another just practical reason for stable coins is so they get a cut in half anyway right exactly yeah so you're trying to protect your wealth and so and the other piece is the rationale for stable coins is any incoming wire from our understanding into a bank account is viewed as income so now you're guilty until proven innocent you have to say no that's not a that's not income that's a loan of an asset being bitcoin that i already owned and i'm just taking in a mortgage against that and so you you want to avoid the banking system because you're being accused of something that's not at all true and you're spending a lot of time and

effort just educating people about something they don't understand yeah mexico came out thinking about banning bitcoin right or at least yeah they have a fintech law the fintech law made things quite complicated it's um you know latin is a bit of a of a puzzle when it comes to legislation for example like to give you an example on the fintech law the fintech law reads that the central bank of mexico will issue the list of authorized digital assets that the authorized financial institutions can transact in and this is like you know this was passed um i believe it's june of last year today the central bank has not authorized a single digital asset and there are active exchanges in mexico that are working uh but it's it's all gray right

now a lot of it is gray and but most of it what we did because we do a lot of like we do a full legal analysis before we go to every country and uh the result of our analysis was largely that on the buying and selling side yes there's a lot of issues because most of it is around capital controls but most countries welcome lending liquidity at non-predatory rates it actually helps their economies right to inject liquidity at very healthy rates and just to give you a a comparison a mortgage in mexico is 14 percent oh shit like credit cards are somewhere in like the 20s 30s no actually no that's uh like car loans are somewhere in the 20s and uh and same goes like as you go down but it's not only the rates it's like you don't get the credit

nobody gives it to you that's the biggest problem you can't get out the loan if you want it you won't get it the other really interesting uh problem that all the i guess the last time countries and many countries where they have currency issues are facing is you can't call bitcoin money because as soon as you do then you can accept then then vendors can accept it so then it just displaces local currency so you have to if you call money then you can regulate it and you can watch it go through all the the systems and and everything but you can't because when you do you create a bigger problem so the governments kind of stay neutral on it and then come up with other ways to kind of approach it but it's the exact opposite problem that you know canada and

the U.S. and the rest of OECD countries have, because in there, it's just really trying to make sure you're watching capital flows and to the really person that doesn't understand it, trying to make sure you're stopping drug trafficking. I watched Dope the other day on Netflix. I didn't see any Bitcoin being sent, just bills and bills of USD, never Bitcoin mentioned. But anyways, another topic. But yeah, it's just interesting, this issue. So what we did is we worked with Denton's law firm to map out every single LATAM country and asked, you know, many different questions.

How is Bitcoin regulated? How do you take security against Bitcoin? Can we operate a Bitcoin savings account? What are the rules we have to disclose for loans and lending? And so we went through this. So we actually follow both Canadian regulations and regulations in the country we operate on. So it's duplicity, but it's interesting and important to understand all the different rules. I'm sure you guys have learned a lot.

Oh, man. yeah it's been well and then just to go back on the on the you know the use case quote unquote for latam um yeah i mean a lot of people like i'll give you the example in venezuela so venezuela uh when it was 20 you know when it was chavez time like 2010 2012 there was strict capital controls like it was literally illegal to hold dollars so and nobody wanted the bolivar hot potato like it was just it never worked to hold bolivares so what people did when they got the Bolívares and they couldn't get dollars, well, yes, they could get, quote, black market dollars, which are just dollars, just not authorized by the government. So, the different price?

Yeah, it's the real price. It's the actual real price, because the only other option is the government, and they just won't sell it to you. You have to be friends with them. So, in essence, you get these Bolívares, you're desperate to get rid of them. There's no dollars in sight. So, then your options become flour, like, do you want to stockpile flour? Do you want to stockpile sugar tires like non-perishable stuff people do that in barter out then the next one is hey i got some bitcoin or hey i got some stable coins or hey i got any of these things that can preserve value and get transferred out and it was bitcoin way back because it was the only thing available but i mean i would say now that if you present people the options between bitcoins and stable coins

with relatively same ease of use people will a lot of people will pick stable coins just by virtue of being able to not having to deal with the volatility, right? If you don't understand Bitcoin enough. No, I mean, that would sort of confirm what the Argentinian readers that reached out to me, like we preferred a dollar and like thinking of a digital dollar.

Yeah, and so we're getting a lot of demand for stable coins. The stable coin that we're going to be onboarding on our platform is DAI. And yeah, the reason we're doing that is because we've done thorough research in LaTam, essentially, which is where the demand is coming from,

with doctor users. We think they have a solid marketing team down there that is basically doing, they're at the meetups, they have boots on the ground. They're really there trying to explain what they're doing and how it's valuable and how to use it

so that people get what it is and how it works. Our loan, so we're not going to pass the die risk, quote unquote, directly to the user in the sense that everything is still done in dollars, We just use die as a delivery rail and the user can then choose to either spend them convert them or do whatever they want With them, but essentially these are just easier rails to get them the dollar of influence Are you worried about the immaturity of maker down and die at this point or well?

I mean rather have a Bitcoin as collateral in that system I well the reason we're doing this one of the reasons we're doing this is that once we effectively do this We're gonna be the only option for you to take an unwrapped Bitcoin and it's pure form and get die So for the Bitcoin users that want to try die and they don't want to go through the ERC 20 or minting or CDP in Anything they can literally just throw a clean Bitcoin on our vault in Biko and try some die interesting, so But that won't that Bitcoin won't be collateral in the maker. No, no, it will be sitting cleanly in big go Yeah, and it has a dollar a liability on it. You guys take the etherisk

Yeah, we're simply taking US dollars or Canadian dollars and exchanging them for DAI and then sending the equivalent US dollars or Canadian to whichever loan they prefer to get it in and using DAI as a payment rail. Interesting. Yeah. And DAI is still... I mean, I just worry about MakerDAO and DAI just because of Ethereum's uncertain future. i think they gotta i mean it it is intriguing if they add more collateral like assets that can be

collateralized right yeah it is impressive though what's happened to the ether price throughout the die life cycle and how it's done right yeah it's been all the way down right yeah it's it's held up yeah well yeah and then the other thing too is that you know as you think through like what the there are every every stable coin has liabilities i mean there are risks to every stable coin out there i still think today um however what one of the things i actually like about die is that um at least as far as i understand that they're not truly holding any usd reserves in any one bank account uh which is a big liability for the other call it more traditional stable coins in the sense that uh you know that could be seized at any one point and tether 800 not billion 800 million seized

earlier this summer yeah yeah yeah so i mean that's what i mean i mean there's no perfect solution there's no perfect answer we saw a need to deliver stable coins for users uh we just did a research on what we thought the best way to deliver that and that's what we're going to be executing and we're also delivering loans in bitcoin which is kind of interesting because you're taking the loan out in dollars but then we're sending you the bitcoin in that equivalent dollar amount and then you can do it so yeah you're just using bitcoin again as a payment rail so yeah what a weird world yeah what are we in right now like how well let's talk about let's actually let's focus on latin because that's something i'm fascinated about um because i love

latin i worked at a company based at quito and cartagena it was remote i was working here but like i don't know but you're in every spanish group bro you're every chat any telegram chat marty's there well because i am genuinely fascinated and generally curious about bitcoin adoption in latin because i think i mean that's all the headlines and all the uh the hopium would lead you to believe that this is a technology that could save uh a continent that's been or south america has been plagued by terrible banking and government crises for the last century yeah so is that playing out at all do you think it could help do you think it's too early you think it is helping oh man i think the narrative's overblown um maybe i mean i don't

how much time we got left let's get into it seriously like what is going on down there i'll tell you what my beef is my beef with the whole thing is and i had a conversation with uh with amir actually uh recently about this which is bitcoin is an amazing tool for saving and letting people be sovereign in a place where there's capital controls and essentially allow them to have censorship resistance money i love i'll tell you this like um they're now today there's two atms in cúcuta so you remember cúcuta the border city where richard branson had its big concert in february all this jazz so that's the biggest crossing bridge between venezuela and colombia uh 50 000 people cross that bridge every day literally people kids to go to school like

it's it's the biggest crossing in the country um people cross over to colombia to do groceries and to buy medicine. In the past, they would try to cross with dollars and they would try to cross with a little bit of gold. A lot of it would get seized along the way by the guards. What's happened recently is that now there's two ATMs just at the end of the bridge. And people are crossing the border with little pieces of paper

with 12 and 24 words and are getting to that ATM, withdrawing $20 to $40. Bitcoin ATM. Bitcoin ATM. Withdrawing $40 in pesos, buying their stuff, and returning back to Venezuela. so the censorship resistant stuff is actually playing out like you're seeing it today i actually have heard of people this isn't the first time i heard about this this is the first time that i'm

seeing it kind of become mainstream in the sense that there's atms there i had heard of people crossing with pieces of paper like it was common but now it's it's now it's not something that you hear just randomly from other bitcoin insiders it's like everyone is like oh what's that atm and then 50 000 people are seeing 100 people go into that atm once they cross and they're like what are those guys doing and they're like they're just bringing encrypted wealth over and they're like what the fuck am i doing with this dollar and so like that that piece is happening what's not happening is essentially what what's really happening is all these people that are using bitcoin are just getting wealthy and getting the freak out but the country's still in shambles

the country's still a disaster the structural issues of the country are not something that can solve with bitcoin right bitcoin will give someone that appreciates freedom and understands what regime they're under the tools to get the out but it won't give the people in there at least right away a tool to change their government it's not a panacea it's not a panacea um it's frustrating because that's where i'm from like i'm i've seen minnesota gone literally down the shitter it's been three years i haven't been able to go see my family um well that's another story but we can get into that my brother's mining facility got raided by crook cops uh like this was two years ago let's definitely get into that yeah um so it's really frustrating right so well i'll

tell you my dad my brother's story right so when we started mining in 2014 uh they started mining i didn't start mining around maybe early 2015. but when we started mining i'm helping them scale like Like, I'm going back between Minnesota and Canada and trying to, like, build bigger facilities there. A lot of people are coming to us saying, like, what are you guys doing? We want in. Like, we really want to learn how to do this. So, we're helping a ton of people, like, set up mines and mines. And with that, people kind of start referencing us as, like, the miners, right?

