The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Fixes This | Alex Gladstein, Human Rights Foundation

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Everyone buys Bitcoin for a different reason, but there is one thing about Bitcoin that we all stand behind - the benefit to humanity. Alex Gladstein, from the Human Rights Foundation, shared why Bitcoin matters for the advancement of financial freedom. For the bulk of humanity that are subject to oppressive regimes, live with tyranny or deal with inflation, Bitcoin is a life raft. As Alex elaborated on in the podcast, Bitcoin is “an escape hatch from tyranny” and “Trojan Horse for freedom” - Bitcoin is our treasure. Alex Gladstein: https://twitter.com/gladstein -- Harmony: Build on Harmony, run on all chains. Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. Be the ONE to bridge to all blockchains. Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Their mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Harmony’s secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and other chains. https://thewolfofallstreets.link/harmony -- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Harmony. Please stay tuned for more information about them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where twice a week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, many people buy Bitcoin simply as an investment, an opportunity to make money, while others are truly in it for the difference it can make for

humanity. It's obvious where today's guest stands. Alex Glassie is a chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, and in that capacity has worked tirelessly to connect hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, policymakers, and artists to promote free and open societies. He's dedicated his life to improving the well-being of others. For this reason, Alex is a Bitcoiner and has famously said that Bitcoin is an escape hatch from tyranny and a Trojan horse for freedom. I can't wait to dig more into what motivates him and why he believes Bitcoin is a game changer. Alex Gladstein, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me on.

So as I just mentioned, you have these incredible quotes, escape hatch from tyranny, Trojan horse for freedom for newcomers into the crypto space is probably makes little sense. Can you break down those ideas? Yeah. And it's, it's interesting that you say that, you know, a lot of people are in Bitcoin to make money and, and others are in it to change the world, but they're very tied together. Right. And I guess I'll start there. Money's broken, you know, across the globe today. Americans have had it pretty good. If you consider that being safe, safe and sound financially means having a good currency, actually a native currency that you're born into and having property rights in some sort of democratic context where the government can't just like come take your stuff. Only about 13%

of people on earth live under a democracy with a reserve currency, meaning a currency that's good enough that other central banks would want to save it, right? Like, you know, other central banks are not storing the Egyptian or the Iranian, you know, other central banks are not storing the Egyptian or the Iranian currency. Right. Sure. They're storing essentially the dollar, the euro, the pound, the Canadian dollar, maybe the Australian dollar, the franc, maybe the yen. That's about it, man. So we talk about reserve currencies and we talk about democracies. It's only a little more than a billion people who are born into that privilege. The other seven billion, you know, close to seven billion, you know, don't have that. So 87 percent of the world's population either have, you know, a repressive political system

or a weak currency. Right. So for them, Bitcoin is a game changer. Right. Because it helps them in two main ways. One is you can kind of think about it like digital gold, and then one is kind of like digital cash. So we'll describe how both help. The digital gold piece helps people escape debasement, or essentially like the collapse of their currency. And I know that American economists and folks working in fintech and finance,

they like to hand wave inflation away. And we have this whole debate about inflation in the United States. Let's just put that aside for a second. There's 1.3 billion people in the world who live under legitimate double or triple digit inflation, or even quadruple digit inflation in the case of a place like Venezuela. And this isn't just one country in one place. This is more than 35 countries. Some of these countries are big countries with like 100 million plus people. We're talking Turkey, talking Nigeria, you know, we're talking Pakistan, we're talking Ethiopia.

These are countries with 200 million, 100 million people, right? And they're watching the money that they earn because in a lot of these countries, a huge percentage of the population works for the public sector, works for the state. I mean, they're all going to be earning the local currency. The elites can get dollars, right? But in most places, the common people have to deal with the local currency, the Cuban peso, et cetera. So they're paid in this swiftly depreciating currency that literally over a month or two significantly depreciates. And they don't have access, in many cases, to something like a dollar or a euro. They don't have access to fine art.

They don't have access to the S&P. They don't have access to, they don P they don't have access to, they can't, they don't have money to buy actual like real estate. Um, their store of value for billions is, is often something like cattle or sheet metal. It's not very liquid cows could die. Um, you know, so all of a sudden we have Bitcoin, which, which, and I feel like, I don't know how you feel about it, but I feel like store of value is, is a misnomer. It doesn't just preserve your value. It dramatically appreciates it, right? So you've got these people who've been using Bitcoin for five, six years now, and they've seen their purchasing power skyrocket, right? And that is such a human difference maker from if they're stuck with their existing currency, where they've seen their purchasing power go off a cliff.