Like, in our hometown, at least. So, that was, you know, 2015, we helped a ton of people. 2016, we helped a ton of people. 2017, it was really getting crazy. Like, every electric outlet in Venezuela had some form of mining connected to it. so crazy um and mostly gpu stuff and essentially 2017 was like peak bitcoin pick at peak coins pick everything and uh that the mother of all coins gets announced the venezuelan petro petro and the petro announcement a lot of people didn't actually follow this through there were

some people who like some people were supporting the petrol like some of the call it talking heads on twitter and i'm not going to get into details but i was really disappointing to see But the people that were looking at the Petro from the outside view, they had a very twisted opinion of what the Petro was. They thought it was actually – a lot of people thought it was an actual good thing, which was like the farthest from truth, right? It was a full-blown sham. A complete scam. And what it actually did was as they were promoting the Petro, quote-unquote, if you look at the press conference – and I'll send them to you. If you look at the articles that came out by the government, you look at the press conferences they would give, it was all around mining.

it was all show it was all around showing the entire country what a mining computer looked like how much money it made what it sounded like and then essentially in not in in not in not in different words said this is completely uh sovereign in the sense that you can go take it from whoever has it and just plug your own wallet and now you're mining their computers And that essentially gave the unofficial go-ahead to all of, essentially, the crooked force, which is the Venezuelan police. Chavismo?

Yeah, the Chavismo. The Chavismo needs to pay his crooks every year to get them to do things, right? In 2016, it was in La Casa. So every time around Christmas, the government would take a private company that had a lot of inventory and would slash it into a fire sale,

and everybody would just line up, and everybody had their own Christmas gift. and populism, the most pure populism, like populismo puro, puro. When 2017 came, no freaking, nobody was dumb enough to bring inventory for Christmas. There was nothing in the country. The country was stocked out.

But guess who had brought a lot of things around 2017? Miners. You look at all the import records and it was all this thing called Bitmain. And so the government said, oh, guess what? I don't have like shoes to give you. I don't have food to give you my my crony assholes who are shooting down my protests for me But guess what I can give you dollar printing machines, and this is where they are

This is how they look like and feel free to go grab them right and so they sound like an angry mob after miners So they did and they started coming at mining facilities dressed as like Utility people dressed as like you know whatever and then suddenly they were just like no we're just gonna you know we want money like we just want money like this wasn't what happened to my brother my brother's case was a little bit more drastic my brother they just literally kicked down the door at like 4 p.m on a Tuesday and seized all the equipment and then started calling us saying that they needed 15k and the machines to not throw him in jail what and so we were like okay hold on what uh we're not breaking laws bro like here's our import records here's our

hydro bills like here's everything that we've been paying like here's internet like what do you want to see, right? Like, we got it. And they're like, nope, this is an illegal activity. And we're like, well, the president is just on TV saying how it's legal. So what do you mean? And they're like, no, it's actually legal. And you're going to get arrested if you keep this up, right? If you keep like not wanting to pay. And we're like, okay. So like we do what everyone does in Venezuela. We hang up the phone and we start calling people higher up, higher up, higher up, higher up, so we could shut down the problem, right? Higher up, higher up, higher up. This is coming from higher up. This is coming from higher up. There's nothing we can do. There's nothing we can do.

there's nothing we can do there's nothing we can do guys keep calling calling calling they started like naming my brother's kids where they go to school like all this stuff and so it's like now it's like I think it's like 11 p.m on Friday all of us were out of the country my brother was the only person in the country and the decision was made that he was just going to take a convoy to the border and cross and get the fuck out and that's what he did I paid for his hotel in Cucuta with my credit card in Canada he drove with a couple of friends that were kind enough to kind to take a few cards that went with him to the border uh we went to the border that had like no internet no radio communications to make sure that there was no it was impossible to get done

and then since then we've actually then the case has been cleared uh but that's just an example that happened to a lot of miners and most of them paid most of them actually paid and stayed so fucked up yeah man yeah we'll send you the the article on it after but uh it looks exactly like a stage cocaine bust where you have two armed guards at either side and a stack of

Bitmain miners and a German shepherd in the corner too. Exactly. And so that, that, you know, I think that was a bit of,

again, another blessing in disguise. Well, does this, does this worry you about, does this worry you about Bitcoin's long-term security in the long run?

Like, do you think if states were to act like Venezuela across the board that Bitcoin sort of wouldn't work at all? I'll tell you one thing

that we can't be naive about one of the biggest beneficiaries of Bitcoin censorship resistance is bad state actors right now they still have the ability to print all the Fiat they want and they have the ability to infiltrate all the p2p markets they want and they're doing it this is happening in Venezuela every day like confiscating minor there's government confiscating miners using it to mine bitcoin then holding bitcoin or they do that that's one arm but the other one is hey raul why don't you go print another two billion go to local bitcoins soak the whole thing up and get us bitcoin for the government really or even the fact that they have

the this is happening official uh remittance is through the government website in venezuela so now they've started overpaying for bitcoin so like you can get more bolillos for your bitcoin through the government's exchange than you can through local bitcoins is anybody converting their bitcoin into bolivars like unfortunately some people don't have i don't want to say this without i don't want to sound rude but like a lot of people the bolivar is still the the way to pay for a lot of things a lot of services they need to the government forces a lot of big companies to take bolivars so like legally it's still the what you need um and yeah i mean some people still do uh and in fact like for example like a lot of those cases is what's very common in minnesota

you have like two or three kids that went abroad and they send each parent like a couple hundred bucks every month and they can get an extra 10 percent if they do it through bitcoin and so they do it but but the other piece that's like we have to we have to know that this is happening we can't just turn a blind eye to the fact that governments like venezuela are printing fiat and then taking it through their testaferros testaferros is a spanish word for hey i'm a sanctioned individual marty speculative attacking themselves yeah you're like i'm a sanctioned individual marty but you're not here's two million dollars go buy bitcoin on p2p market and send it to my wallet keep keep tiny percent that's happening it happens every day like fucking venezuelan government is stacking

bitcoin essentially to circumvent individual individual individual politicians within the government or they're basically just so it i mean it's hard to explain because they're so expensive you're just saying that they're overpaying so mauricio is not a sanctioned individual i am so i just say hey mauricio can you exchange this bitcoin for me yeah in your name i'll give you 10 percent back yeah so yeah and so so if you want like an actual full breakdown is okay central bank prince bolivares central bank can't actually do a transaction on local bitcoins so central banks will go and talk to you know i don't know the secretary of whatever somebody that works in any just pick one person that their whole family they they know where they live they

know where they are they have that person by the balls and they say use your name to go on local bitcoins and make this transaction you're going to send that bitcoin to this wallet address and it looks like a normal p2p transaction uh but in fact it's going to their wallet and they're using it to circumvent all the u.s treasury sanctions ah to buy shit for the country of course from like russia russia china what what are they buying oil or or no that was a dumb dumb fucking comment they're not no need to buy oil what are they buying like no so from russia they're bringing like uh i want to say like from the biggest and there's no oil in russia giving out oil in russia like diapers and like you know things like that like formula diapers like pharmacy

items food things that they promised as a as a well what would you what would you uh what do we label this as because it's not the black market because it's the brown is it like because it's like technically supposed to be the white market but it's just that uh turn it to the brown i mean yeah well so what you see what you see in the imbalance is that and this is interesting because this is happening in several countries so in venezuela bitcoin trades at a premium like a dollar worth of bitcoin trades at a premium to a real dollar because of the censorship resistance aspect of it there's people overpay for bitcoin than the dollar um and in colombia so it's actually there's a there's more people wanting bitcoin than people that were willing

to sell it in venezuela in colombia you're seeing the complete opposite because the people take that bitcoin in venezuela across the border and dump it in colombia for pesos so they can get goods so while venezuela has an artificially high bitcoin price colombia has an artificially low bitcoin price so yeah basically our our runners running across the border with those numbers trying to get asimismo and actually the best arb in that situation is colombia us right like you pick it up you sell it at par you come back you pick it up at discount you sell it their power and as long as you have two good banking accounts you can keep doing this yeah holy shit yeah um fuck man are you i mean what it what is the future of venezuela in your mind

like what is happening is that i asked marisa this today as we were as we were walking around the city and they said uh okay give me the update today and then break it down for me in every five year increments what you think is going to happen over the next 25 years and uh it went on for a while i don't know if i got to a funnel it's a hard question man because like really nobody knows right well i guess the best question to ask to start this train of thought is how long like did you think it would last this long i'll give you i'll give you some cool stories um when chavez won the election most people including my family used to think that chavez was going to be just a few years like he was just going to get uh they were going to impeach him like halfway through

and essentially you know they were gonna they were going for a two-year vacation in Miami and they were gonna be able to go back to Venezuela and everything was cool so a lot of people actually just thought this was a passing issue what really scared me is when Chavez died and these guys were able to essentially steal the very next election that that was really scary to me because I just saw how how really how corrupt everything was and the other thing that was to me almost like very hard to believe was that there were still even like humans willing to vote for this party which they do because people and what the scary part is that the Venezuelan society has

been just decimated over the last 30 years and there are no moral values in that country like right now the moral values in Venezuela is like you do what you do to get your free box of food that's not values you build a really great country on and what scares me is what's happening in Argentina today right you know you had the Kirchner's leave you have Mauricio Macri come in which is arguably like the guy you want right in Argentina Chavismo wasn't around for so long so arguably it was a somewhat easier problem to fix and Macri just put on a sepo like he just put on a currency control I knowing what I know and seeing what I've seen in that time I know that must have been the hardest fucking decision ever for that guy to put into currency control wasn't

that because he lost the midterm election right to there so kishner was location was reading high on the polls and that like again that to me is really scary because i see is okay maybe maybe we can do an analogy that that makes that puts the fear of god that i have in other people i see socialism as like the the social welfare equivalent of quantitative reasoning like quantitative easing is like once you start it down that path you can't unwind it because you can't take back social services without having an uproar so i'll give you a perfect example in minnesota guess how much i need to pay minnesota to fill a tank of my va grand cherokee jeep like the one of the biggest gas tanks in the world like how much is their cost in minnesota u.s

dollar terms um i mean u.s gas prices today be like 45 50 dollars in minnesota in minnesota I would have to break a U.S. penny into a quarter of what it is. That's why I felt so stupid. I was like, you guys are importing oil. It's so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous right now that people aren't even giving you change at the gas station. They just fill you up and you can go. And you can just tip them something.

It's like you're in the middle of Iraq and you can just... It's more work for them to create change for your bill because they're all now way higher than what you need to pay than for them to just give you the gas. i mean it's a shame it's a socialist country because this is a bitcoin miners wet dream well but and that's and that's the thing like in minnesota so a lot of people are there you know living in kind of like mad max world they have some miners sitting around and they're literally carrying around like smith and weston's and like paying off cops and guards every time

they come and that's like that's that's one way to do it um you know i i certainly wouldn't want that i don't think that's like sustainable or great but that brings me back to the problem that we were talking about earlier like if everyone's behaving that way and if every every attempt of curbing things gets corrupted somehow because people keep wanting free shit the same thing that's happening in argentina like you had a a two-term president in the kishiners that just gave out free stuff brought to you by chavez and now they went away and you had macri come in with you know imf the whole thing like we're gonna we have a great restructuring program but hey guess why you gotta work and then you got another guy on the back in the seat being like hey guys in

six years i'll come back and you don't gotta work what is going on so what do you you know what i mean like it's inevitable that you're gonna have a bunch of people being like oh fuck this guy i don't want to work and i don't know i think it's a slippery slope like how do you undo that you know like how do you how do you sell capitalism when you have a guy that's like basically telling lies allowed to run that's the thing that fascinates me like how do people not realize this yet like how much strife do they have to go through before like all right this obviously isn't working so there's personal the sense of personal responsibility you get numbed so much that it's hard to sort of shock people back into it or i i think what poisoned

the feedback loop of venezuelans was the fact that chavez came in at 98 chavez came in at 98 with dollar I think was $14 a barrel 2002 oil was at like 60 Chavez never updated the budget so what started happening is that you had a communist president start seizing private enterprises start shutting down and reforming all the companies that were working and all of a sudden people are doing better and people are like oh my god communism is the solution to all of our problems it was a correlation not causation problem right absolutely and so prices were going up correct and so what happens is chavez is now giving everybody free things so in about 2003 i

think chavez gave every venezuelan the right to go get a credit card pre-loaded with 5 000 bucks to travel who was telling me this dude and it was i don't know if it was alejandro machado or yeah ale ale is a good friend no it was eduardo medina actually told me oh yeah i've had a couple chats with them too but but essentially this the pre-loaded card would became like a thing and now all of a sudden so like you had you know Venezuela was a place where you had a lot of like factory workers or people that worked at your home like you know most wealthy families had like two or three people that worked at their homes and all of a sudden nobody was doing nobody was basically housekeeping everybody had quit all the delivery guys had quit they were

like too good to work I'm sorry I'm going to Peru and everyone's coming back with I love New York t-shirts exactly exactly you'd have people being like mowing the lawn being like visit peru like my son went to milan and got me this crappy shirt you know it's like and you're seeing this and you're like oh my god this is gonna hit off you know like how like i mean but it's it's it's a great i don't want to say case type it's like the herd mentality like like thinking today like if donald trump starts handing out 1500 vouchers for people to go travel it's like wait wait what's going on here like completely but what and it's it's fascinating because again like i said like people still want communism

and socialism and these some people it's not obviously you are a venezuelan who's not who one's capitalism but it is uh just just from a purely psychological observational perspective it's like what what drives people to to keep coming back for more punishment well a lot of it is the narrative and maybe we can go this this might be a nice segue into why i think stable coins can really help progress in general so one of the things that excited me about libra for example and i like let's maybe get into like the libra type developments what i saw in venezuela when when chavez outlawed the dollar was that the way they narrow justify the narrative they use to justify the move is they go to the public and they say this only affects very rich

people that can afford dollars and traveling and buying things on amazon do you miguel have dollars in your day-to-day life no senor presidente and then it's like okay great miguel so how is my ban going to affect you and it's like oh you're totally right mr president i'm right no you're right i don't use dollars in my day-to-day life blah blah like it's fine it's for the rich people fuck the rich people right and then like great just put in your currency control and then so what happens is the guys that run the businesses are like okay well i can't get dollars to restock my inventory i have to go to the black market so when i used to be able to buy this coke for 10 bolívares now this coke is 40 bolívares and the coke goes back on the shelf of 40 bolívares

so people are like oh my god the coke is 40 bolivianos but they don't associate that with the currency control what they get mad and the government goes on tv and says we've noticed that some crook capitalism capitalists are raising the prices on our people's food and we're going to start offering that regulated coke through our things and blah blah blah and now again they turn they spin this spin zone baby and so what what keeps happening is ignorance is bliss right like ignorance these people are like oh my dollar doesn't affect me it's the crook capitalist blah blah, blah. When you start giving these people dollar-like vehicles in Facebook, and they all of a sudden start paying their, I don't know, Farmville or Netflix with stable coins, and they're

now starting to use these Libras every day, and now the government comes back and says, oh, the dollar is just for rich people. They're going to go back and say, yeah, cool, as long as I can keep my Libra, that's fine. They're like, no, actually, your Libra's a dollar. And it's like, okay, well, but I'm not rich, and I'm using my Libra, so why the fuck are you going to take it away? and you're seeing this in argentina right now so argentina to my knowledge is the first sepo or currency control that actually uh catches bitcoin and stable coins it's like the v1 of the sepo had no nothing to do with bitcoin but then people were like okay well if the dollar is capped let's just keep buying bitcoin and then the guy the government was like

okay crap like i guess we have to cap bitcoin too oh i didn't realize that yeah bitcoin is capped to my knowledge and i'd like to confirm better like please somebody somebody's from argentina and has more detailed information on this i invite them to please reach out but my understanding is that there's a limit now on bitcoin too because bitcoin is a way to take capital out yeah because the uh well i know the u.s dollar amount was like ten thousand dollars a month right to right purchase and there are some platforms that are operating in argentina like bitcoin brokerages and bitcoin buying exchanges where this is affecting their ability to take on u.s dollar deposits this is affecting their ability to process transactions for

argentinians so this is a really unique thing and i think this is going to keep happening But the issue is that the governments are running out of tools, essentially, because people are now starting to use these things for day-to-day lives. When does everybody throw their fucking hands up and just say, fuck you? I just can't wait until we talk about Canada. You think Venezuela is crazy until we talk about Canada. It's fucking wild up there. What is going on with Canada? We got an election coming up on the 21st of October.