And again, yes, in America, we all know things like movie tickets or ski tickets or health care, education, or even just a latte. We know that they've gotten a lot more expensive in the last 15 years. But I mean, again, think about if you live in a country that has, let's say Nigeria has 15% official inflation, but the food inflation is way higher than that. So you're talking about people who are watching basic goods become completely unattainable. I'll give another example in Cuba. In the last year, Cubans have lost two thirds of their purchasing power. The peso has collapsed from around 24 to the dollar to 70. Okay. So, so things that were previously unaffordable just aren't for so many people. So this idea of digital gold, this idea of an asset you can control on a phone that does not depreciate is a massive human game changer. And that's why it's important to

connect the making money with saving people. They're very connected. The second piece would be the digital cash piece. So for your audience, if you think about what is a banknote, it's many things, but it's privacy, right? And it's freedom. Because when I pay someone for a newspaper at a kiosk, they don't know my name or my address or what my political beliefs are or anything like that. They don't know my email address, my phone number, nothing. They don't know. They can't predict what I'm going to buy next. They just are like, thank you very much.

Final settlement. Here you go, right? But when you pay with a credit card or a tap or a swipe, you're revealing this enormous amount of information about yourself, not just to the merchant, but to these third-party brokers, that processing company, and your bank and card company sell that data to, which eventually gets siphoned up by governments, right? So this leads to surveillance, control, social engineering, things like that. It's obviously most advanced in China. But but a lot of things happen in the United States that would that would

shock people. I mean, a lot of people are familiar with the sensation of buying something, then immediately seeing an advertisement a few minutes later for something similar. That's not that's not tracking your phone. And I know this because I looked into this one time I was buying dog treats for my dog and I bought like a very particular kind and I used a physical visa purchase. I didn't, this was not an online thing. This was at a store. And I walked out of the store and I got an ad on Instagram or something like that for the almost the exact same dog treat, toothbrush shaped dog treat, like minutes later.

And I was like, like well it couldn't be geolocation off my phone because how did they know i didn't buy parakeet food or something and i looked it up and chase who ran my visa card in the disclaimer when you sign up for their services says that it it gives your information out to third parties um it's something you agree to when you read you sign up for your card and you skip this treasure, this massive trove of, I don't know, 500 pages of stuff that you sign off on. So the point is that in the digitized modern world, our money has moved from being a tool of freedom to a mechanism of surveillance and control. And that's something else that Bitcoin really

helps with in terms of people around the world who are dissidents or democracy workers, their bank account gets frozen. Often, we've seen this happen in Nigeria and Belarus and Russia and so many places. They aren't allowed to like raise money from people like Alexei Navalny, who's currently rotting in a prison in Russia, you know, during his campaign, his accounts would often get frozen. Independent journalists in Russia often have their accounts frozen. Well, you know, they can obviously just use Bitcoin and avoid that. It is truly like digital cash. So I think it's best appreciated as both, right? If you think about digital gold, digital cash, that's how it's changing the world. It's interesting that divide though, because in the United States, we often say,

you'll never sell your Bitcoin. You buy Bitcoin, you're handing it on to the next generation. It's a savings account. And that's obviously a luxury that we have because we can save. In these other places, you actually have to spend it. So you talk about the appreciating value if you bought it in 2014 and 15, how much it's appreciated. But there's also an element there where you actually have to spend it as digital cash to gain that privacy and to store value. So is there any conflict there? Or is that just... Well, I think that for people who are

lucky enough to have Bitcoin as an investment, that there's something in play called Gresham's law, right? Which is a historical economic law or, you know, theory, which states that the bad money drives out the good. So this came from like when kings used to do coin clipping, right? So if you lived under a king, they'd have a coin that was a certain amount of silver or gold. And sometimes the king would like remove some of the gold, but the citizens were smart and they knew which pieces, which coins had less gold. And they were all denominated the same, right? It was all like one pound or whatever. And what would ended up happening is that the citizens would save at home the coins that had the more gold, the better money, and they would use the crappier stuff. Right. So part of us thinks on a deep level, if you're into Bitcoin and you're studying it, you kind of know what's going to happen.