There was some great election fodder for your election today. It was the blackface. The blackface, yeah. That'll come again. The fortunate Halloween costume. They were keeping that picture in the books for a timely release. Very timely release. Yeah, that's the puncher and the pussy in this election cycle for the Canadians.

Completely. That's the Canadian equivalent. Grab her by the pussy. The Halloween costume is not appropriate. Grab her by the pussy, not punch her. Yeah, that's definitely the Canadian version of that. So what does the Canadian Bitcoin seem like? It's awesome, actually.

I've been to Montreal. I know Montreal as well. I've never been to Toronto, though. I'm sorry I could not come early in June to the game. Yeah, for the record, Marty was invited to a playoff Raptors game. I can't remember the exact conflict, but they are the NBA champions. Congrats. Congrats.

I think I was too salty after Kawhi dropped that shot. We still love you, Kawhi. Hey, he got you that ring. Yeah, no, man. Canada's been awesome. I mean, the tech scene in Toronto and really Montreal, Vancouver, everywhere is amazing, like amazing software development talent. A lot of Bitcoin development happening in Toronto as well.

uh and obviously all of canada and then the mining scene right given the cost of power so uh just yeah overall we got a big crew up there and it keeps getting bigger and better uh you know like the bull bitcoin guys are doing great things we got block stream out on the west end uh you know we're there but uh no it's getting big and like there's guys like nbk like coin kite like those guys are massive uh roller foes like it's become a good friend of ours uh yeah he's there's just a great number i don't know i'm not going to mention anymore in fact because i don't want to dox anybody but but it's it's a huge community like we get together almost every every two weeks to something for steak and it's pretty fun and there's it's crazy to have your teams from latin

america canada like a big um big desk i mean obviously us is as well but toronto um it's not it's not necessarily like a miami like miami como venezuela like miami is like you're you never left Caracas, right? But Toronto has become, Toronto is a hugely multicultural city, but I think what strikes a chord with LATAMP users is that we grew up around inflation, right? And it's, so like one of our

main and awesome devs is from Cuba. And so, fuck man, we know authoritarianism like no other. When we see Bitcoin, like we get it. Like there's not too much to explain. So I think that and the fact that we were very much

like we like to consider ourselves like very purposeful like when we developed this like we really wanted to solve the problem like we didn't just want to go make some money like we wanted to to do this we wanted to let make sure that they feel comfortable knowing where their bitcoin was that they could process loans in an amount that wasn't going to be burdensome to them that we would be able to answer the questions in their language that the contract was in their language that they could send it to their lawyer for review without spending any extra you know additional dollars it was very much thought out like how we could get to them and i think people We'll see that.

I mean, I think it comes through in our work. You guys are extremely passionate. And I'm just, from speaking to you, knowing you, me getting to know you over the last 12 to 10, 10 to 12 months, like, you're in it for, you're down for the cause. Like, you're pure. I appreciate that.

And that's what, and again, like, all the, again, going back to, like, Twitter and the people that like the shit on, like, the lending companies, like, I can't, everybody I've met at this company is that they're not out to, you know, get money. Like you said, you're mission-driven. You wanna make this happen. Yeah, and listen, there are risks, right?

Like, and starting by the risks that we took, like we have our own, like our careers, our reputation, our capital, everything is on the line with this. Like we can't fail. We don't want to fail, right? And I think that that's really, we wanna serve a role and we wanna mitigate those risks

and be as transparent and honest with our people about the risks, right? Like we don't wanna hide anything. One of the beautiful things about blockchain is the fact that everyone can verify everything. And the second you lie to someone, they'll know. So we want people to question us. We want people to ask us the hard questions.

If we're not able to answer it, you shouldn't do business with us. Right. No, thank you for, I mean, I don't think my questions were too hard, but, you know. No, they're not hard, but, like, more uncomfortable. It's like, hey, you guys are custodians, right? Like, people are like, are you going to, that's the question. Number one people have questions of mine. Are you going to lose my money?

That's fair. Like, where is my money? Like, what are you doing with it? And I think, you know, we have visions of like we want to build an ecosystem. Right. So lending was the first product to get out of the gate. And then we have the savings account. Now we have the buy to X product and we want to do a whole bunch of other pieces that all fit together. So it's like we see this as evolution and we want to build more and more trust over time. So I think it's interesting because the whole concept of Bitcoin came from the lack of trust. But yet everyone wants to work with people they know and like because they want to trust them. And so the human aspect of it is probably the most important piece. Like, how do people find out about Bitcoin anywhere?

It's because they learned about it likely from someone that they trust and someone that they like. And so that's how it has to propagate. And we hope that's the same for companies that people want to work with. Yeah. And so let's get heady here. Let's get cosmic. What are we drinking here, by the way? Let's introduce the drink.

We're drinking Ron Diplomatico. Ron Diplomatico Mantuano para los venezolanos that are listening. 1959. I was, for the record, looking for Cacique 500, but I couldn't get it.

That's my favorite rum. This is a very good one. It's probably my second favorite. Gracias. From the Venezuelan community. It's got like a smoky taste to it. It does. Yeah, it does.

This is one of the best things to come out of Venezuela, actually. We have really good rum. We used to have really great coffee, but fuck everything's been decimated now these guys

Diplomaticos I don't know Diplomaticos Santa Teresa no there's one of the rum makers that's like buddy buddy with the government

that I'm not really a big fan of but in fairness anyone that has been able to export today it's probably not in bad terms with them

so okay interesting but anyway it's still delicious but again before but no that's like as we refill our drinks here and get heady like how do you see

again we were talking about like stable coins might be transitionary but i'm thinking socially like how socially do we get people to to wake up like hey stop depending on your goddamn government for money in particular um and this will give you more freedom um bitcoin being this well i wish i could tell you that venezuelans got into bitcoin because they figured it out but that's not why they got it and that's largely not why most people get into it if they get into it because of necessity it's like like i said it's like they got a bunch of oleores and there was just flour and tires and there was just this bitcoin thing and now they're like okay well it's easier than store flour right so i'll try bitcoin they tried it they realized how convenient it was they

realized that it solved the problem and they kept using it i'll give you an example as a venezuelan but a lot of people say oh why don't venezuelans just use dollars can you just can you just use dollars bro and i'm like okay i'm like listen bro like if i could i fucking would have them of course but like what are your options when you're in venezuela you either have a bill that could be counterfeit so either you have literally that pen so everybody in minnesota right now has like you know those little pens markers yeah the marker or your little lamps so you either walk around with those and in minnesota now like a 20 bill with us with a marker on it like with a mark on it it trades at a discount because i don't like marks on my bills

so it's okay so cash is pretty much out of the question because it's very hard to kind of some dickhead could just go in with a sharpie and devalue somebody's cash exactly yeah and then the other piece is like okay no no worries i'm just going to get on a plane to panama and open an account and i'll just wire my dollars and so i'll give you an example of how ridiculous that shit gets when you're a venezuelan uh my dad uh i think it was 2017 or 2000 actually this was pre-bitcoin so maybe maybe 2013 or maybe like early 20s of 2014 my um one of my family members needed to have an operation she was getting an operation at the mayo clinic uh i think it was the Mayo Clinic some some big clinic in the U.S. like very known clinic and my dad was going to

pay for the operation he had the funds in a Panama bank account under the company but he's like okay well I need to help pay the operation I can't really send it to my personal account I'm just going to do a wire straight from my company to the hospital just pay it out it took us two months two months two months they asked us for receipts they asked us for doctor's letters they asked us for any which side of transaction the U.S. or the there was a Panama side essentially to send out the dollars okay um and i mean it's it's your fucking money man and and and in fact like i suppose this happens to many venezuelans like i've gotten my brother has got frustrating dude and and so what happens is they're like oh no worries we're just gonna mail you a check to

your registered address bro where the fuck am i gonna deposit it where am i gonna get so the the dollar piece is is the dollar system is broken for a latin user because they just can't move them around like they it's hard for them to access them it's hard for them to move them around and even if they have them and they were lucky enough to get a bank account they're still at the mercy of some asshole somewhere that has no fucking clue like who this person is and what they're really using it for so it sounds like swift is a terrible money transfer system here right well because that's well and then we're talking about like bitcoin and stable coins like Like, they cannot, can that, like, let's get into that.

Like, in your experience, has that ever been stopped? No. I have, and that's the thing. And that's like, even though as much as we shit on Ethereum and stuff like that die, is there a central, there's not, it's not Coinbase, USDC, what is it? Yeah, USDC. It's not USDC where Coinbase can come in and be like, you can't do this. Right.

Yeah, I think the one risk that stable coins have is a redemption risk. So the moment that someone tries to convert back to dollars and that person's KYC doesn't work, then that stable coin is infungible. And then you have a big issue with that. And so it's not viewed as money there. So I think there there's some risk that we haven't seen yet that I think may evolve and that's yeah Actually doesn't exist with die, which is kind of interesting there, but in the in the centralized table coins, I guess. Yeah Yeah, and so to your point about like how do you wake these people up? I think it's just sadly It's a matter of time right like it's it's it people have to get burnt I mean, that's just the quickest way to learn is just to lose money and I love this quote that people high I forget who exactly did it, but Bitcoin's not about getting rich quick.