Part of you knows that it's going to increase in value over time in terms of purchasing power. OK, so you kind of want to save it. The thing is, eventually you're to be forced to spend it. Even, even if you live in a place like America and I'll explain why there's also something called fear's law, T H I E R S a different economic theory, which states that good money drives out the bad. Now you see this first in dollarizing economies, collapsed states. So, for example, Venezuela today or Cuba in the early 90s, the local currency selling a home or they're selling a significant product, they're not going to want your fiat money. They're going to want your Bitcoin. So I think even in advanced economies where people have sort of the privilege of thinking

about Bitcoin strictly as an investment, you're going to be forced to use it at some point, I think. We'll just have to see how it goes. But that's kind of my theory on how that might work. I had Bill Barheit from Abra on and he had a similar idea was that obviously it would be centralized to huge whales and holders, maybe centralized is not the ideal word for Bitcoin, but eventually they would need to spend it and it would disperse into the greater economy into other people's hands. Sort of the idea of trickle down economics that actually work as opposed to the trickle down economics that we've heard about in the past in the United States.

Well, I mean, look, you know, classic economics teaches that if there's a money, it monetizes. We have this verb, it monetizes, it becomes money. And it does so over time through three phases, store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. And most people who are being honest about Bitcoin will know that it's, depending on where you are in the world, somewhere between steps one and two right now. Clearly, we've seen it be an incredible store of value, not just a store, but an appreciator of value. And then in some places, like in El Salvador, it's legal tender as of about a week from our recording here. And in many other places, it's used as a circular

currency, as a medium of exchange. In many places like Nigeria, Cuba, et cetera, people actually use Bitcoin to spend. I mean, they use platforms like BitRefill. And through BitRefill in these developing countries, you can buy your mobile minutes, you can buy your groceries, you can buy your gas, you can buy pretty much everything you need with Bitcoin. And whatever you can't buy with Bitcoin, you just sell it in exchange. So it's literally starting to become that second function for many. And then, of course, for a small few, they don't think in dollar terms. They only think in Bitcoin, like they're thinking about their Bitcoin holding, not their dollar holding. So we're starting to see this kind

of emerge and monetize. And again, it depends on, you know, your your privileged you are in terms of your economic, personal, family, community, city, country-wide security, but especially for people who are having a hard time connecting with the outside world, who are living under sanctions, who have to deal with frozen bank accounts, who you live in Afghanistan, you live in Cuba, guess what? Because of American policy, Western Union is closed. So all those Western Union opportunities for you to receive money from your family abroad, they're now closed. So what do people do? I mean, they're turning to Bitcoin. Which makes perfect sense and is incredible for the citizens of those countries, of course. But

is there a flip side where there's risk because those governments also realize it and they can be oppressive governments who also use Bitcoin? 100%. Yeah, I like to think of it in Bitcoin on two levels, the personal and the geopolitical. And I think personal should be enough for all of us to get into this movement. I mean, it's empowering literally millions of people around the world. You see a lot of again, mainstream economists trash Bitcoin and it's like, what have you ever done for somebody in Afghanistan? Nothing. Zero. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is like lifting people out of dire straits. So I just wish these people would, you know, kind of have a reality check. But, you know, in general, the personal side is is is I think why we should be in it.

But we need to be cognizant of the geopolitical side. Now, given that it's an open, open, neutral platform that cannot discriminate against gender or ideas or who you are, it also can't discriminate against, you know, good and bad in the classic foreign policy context. So you're going to see rogue regimes use Bitcoin just the same way you're going to see democracies use it. Now, I think that, you know, today, the dollar is obviously the reserve currency of the world. It's utterly dominant. The U.S. government can really control economic flows. Now, its ability is waning.

It's kind of deteriorating. It reached an apex in power probably around 2010. Other countries have stopped buying our treasuries. China stopped buying in 2013. Russia and China are starting to do business with each other. You have the Nord Stream connection between Europe and Russia. You're starting to see the dollar start to wane in terms of its influence, but it's still pretty dominant. What that means is that 4% of the world's population has economic control over 96%. And as an American, I've benefited tremendously from this arrangement. I've benefited from the petrodollar system. I've the system so that like other countries would literally save in American debt and thus finance guns and butter finance war and you know the

warfare state and the welfare state this is something they designed is brilliant uh American elites have benefited astronomically I mean if you've been in defense or uh insurance or finance or technology over the last 40 years. You've absolutely crushed it. Now, not so much for blue collar workers in the United States because their jobs have been exported elsewhere and not so much for the developing world. Not at all. I mean, a lot of these countries, their economies basically stagnated for 20, 30 years.