It's about getting poor slow. So it's like these people are getting poor really fast. So the second they learn that they can get poor at a lower rate, I think there's going to be, honestly, it's going to be like a no-brainer switch. No, but I think that was my learning curve. I got in to get rich quick and learned that you're going to get rich slow.

I don't think you're going to get poor slow. I think you're gonna get rich slow yeah you're gonna get rich slow over time if you develop that low time preference let's pump the memes here stack saps but no you do have to get burnt like I'm a strong believer in that as well but as a romantic too it's like how can we help me help people from not getting burnt right like is there well is there like is there a threshold at which so many people have seen so many others get burnt they sort of learn like all right maybe I should just do this here's here's our like i guess one version of it is that i try to keep people or whenever somebody comes and asks me about digital assets or whatever like i i try to steer them away

from anything that's not bitcoin uh because i think that there's just enough to manage trying just to learn about bitcoin alone and there's just a lot of i wouldn't i don't want to say misinformation but perhaps biased information around these other projects because there's just a lot of people that have something to gain from it i'm not saying that some people don't have something to gain from bitcoin but it's just a broader older more i would say like uh unbiased communities because there's just no real people you can point fingers to yeah and i think it kind of goes in order right the first is just basically awareness like in in the uber over to your place here uh our driver was from sudan he moved to new york nine years ago and he didn't know what bitcoin

was i was shocked like i would have thought someone that comes from an area with out of likely a stable currency he didn't know what it was so i don't know it's interesting like i think there is it's still quite insular into people people may have heard the name they couldn't tell you at all about it uh so i think that has to start and then the second piece is providing a useful need to you it has to solve a problem there has to be a reason for you to switch and it has to be easy for you to switch or get into it and so kind of going in that direction and so i think we're still working on the fringes of the first two yeah and then the other thing that helps is just like an astronomic rise right like the the 2017 the easy easy way to build a

that was the the fomo is the best way like the 2017 was like the first time i would think a bitcoin rally was kind of heard around the world right like definitely the rallies before then were not as well that was as a somebody who uh gained their chops in the 2013-2014 bubble um and had sort of the and you freaks out there the bear market of 2014-2015-2016 was treacherous it was pretty terrible but living through that and then seeing 2017 uh that bubble like that like i wasn't as i was like holy crap i can't believe it's like this high right now but i was like ah like bitcoin does this i expect it but uh that being the second bull market i had been a part of and like sitting in the middle of the room watching a bunch of people go through it

the first time i was like oh this is what i looked like five years ago right and so i think so there was a lot of like there was a lot of disillusionment in venezuela when bitcoin crashed a lot because miners weren't making as much people had lost a lot of their money they thought they had earned not not a lot of people were trading it most people were buying and holding it and when it came down people were like huddling down with the ship you know and they just their wealth went right back down with it you know i i held through a lot of the bear market and i'm i'm happy but but again it's i'm i have a very high conviction on bitcoin i understand why it was going down at least i thought i reasoned my head i kind of knew why it was going down for

but for the people that were you know had bought it in june and then had seen all their earnings be erased they just felt like they got duped right you know and and so it understandably there was a lot of frustration most people actually don't keep peeling the onion layers and get to what bitcoin really is they're just like i just oh great now i can preserve my wealth and hey guess what bitcoin was the first time a lot of people in that time saw something appreciated in dollar terms like most people don't see things appreciated in dollar terms like most people in that time don't dive into that what do you mean by that like what so what do venezuelans see in dollar terms so for example like the top mountain in venezuela if you're like a really wealthy guy

in venezuela most of your stuff's in dollars in a bank account in wells fargo literally plain dollars like the sophisticated investors and by this i mean probably like one percent of the population says i'll buy some real estate in the u.s and perhaps like even a half of that will go as far as taking u.s equity like right and go and participating in the u.s stock market largely the populations of you know south of texas nobody participates in the local stock markets most of the stock markets are gamed in some sort of bullshit corrupt way like everything else is and so most people just say okay like the top of the mountain for a lot of people is just dollars that don't quote unquote devalue right and and so it's for example like devaluation is is actually

very it fucks with your head so like i remember in venezuela growing up people would tell me like hey man minnesota is a great country i'll buy a truck i'll drive it for five years and i'll sell it for more than what i bought it for i'm a genius people were thinking about that with trucks dude but they were thinking about it in bolivar terms like if you dollarize the purchase and you dollarize the sale you lost money but people didn't even go that far they were just like i made more bolivar is and it was like okay and so it fucks with your head because like the head the top line is growing they don't get the they don't get their purchasing power is decreasing correct because it takes a different mindset that you have to really dig deep and see what's monetary

policy how much are these guys printing are they debasing my savings capital that people don't get that far most people don't no well i think two of the first 10 episodes of tales in the crypt were one was asante siri from argentina and his story his story of like his personal experience of coming home from school and his mother getting paid and immediately running to the grocery store and buying as much like groceries as possible before the peso got devalued there like that was like what the fuck like it's like the psyche of that like okay i got paid like i'm at like i get paid and i'm like all right cool i got paid like i woke up check my bank account i'm paid having like yeah like thinking of being in the psychology of oh i got paid like let's go

buy as much yeah store value type shit that we can and then uh the second i don't know if it's for i'll say first 20 with confidence with 100 confidence first 20 episodes za um he was a co-worker at a barstool from zimbabwe and he described uh their hyperinflationary situation it was very similar what happened in venezuela like uh mugabe came in and was mugabe i think to zimbabwe yeah yeah i think it was yeah it came in kicked out all the farmers the productive farmers and then that led to uh the brain drain like all the engineers all the oil engineers and stuff like that left the country and yeah they ended up and he paid for high school with cattle like yeah that's that and then the well brain drain is a whole probably topic for a brand new

show but that's one let's get into it yeah like the brain drain that's happened in venezuela is just i was gonna say like i think the opportunity that uh the bitcoin has though is if you look at world right now like the whole developing world is getting richer a lot quicker than they were in the past and you know if you excuse the the one percent in the ocd oecd countries that are continuing to get richer and richer uh that isn't as happening as fast here so i think what isn't catching up is there's not savings alternatives for someone in like let's exclude as well for example because of the situation but let's pick a market like let's say brazil right so you have a population that is increasing wealth and then but you don't have a stable stock market

i don't know the real estate market in brazil but i presume there's issues with uh that don't exist or that exist that maybe not in new york and and uh you know uh us canada europe so bitcoin can be that solution right for the first time you have a global asset class that you can save in and it's an incredible store of value i think just people have to know about it yeah and then so going back to the appreciating dollar terms thing there's a stat from someone that says that more people in brazil own bitcoin than own stocks in their local real uh stock exchange i i can 100 believe that i think it's the same for most countries in latin uh and again going back to things appreciating in dollar terms like i said the top of the mountain for most people or south of texas was

just to hold the dollar balance that would appreciate in their devaluating currency because they just base everything on their currency locally and things you know as long as that's growing and they're not getting poor quickly they're happy but now when they have a little bit of Bitcoin in their portfolio that they got at like call it a thousand bucks worth of Bitcoin and now they look back at the portfolio and that's two thousand bucks they're like what why am I not overweight this thing in my portfolio and then another piece that I wanted to mention is one of the things that really excites us about the opportunity with Latin is that in the

passed your asset pool that was able to be financed was largely in your local jurisdiction your home was in venezuela your car was in venezuela most of your big assets end up being in your local market bitcoin is a global asset so for us to issue a loan in canada against the bitcoin is no different than somebody sends us a bitcoin from venezuela argentina colombia we can give the same rates it's this and this is the first time this has actually ever happened like before this you couldn't really finance a car in Venezuela a person in Venezuela could not apply for a loan in Canadian terms and rates and standards of service like if that didn't exist we actually had a

potential investor say to us well why don't you charge higher rates in Latam because you can I swear to God and you know they'll go unnamed but that's not our plan and why would we ever do that that's completely the opposite of the the mantra that we want to build we want to equalize things globally and yeah yeah why why would it be any super cool about Bitcoin right no yeah again because you're talking about like people want the dollar is the top of this mountain for these people and the dollar is still a layer like the dollar at this point like after especially after my conversation with Raul yesterday it's like it's been abstracted

like it is a reserve currency of the world yes but what is backing it like again like we're getting into the whole reserve currency fiat type stuff but it is getting to the point where it's so scary that the thought of people using the dollar the dollar as their pinnacle of savings and then dollar having a crisis and the cascading effect from that that's what's so nuts right the u.s has a financial crisis people buy u.s dollars like it's like it's so strange right it's yeah it's no i mean that's what that's why the fed had to do repo operations yesterday today yesterday and the day before was because there was a liquidity shortage of dollars like the dollar was neat like dollar funds everything in the system we may be that's what worries me because

teams out like looking at a macro perspective that we may be turning into a liquidity crunch and going into more qe more rate cutting and you have people like mark carney coming out and saying the u.s dollar is not going to be reserved forever um canadian well mark carney's so this is going to be a weird tangent but there's a documentary out there called all the plenaries men p-l-e-n-a-r-y apostrophe s men all the plenaries men and it actually revolves around mark carney when he was the head of the boe um so mark carney for you guys i know he's a central banker he was the head of the bank of england um and also part of the bank of international settlements so there's like this weird um weird situations specifically

uh including mark carney hsbc the bis and how uh he was able to sort of skirt international banking laws via the bis you should go look at it i'm not saying what i'm trying to get at is that mark carney is uh is a crony bankster number one but number two even he being a crony bankster being so ingrained in the system recognizes that it's not going to work he said libra i think that's interesting like yeah we are going to need to move to a new i thought that was pretty ballsy at jackson hole right and standing on u.s soil and staying that but like if again the point i'm trying to make here is you go if you go and read or read if you go watch the documentary all the plenaries men and you understand the the position of power that

mark carney is in and the complete understanding of the whole system that he has and if he's saying that you know something is wrong in the banking system the monetary system like he has like you been at the pinnacle knowing how like we're talking about the puppet master behind the stage he's pulling the strings right that layer of the banking system and if he's going to jackson hall being like uh maybe we should think about other reserve currencies that's not a good sign yeah for sure well i think it's just there's just so much potential right like i think you know i might get like scolded for this but i think you know as a venezuelan like if i had the option like a lot of people came out you know shutting down libra they were like okay why this is

bullshit blah blah and and who's gonna use this and blah blah and i totally get it if you're in north america that you know your visa taps everywhere and whatever like you can send venmo and zelle to everybody but for the large majority of the world's population if they could have a dollar-like instrument to essentially use for the day-to-day lives it would be the most positive and uplifting development in like i think humanity's history really um absolutely you think it's that that gravity is that large well think about it for second like think about if if again like i think this this call goes back to governments having to be accountable right like a government like venezuela can just straight up lie to its people

forever and continue printing printing printing printing and people just will as long if they don't have an option to compare that to they will be none the wiser for the whole time right libra is a way to essentially uber your ass into things like when uber came out nobody like i'm i'm sure every city had a taxi lobby i remember the first time i got an uber i was like i'm never going back so when uber came to be yeah so when uber came to be they just fucking rolled out their service because they knew that or not they knew they it was it was a better service and essentially it got so big so quickly that when the taxi lobbies tried to essentially shut it down the users came out and said screw you guys we're more there's more of us than there are of you

so i think libra is a way of jolting society into saying hey get us we see the value in these dollars you guys are you guys have a never given it to us you've never given us a stable currency now we see this and we can compare it to the shit you give us and we demand better service from you and if you don't we'll vote your ass out you know and that that that's a great tool for humanity i think yeah and i think the other thing is just about like adoption awareness what's interesting is when we talk about bitcoin businesses in again like canada whatever us oecd want we want to use anything but banking language when you talk about it in developing economies that's the easiest language to use and when you say hey you can get access to north american banking that is like

unbelievable like eyes open why that's what they're desperate for yeah and no it's just like a simple solving a simple problem and i'm also partial to this specific trajectory of stable coins being um and let me be clear for any freaks freaking out like oh marty's pumping stable coins i do still believe that stable coins are inherently instable they are susceptible to black swan events but they will act they will be stable for the not a predetermined set of time but for an extent for a period of time at least you'll be able to treat them as hot potatoes at least for a given period of time yeah and it's just use them as rails but again like it is a trojan horse and like oh i got the stable coin i have optionality to the bolivar now i i can use this this libra

exactly oh this libra is pretty cool but oh shit bitcoin like facebook can't even censor me libra to that like libra is free marketing for the entire bitcoin community and so this stat came out when the libras was announced uh facebook has subsidized the internet in in africa this was just about Nigeria so I'm not sure if it's all of Africa but you can access Facebook for free on your phone

in Nigeria so 65% of Nigerians according to the stat believe that that's their internet right? that believe that Facebook is the internet so then you allow

you instantly put a currency that they can use and then yeah as you said how quickly can you then convert that into Bitcoin because now you have this concept of digital money

because you already have a Facebook account well and then here's the other thing right like people people freak out a lot about the dollar getting debased

and like the dollar being printed and the dollar getting this dude like if you if you put currencies on a spectrum the dollar is freaking like an angel it's like jesus christ reincarnated into the dollar like honestly compared to like venezuela bolivar or zimbabwe or like ridiculous currencies because every country has one most of them the dollar is a gentleman of the currencies and so before the dollar before all this thing happens to the dollar you're gonna see every other country go through literally off a cliff before it happens to the dollar so i think that we're still gonna see a lot of call it like it's not gonna be like an impending event that just blew up in the u.s like

you're gonna see consolidation yeah you're gonna see countries just capitulate essentially and dollarize because they have to and the population demands it and then that you know i think in for this to get to the dollar we're ways ways away like the dom other dominoes have to fall uh way well before the dollar i mean that's the way i see it at least it's because i've i just lived around way shittier currencies way my whole life right yeah no and it's and well that also worries me too what worries me is somebody who's grown up american as american as you can get born in philadelphia the cradle of freedom america was born in philadelphia it's the greatest city in this country but what scares me and more particularly knowing I don't want to sound

cocky but like no just from studying it in college and in my career the economy like the point where we're at now where you have Trump on Twitter screaming at Chairman Powell to like lower rates and do QE like that's what like as an American like even though we are the pinnacle and we are the the best looking gentleman of the currency on the block it's like whoa it looks like the best looking gentleman took a hit of meth it's not a good look it's getting crazy right well that but that's the state of currency in the world right now the state of money in the world it's a race towards the bottom like there was that's well i think that monday the bent that i wrote was a tweet by this dude charlie ballello who's like a financial twitter guy i mean you're

just like listed out 19 central banks and 19 of the biggest central banks you only need four you really only need four the the fed ecb boj and the pboc they're on that list they're all easing at the same time they're literally in a race to devalue their currency like in the u.s is entering that race to or at least trump wants the u.s to enter that race as well because we're in a trade like and like again like the the uh correlation not causation about the oil prices going up and people thinking like things were going good like this trade war like people think it's good but it's also like forcing trump to devalue the dollar as well like yeah well i think for not trump to devalue because trump can't technically devalue

the dollar because the fed is a political institution but he's trying to pressure them to Yeah, I mean, for 50 years, it was the best business decision in town, right? Because you can just print money, and then you don't have the issue that every other country has because all the other countries soak it up. So the Venezuelans in the world take those extra dollars that are just printed and stuff them under the mattress, and there's always that demand because it is the reserve currency. So until the issues that you spoke about with Raul are populated, then it works. But it's when the entire world rejects it as a reserve currency, then you have an issue with QE.

yeah so you mark harney oh man i'll i mean listen like central bankers i mean i i appreciate the ones that take a take what i do appreciate is the fact that the guy stepped up and said hey let's try libra like this is this is this could be just a little taste just a little see how it feels uh no but seriously Like, I'm not sure how this whole thing is going to play out and, like, which central bank is going to allow it. But I think that sooner or later, you know, digital assets will penetrate societies. They are. They are penetrating.

So that's the thing. We, like, us three here, like, us, we're pretty bullish on Bitcoin. We're pretty digital. Yeah, we're pretty digital. We're pretty into this stuff, if you couldn't tell. This is episode 105, I believe. um kudos bro talking about bitcoin but like i am i've reached my bitcoins end where i think bitcoin i'm like 90 sure will be successful in the long run quote me on that quote me on that

do it but it's like again like you have there's only what 10 to 15 million people in bitcoin right now 10 to 20 million people in bitcoin right now there's right eight billion people like it's going to take time it's going to take it's it's a learning curve exists the adoption curve exists the tech hurdle exists like it's going to take time and i think like building services like let in and stuff like that and help and it's all feedback loop as long as you're contributing that feedback loop just again find your bitcoins and realize that's going to keep producing blocks as long as people are plugging in miners as long as people are downloading node software and contributing to consensus like this stuff's gonna work we can do our best to educate

people which is what i try to do or get people liquidity and make bitcoin more useful which is what you two are working on and i think it's inevitable and i think these conversations about the transition from the analog fiat world that we're used to to the uh the bitcoin world are fascinating but do we really have any uh any like way of knowing exactly i don't know if it happens probably not yeah i'll give you a tidbit that was very insightful for me today venezuelan wrong with it got me like a nice warm feeling right so one thing that i heard today that that made me actually really bullish we were talking we obviously can't say names but we were meeting with some really big institutional players today that we were just talking about bitcoin lending

which is you know what we do and uh one of the really fascinating things was he basically flat outset like no big guy is shorting bitcoin like none of the macro guys none of the big guys none of the institutional guys dare to short bitcoin that scares me really yep uh are we wrong how could we be wrong maybe that's how we should we should try to like steal a man or argument here could we be wrong do you think we're wrong i think about that but then i i see what's happened everywhere in the world and I I just think bitcoins transparency and it's fixed cap and just how fucking open it is for everyone to go verify it it's just very how can it not win like how can people for example like we're