But in general, it's been really good for a small amount of people. But I don't know if that's fair. And, you know, you think about Bitcoin long term, you think about its possibility of becoming the next reserve currency. I think the world would be better if everybody was on equal footing, if 4% of the world didn't get to control everything for everybody else. You know, the US does use the dollar as an economic weapon. And I understand why.

The Taliban are not good news. Okay. These are, you know, these, these people are massive human rights violators. Okay. However, who suffers when the U S you know, puts economic sanctions on a, on a country. It's not the Taliban. They have plenty of poppy fields. They're going to do just fine. It's, you know, at least it's not the leadership will be fine. It's the people who suffer. Right. So I think this sort of this is, you know, some people say it's economic terrorism. I mean, I mean, it really hurts the average person. Right. So I think a world where governments are are independent, I think would be more fair and better. And if you think actually about Bitcoin

mining, which is very, very important on the geopolitical level, consider a country like El Salvador, right? How do they raise money to do stuff in their country? Well, normally, they would raise money by borrowing from the IMF, okay, right, or something like that. Now, what happens if they don't pay their IMF loan back? Well, they have to go through austerity and structural reform, and usually they get overthrown or something like that. So imagine now that El Salvador, instead of borrowing from the IMF, they're raising, I don't know, it's like $450 million in volcano bonds, meaning they have all this stranded geothermal energy from volcanoes that they haven't been able to use, but it's provably there. And they're raising money off the potential of Bitcoin mining there. And the open market in the world is going to lend them money for that. So imagine you're any of these countries in Latin America that have the stranded geothermal. There's so many countries in Africa that have stranded renewables. You'll be able to sell bonds to the world based on your stranded renewable energy instead of borrowing

from the IMF and being like a debt slave. I think that's kind of amazing. So I think there's really cool things to think about both on the personal side of Bitcoin and on the geopolitical. IMF loans have certainly not played out favorably for countries in the past, more predatory than American credit card companies. And really, when you look at the history of it in combination with American foreign policy, it is really quite astounding. And one other thing on the mining piece, people are often like, well, governments will just take over mining or whatever. I mean, the biggest police state in the world is having a bear of a time with this right now. OK, so China, obviously, as we saw, provably, you know, we looked at the hash rate halved.

I mean, we know that basically about all of the miners in China, about close to half of the world's miners went offline. Right. A few months ago. Now they're coming back, right? And we're not sure exactly where, but it's clear that they're popping up in Malaysia, in Kazakhstan, in Texas, in Iceland, in Latin America, Africa, et cetera, that they're popping up and we're now back. We're recovering. If you look at the hash rate, it's amazing to watch. I mean, we're swiftly recovering, but even in a country where the government has total control with high, you know, high tech police state, what we've learned, I think, from the head of pooling the money, you know, the mining and pool company is that miners are coming back online in China to secretively. So, you know, a lot of people like to talk about, oh, like governments will just ban Bitcoin. OK, if governments can't even ban mining, good luck banning the use of it as currency or investment when it's freaking invisible. I mean, good luck stopping an idea,

I guess is what I would say. Isn't China banning mining a huge misstep and a missed opportunity for them? And not ironically, the biggest fear among the Bitcoin community was always centralization in China, right? That was what we talked about all the time. But of course, then price hit 65,000 starts to drop. China bans mining. And apparently that's a negative, but we all know that in the long run, removing that control for China is a good thing for the Bitcoin network and for Bitcoiners. But we talk about oppressive controlling government. Shouldn't China have just, you know, nationalized Bitcoin mining rather than banning it? Yeah, I think it'll be a geopolitical blunder. Like when we look back in

20, 30 years, similar to like Napoleon invading Russia or the US invading Vietnam or something like that. Soviets invading Afghanistan. This is a huge mistake. I mean, they literally could have had so much power, not necessarily over, over, you know, a lot of Bitcoiners like myself, like to try to go to pains to explain to people that that miners don't control Bitcoin. But there are certain things they could have done, which would have been problematic for the network. Not anymore. And it stands to reason that if you look at the way mining is diversified across the world and the way that actually people who are buying huge swaths of miners are setting them up in different jurisdictions, I mean, there's a good argument to be made that there will never be

another country that will have more than half of the hash power again. And this is obviously really, really good for the health of the Bitcoin network, for human rights, if you can see that this network is a powerful human rights tool. And over time, probably good for the environment as well. Obviously, during the winter, quite a bit of the mining in China was done with coal, which is not economically feasible. The only reason that was happening is it was basically stolen. It was like corruption that was aiding that. I mean, the whole reason that