Canadian like we know I became a Canadian citizen this year very happy Congrats thank you so we're Canadian like I actually have tried to go to the Bank of Canada website and look for m1 m2 m3 right like they should tell you they don't have that they don't well they don't publish it they don't no it's not open doesn't i mean it's not on their website easily accessible like i couldn't find it and i consider myself bank of canada doesn't have like a fred like website the do you like the st louis fed the it's called fred but like yeah so they have they have a website and they have a next definitions of m1 m2 m3 but they don't publish them really and to me i was like well hey then i started

googling something and i consider myself you know a technically apt person and i couldn't for the life of me find what the float is for canada like at least easily and that that i mean we're in canada this is like he's pretty good good at google too i become a google master myself so that that to me is scary as hell like if canada won't show you and i and i you know i've turned the question back to you can you see what the m1 m2 m3 is for your for the united states is right know yeah that's why i've seen that website fred like yeah like i'm pretty sure i'm gonna try and look it up right now but like that's what uh let's see m1 fred that's when i type in the yeah it's like that's what i'm saying it's st louis fed they have this that's what i'm saying

like and thank you st louis fed for providing this data yeah that's beautiful because because we're able to use it against you like the like the monetary base is my favorite chart to share is because it's like look at this chart it just looks so fucking unnatural wheels going it's still barked right wow look at how this is we're looking at a a chart from again fred.stlouisfed.org it's actually incredible to give anybody all this data it's incredible data we're looking at the st louis adjusted monetary base which basically represents the the amount of money on the fed's balance sheet which represents the amount of money that's been printed over time and we're looking at the the glorious chart of the fed's balance sheet expanding from 800 billion to

4.2 trillion dollars over the course of six years between 2009 or excuse me 2008 and 2014 so just to entertain myself can you do the same search for canada yeah let me see is this a loony let's go canada m1 yeah bank of canada m1 st louis fed has it m1 for canada national currency yeah canada doesn't have it but the u.s has the data so yeah i mean this look at that look at that yeah would you look at that that looks beautiful i mean beautiful for bitcoin art so m1 in canada this is the amount of base money in circulation will start in 1971 what the fuck happened in 1971 crazy how gradual it is in canada compared to the

u.s right gradual well i mean parabolic gradually parabolic versus a scissor graph yeah no i mean the the u.s monetary base like the fed's monetary basis yeah that election no it's not even no it was that was yeah that was the open markets by the way i want to give a huge shout out to satoshi for putting the halvening on election year oh my gosh historically there's i mean this i learned from my dad the the best years to do business is the year before and the year of an election really but there are no incumbent can afford a recession right well that's why well like going back to trump screaming a pound stuff like that that's what makes me feel like it's not this in particularly that makes me feel this way it is a confirming fact uh for my thesis is my thesis is

that the system is fucking broken and it cannot be fixed and uh a fact a data point i'm going to use to prove this is trump before his presidency and after his presidency commenting on the federal reserve's policy and like basically the state of monetary policy in the united states and before he gets elected office he's why is the fed print fed printing this much money like we need to get back to like a sounder currency blah blah blah blah now he's the exact opposite of who he was before he got elected yeah fired up fucking print like he's literally chewy and that's the other crazy like this is what's like we're laughing but like it scares me because the federal reserve is supposed to be a political institution like you're not supposed to have

the government in the u.s influence like technically like we're just talking semantics here you're not supposed to have the government influence the fed at all right and it's usually been done influencing the fed has been done slyly via press conferences and stuff like that in the past but now it's just like and even back then it was like all right obviously obama or bush was posturing with this uh statement towards the fed to compel them to yeah push a decision in a certain way now it's got some way where it's like straight up like i'm calling out the fed by name the chairman by name to do this policy by this time and it's the whole again there's like a gentleman's game to it yeah it's like you don't mention it you don't mention the fact that you're playing

prior presidents weren't as active on twitter exactly that and like but it's like that the whole aspect of like a gentleman's game has been thrown out the door right right you're like before it's like you don't mention it but people know you're mentioning it yeah but now it's like all right if there aren't any like even gentleman roles to this game like what game are we playing yeah and i completely agree with you and i think that's a really scary slippery slope like we in venezuela we we don't even have the the illusion that the government is separate and there's a separation of powers and that this guy doesn't talk to that guy like that that's long gone out the window in venezuela again like so we're on that scale towards where your government or where

venezuelan government isn't now right and i don't want to slip towards that like that is scary and is it inevitable and you don't have that but i guess you spent years studying this right would you think it's fair to say that everyone puts as much thought into it as you do right like i mean someone reading headlines right but the other piece too like i see stuff that happens in the states that makes me think you know hey this is just like any other country like you know maybe this is a different whole candle warmth of the whole jeffrey epstein thing oh my god well everybody in the u.s that dude was fucking murdered if you're listening to this right now that dude was fucking murdered in venezuela we're used to you know political dissidents getting

taken in for questionings and then they surprisingly jumped out of the 10th floor balcony and then committed suicide committed suicide by two shots to the back yeah and so in venezuela we're like you know we were used to this shit we're like okay this is just like obviously that's not what happened like ridiculous but then and i'm not you know to me i mean i don't i don't want to put words on what happened because frankly i don't have the facts but it just looks really fucking bad you know you had one job kind of no that dude was fucking murdered like i hope that america i think that america is like the jeffrey epstein incident in particular is like all right like this was so fucking blatant there's so

much evidence that something was going on this dude was in one of the highest security prisons in the country and he's able to commit suicide after being on suicide watch he hung himself with sheets that would rip it's like a 200 man a 200 pound man like try to hang himself with them like it's but all right the crux of what i'm trying to get at is there's a two-tiered justice system and it's not fair and we deserve to live in a world that's fair and i think the digital age in particular has awoken more and more people up to the fact that it is not fair and we were talking about earlier like when uh when chavez was uh blaming the capitalists for the high coke prices and stuff like that people like oh my god oh my god like i believe you i believe you now

people have more access to information and be like all right i'm gonna call your bullshit and i think bitcoin and then bitcoin on top of that gives people power to say i'm gonna work with outside of the system like i don't even want to have to deal with your bullshit like i don't have to here therefore i'm gonna opt out exactly and that was my uh venezuelan rum drunk rant there we've actually pretty much polished the whole thing it's pretty impressive i'm sorry i uh yeah but i think you know one of the things that that first of all i love i love uh you know the freedom and what the united states and canada stand for like i think it's it's it's a beacon of liberty in the world people have to realize too it's an idea over a law book too yeah and so

i think the u.s is it's to me it's almost it's very important that the u.s stays free and independent and and you know the powers stay separated from each other um but the thing is you know as a venezuelan like a lot of people and again going back to like what you know there's a big thing about bitcoin fixes this like i i love that meme i think it's a great meme as a venezuelan I don't think Bitcoin fixes my country, personally. There's a lot of limitations to what it can do. And the best case is it helps smart people get the fuck out, right? And that's brain drain.

So those people largely won't come back. For example, like a good friend of mine said this to me the other day, and he says, I don't think he's wrong, essentially, but I didn't see it this way. He says, Mauricio's like, when the country changes, who do you think is going to come back? So do you think the guys that made it in North America are going to just even think of coming back? What we're going to get is just the guys that failure to launch. Like we're only going

to get people that just feel like they could be better back home doing less. We're not going to get the guys that are working hard and made it in OECD countries. They're staying there. What's their incentive for them to come back? What? Help rebuild? Help do what? Like their kids are safe. They're going to like Ivy League schools. They're doing great. Why the fuck are they gonna come back it's so fucking sad it's a one-way trip bro yeah like it's it's not a round trip you fucking hate to hear that shit dude but it's true yeah like he's i mean i'll give you my case i'm in venezuela i'm doing great levin's doing great my wife's very happy in toronto we're both venezuelan my daughter's in canada i'll give you an example for example this christmas my whole

families back home this Christmas everyone's having Christmas with my Nona who's 98 and lives in many that looks beautiful town in Venezuela that's what I did every year growing up I went to Christmas at my Nona's the my country stopped issuing passports about two years ago Venezuela Venezuela has a very nasty law that if you hold dual citizenship you can enter Venezuela as a foreign citizen but you cannot leave Venezuela without a current Venezuelan passport so because i don't have a career venezuelan passport neither is my wife i actually can't go without running the risk of not being let out um that's been the case for two years

damn sorry dude no that's that's fine i mean my my daughter is named after my grandmother how's that weigh on you though like fuck man like frankly it's it's really rough like frankly it's it's uh man i mean i i've you know i'm a half a bottle of rum deep so i'm not gonna get really emotional here but it weighs on me bro like i haven't seen my nonna in three years like my my daughter's named after my 98 year old grandmother and they don't know each other and i don't know if they will and that's that's the biggest one for me like it's fucking tragic that's the big one and and listen i can sit here and tell you how sad i am and all this other shit but there's people that got it way worse.

And so I don't want, this is by no means a pity party, but I think that, you know, I've considered myself incredibly fortunate and I would love to go back and help my country, but the reality is that even going back there to try to help my country presents a risk on my life, right? Like, so when you have a daughter, when you have a family,

you got to start thinking about other shit. And that's what I mean when I say it's a one-way trip, right? because if you make it and you did well you're not coming back right like you you found a better place so that that's actually brutal because i like to go to sleep and i think that my country is going to go back to the heyday and what a beautiful thing that i once was but the reality is that everyone that a lot of people that i knew so like out of my 10 best friends that i graduated high school with five are still there five are gone um and even if i went back like i'm frankly speaking very candidly some of the ones that stayed are doing okay but i'm not really a fan

of what they're doing to earn a living because anyone that's doing okay is working for the government or with the government so they just kind of became one more of this system this broken system and and essentially when i see when i see argentina right like i see macri that really wanted to try and really wanted to do something good but he has this cancer on the outside being this other political party telling people you don't have to work you don't have to work you don't have to work and unfortunately we don't have enough education there for people to discern the difference between the two and the consequences of that decision and so people just keep selling socialism free food no work uh and and the weak lines end up going and voting for it just because

they don't know any better but i think like to bring it back to bitcoin like what's amazing is like bitcoin became the best option from ratio right and so for so many people they became an entrepreneur because of bitcoin and so i think what you know the the view of you know to tie back to what we're talking about earlier is what what's our view of outlook of it i think bitcoin will work because of all the people involved in it so it's self-fulfilling because you have all these smart hard-working people building it and because they're working hard to it and because they have self-interest in making it work it just keeps churning and they keep getting more people into it and growing that way so i think it's it's super fascinating how many entrepreneurs

bitcoin's created well i can say with certainty that i'm very proud to be on the front lines with you two gentlemen um but like and let's end it on this topic i guess like do you think the only way out for countries like venezuela and people in similar situations that venezuelans are is a parallel system that is completely bereft of the handcuffs of traditional governments and nation states. I think one of the things I love about Bitcoin, and I think that in order to be bullish about Bitcoin,

as a Venezuelan, I can see how Bitcoin helps the humans in Venezuela that need help. I can also see how Bitcoin can facilitate avoiding sanctions from my government. no as a base case i believe that there are more good people trapped in bad countries than bad actors around the world and being enabled by bitcoin that's the crazy thing it's because like when you look at like the way the world works and how does the world work it's politicians meeting with each other and deciding things and yeah to be a politician you have to be

a sociopath you have to be crazy you have to be insane you have to want power which you should never want power over a great number of humans it's weird number one totally number two everybody should have their own autonomy but that is the that and like this is a big thing i've i say a lot in person i don't know how many times i've said it on this podcast but like the whole mechanics of modern day democracy or not even modern day government where you have somebody go vote on somebody else and politicians so not modern day communism or democracy modern day politicians what is the mechanism of a politician a politician is supposed to represent a voice of their constituency why do we need that today we have twitter we have the internet like we do not need

to reallocate our voices to politicians like we can and i'm not like screaming for direct direct democracy or anything like that but i i do not think that we need to be beholden to these archaic uh ideas of government that have been around for 300 years when we live with the internet like we should not have in america there should not be less than 2 000 people deciding what happens for 350 million people like that doesn't make any sense to me it doesn't scale to me and just brush that across the world and world governments it just doesn't make any sense right yeah i think you know what i see bitcoin as is is an enabler of freedom like people freeze up your wealth and with that you can free yourself right and largely when i look at

the world today as far as where i would like to position my capital like if you look at what happens in china you look at what happens in latin what happens in russia when a wealthy russian makes out what where do they buy property here miami here in miami and so when a wealthy latin person does well where do they buy property miami so people want their money to be free and people want to be free as well what other countries do is essentially they try to block the transfer of wealth from their pocket to someone else's pocket but people find a way around that right so i think what bitcoin does is if people essentially were now coming to the u.s via dirt roads bitcoin just opens up the biggest fucking highway you've ever seen for freedom of

wealth and freedom of immigration to go to the places they want to be in and it's almost in your face too it's like hey you can't do anything about this like i want to get my wealth here i'm going to sorry exactly yeah so i've been in the other thing too is like there's there's a limit to it too like in minnesota like i'll give you an example like you can have all the bitcoin in the world but then if i have a convoy from the fires which is their you know hit team come with like you know 25 people holding guns you know all the private keys in the world are not going to do right like i'm gonna have to spill the beans right so there there's a certain limit to this sovereignty that bitcoin allows like i i really like you know people we won't get into like the

gun thing venezuela is a very gun heavy place like everyone packs heat in venezuela but it's it actually very rarely does it ever work in their favor because nine times out of ten a gun is a liability not an asset uh in a violent environment right so you know in a violent environment with everybody packs and you're you're just literally there with your gun and there's seven guys with seven guns around you there's a limit to everything right some randomness and yeah so i think bitcoin is great in that it's it's it a it's completely encrypted it's nobody has to know you can just be sly about it and get the hell out but this idea that i'm just going to keep accumulating bitcoin and living in venezuela and no one's ever going to find out or blah blah blah it's like

i think bitcoin is great to like get some wealth and get the fuck out but in those countries largely the people that discover bitcoin they want freedom there's not going to be some circular bitcoin economy within venezuela anytime soon i i think most people that make it and they realize that they're going to see that and for example like i'll give you my case it's not a product to bitcoin either it's a part of their situation like you can have all the bitcoin in the world but and you won't you won't have every good intention in the world if you want to go change venezuela but if the reality is that you have two kids and a wife and going there and trying to get a get elected and change the country is going to get you shot there's just a whole world of

pressure for you not to do this and go to a place where you can just be a great professional right like yeah fuck man why can't everybody just be chill we gotta get him some bitcoin and get them in the u.s or canada or canada canada no but it's like it's like why why why are all these politicians so fucking sociopathic it just why do you want this control over us why why is it that uh do you get a boner every night like is that what it is is it a sexual thing i don't know i don't know man i mean i think these guys some of them have good intentions but they're just like seemingly they don't think they don't think things through um you know i i think macri for example like to give you an argentina example i think he had good intentions but a lot of times

you can have all the great intentions in the world but it just doesn't pan out the way you wanted to yeah well and that's and this is a beautiful place maybe to end it too it's like that's like the beauty of bitcoin it's distributed nature is like it is banking on the fact that centralized top-down hierarchies are not going to provide the solution for everybody i think it's got to be emergent bottom-up not top-down like here's the solution that we're going to imbue on you it's good here's the solution that we came to together and realized was the best as we were trial and erroring this on the way up not the way down yeah i'm drunk that's a poetry man gentlemen uh let's get some parting notes what uh what do you guys want to tell the freaks as we as

we get we're two hours and 15 minutes in now it's about to be like the fifth longest tales from the episode ever no i just want to give a shout out to my my people in venezuela i think i'm like one the few venezuelans to be here uh so i i just want to say you know just feel free to reach out feel free to you know connect with us and and uh you know keep using bitcoin like keep keep learning keep listening to from the crypt because bomb and uh and you know come hit us up whenever if you ever want to if you ever want some help or if you want to leave like we're doing a lot of great things in venezuela too like we're doing meetups and stuff and we're trying to help people out and if you want to learn about mining if you want to learn how you can get into bitcoin

Feel free to reach out to us. We'll help you out in your language. And really, what we want is just to get you onboarded onto Bitcoin and give you access to getting the fuck out if you want to. Yeah, no, I'd just like to thank you, Marty, for having us on. And, you know, I think everyone learns a ton from listening to what you do and the people you bring on. I definitely want to thank our team in Toronto.

It's amazing to work with everyone and, you know, everything that we're building. It's super exciting and really thank the whole community. I mean, it's, it's awesome how collaborative it is and how everyone's working together. And just, I think the more we can focus on getting the word out of Bitcoin and just finding like super easy ways for people to get involved, the better it's going to be for everyone. Gentlemen, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you for bringing this, uh, Venezuelan rum. It's again, that's very happy drunk.

I'm like giddy right now. If you can't tell, I've been smiling for like the last 20 minutes. Exactly. I think this is a very informative conversation. I, I learned a lot, like, and again, like going back to like what we're talking about earlier, like there's a lot of narratives that come out. like bitcoin is the pen is not i don't want to say anybody's saying bitcoin is the panacea but like everybody's like oh bitcoin is perfect for these people but you get like things are different

when you get on the ground and there's limits to everything mauricio adam thank you for coming and sharing your story i think uh the freaks are gonna fucking love it go check out leaden ledn.io especially if you're in canada or latin are you guys in america four states four states which states uh florida uh pennsylvania uh shout out to the union of california california uh i our savings account is actually available for u.s residents uh but uh but our loans are in four states i have to get back to you on the other two okay all right well thank you guys for coming through thank you for making the trip to williamsburg it's been a pleasure it's been a long time coming i'm pumped to see what you guys are doing um that's what we got this week freaks

Peace and love.