all that mining was in China in the first place was because of all this extra hydro power that they had overbuilt in these Southwestern regions. And in the winter, when there wasn't as much hydro, they were like, well, what do we do? Let me call my friend. Maybe he can like get us a good discount, like on some coal power, you know, so that's all now over. So I think that's also a helpful thing. And in general, just really, really, really big news that didn't get a lot of global attention because, you know, mainstream political and economic journalists and thinkers don't really understand bitcoin guys i'm really excited to be sponsored by harmony i

know all of us have traded their coin one in the past but what they're fundamentally doing is a game changer harmony is your open platform for assets collectibles identity and governance think of it as the one to bridge all blockchains harmony is open and insanely fast with two second transaction finality and a hundred times lower fees than ethereum their secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with ethereum binance and almost every single other chain maybe most exciting is that harmony in cooperation with sushi will be providing four million dollars in incentives for liquidity mining find out more about this program and build something yourself at thewolfofallstreets.link slash harmony. That's thewolfofallstreets.link slash harmony. Build on harmony, run on all chains. Absolutely true. You talk about the

biggest blunders in foreign policy history, and you mentioned, obviously, the Soviets invading Afghanistan. Well, Afghanistan seems to be sort of a hot button topic at the moment, seeing the United States blunder through a withdrawal after 20 years there and arguably very little accomplished. We could talk about that endlessly, but I want to talk about the role of Bitcoin in that context. Yeah, there's a micro role and then there's a macro role, right? So micro, I have a story coming out later today that by the time this airs, you know, will be online. It's called Finding Financial Freedom in Afghanistan. And it's really a profile of a woman named Roya Mahbub, who is a Afghan entrepreneur. She's the first female tech

CEO in Afghanistan. And she started a company in 2013 called Citadel Software, which ironically is aptly named as Bitcoiners' dream of citadels, which are obviously places in the future where they can be free of government interference in their affairs. But she named it Citadel Software because there was this huge fortress over her city of Herat. And she felt like she wanted to create a place that was safe for females to work in the technology industry. And that would be like their castle. And she indeed, she started this company and she had a lot of female employees. And, you know, one of her big challenges back then was trying to pay them because they didn't have bank accounts. And if she paid them cash, their male relatives would basically take the cash. And she was like, well, how do we how do we fix this?

And well, Bitcoin fixes this. So she, she, they had phones. So she helped, you know, her business partner told her about Bitcoin at the beginning of 2013. So when she first learned about Bitcoin, it was trading at about $13 per Bitcoin and her business partner told her about it. And, you know, of course, I mean, people need to realize, I think there's a lot of folks out there who say, oh, you were lucky to get into Bitcoin early. I mean, Bitcoin was so sketchy in 2013. I mean, today, yes, it's like a mainstream asset. Like, no one's going to look at you twice.

Like, it's fine. People were looking at her crazy for talking about Bitcoin. I mean, back then it was like known obviously as a tool of criminals. Right. And and it was a crazy like risk to invest in. Right. But but she saw the potential. Right. And that spring started helping her colleagues get get online, the people who worked with her so she could pay them. And they had this financial freedom now that their husbands and brothers and uncles didn't know about, you know, and they were able to save it. And her sister actually started a business buying Bitcoin back

from them with cash when they wanted to buy stuff. So it was like this little, you know, ecosystem. And that year was really good for them. I mean, obviously, Bitcoin went from $10 to $100 to $1,000, right? So they felt invincible. But then, you know, then came the crash. And over the next year and a half or so, you know, Bitcoin lost 80% of its value, more than 80% of its value versus the dollar. So she actually, you know, it was tough for her. She had to make people whole.

She offered to pay the people who had received the Bitcoin, the value in dollars that they should have been paid, etc., etc., etc. Her business survived, but it was tough, tough years. She ended up starting to do a lot more educational and nonprofit work. She founded something called the Digital Citizen Fund. And, you know, she couldn't get this idea of the freedom money out of her mind. Like even though most Afghans lost faith in it, she couldn't get it out of her mind. So she kind of kept it there. And she incorporated it into her curriculum through the DCF. She's educated thousands of girls and young women in Afghanistan about technology. And Bitcoin was part of that. So she's created many, many Bitcoiners in Afghanistan, which is incredible to think about. And some of those early employees ended up keeping the Bitcoin, didn't want the dollars. And one of them is this incredible story of a woman who worked for about, I think, 18 months at Citadel and earned about 2.5 Bitcoin.

Now, at today's exchange rate, that is more than 100 times the average annual income in Afghanistan. Think about that. Think about how life-changing that is. So she had to flee Afghanistan. It wasn't the government or the Taliban or anything like that, but local conservative religious elements didn't like the fact that she was working in technology. So this woman, Lala Farzan is her name. She actually left with her family. They sold their assets. They fled. They took this perilous route that thousands of Afghans do through Iran, through Turkey, and then they try to make it to Europe. And, you know, along the way, you know, thieves stole their stuff. They got, you know, shook down like their boat sank. All the typical horrors you would imagine that would happen to a refugee family.

But they make it to Germany and she has the seed still to her Bitcoin. And she sells, I think, most of it at a 10x in dollar terms to what she earned in 2017 when she finally gets to Germany and starts a new life. And I think that's extraordinary because if you just think about the refugees through history, I mean, you leave, you have nothing on your back. And I mean, she's not alone, certainly. I mean, I've interviewed personally several Venezuelans who were able to leave Venezuela, I mean, literally by foot and then get the heck out. But they brought their Bitcoin with them and they started a new life elsewhere. In fact, the founder of Ledin, Mauricio, obviously this popular Bitcoin company that's doing well right now, he and his brothers fled Venezuela in this exact way. It's an incredible story.

So it's helped so many people in that perspective. And when Roya told me that story, I was really blown away. Apparently, her sister also, the one who was buying the Bitcoin back from the girls with Afghanis with cash, she ended up saving some of the Bitcoin and used it to pay for her education at Cornell years later. And basically, for the women who had a long-term perspective on it and believed in it, it became an enormous treasure for them. And I thought that was so powerful. Now, today, obviously, Bitcoin is more important than ever. So, Roya told me that that's what she believes. She wants to double down. She's not going to give up.

She's trying to negotiate with the Taliban to make sure her programs can continue. She actually flew back to Kabul earlier this year. And, you know, because the writing was on the wall. If you really were paying attention to Afghanistan, you knew that if we pulled out, you knew what was going to happen. So it was just a matter of time. Right. So she flew back and she tried to convince her parents to start buying some Bitcoin with their Afghanis. And, you know, they're traditional, older, conservative, like they procrastinated. She wishes she had been more

persuasive because they had to flee the country this month and they weren't able to bring their savings with them. And that is the case for so many people who are now in this traumatic sense of having to uproot their life to go elsewhere because they're afraid. Not being able to bring your money with them is a serious matter. And, you know, I saw a lot of like, you know, mainstream journalists make, you know, being like, how could you say Bitcoin at this time? Or like, what are you talking about? Or and they're just so wrong because like Bitcoin literally fixes this. Like Bitcoin literally allows people to bring their wealth and savings with them.

Or if you choose to stay, it allows you to opt out of the Afghani, which is going to collapse. OK, we've already seen it go of the Afghani, which is going to collapse. OK, we've already seen it go from, you know, well, I mean, we've already seen it go from something like 70 to the dollar to close to 100. But, you know, what you're watching is the U.S. government has prevented dollar flows from going to the banking system. Germany has stopped a 300 million dollar loan. The IMF and World Bank have frozen billions of dollars of commitments,

and Western Union and MoneyGram have stopped, and remittances make up 4% of Afghanistan's GDP. So this economy is going to contract significantly. The currency is going to devalue, and there's going to be massive inflation. Apparently wheat, according to the central banker who just fled, he wrote a piece the other day in the FT saying that wheat has become twice as expensive in certain parts of Kabul already. So you have massive price inflation. And again, who does this end up hurting? It hurts the average person. But even if you choose to stay, Bitcoin is a huge help for you, right? And what's interesting is the data backs up Roya's assertion that Bitcoin was becoming even popular

among brokers and in the Hoala system, essentially in the country. Hoala is this sort of eighth century technology, I guess, where it's like just trusted relationships of people who move money back and forth. Well, some of these people had started to get into Bitcoin. And if you looked at, not a huge fan of chain analysis, obviously, but hey, they put out data and they did put out a report the other day. And it did show that in terms of peer-to-peer Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading volume globally, Afghanistan ranked seventh when adjusted for population and internet users, which really, you know, backs up that this assertion that this thing's becoming more popular. So I had a piece chronicling all this now. And

again, I think you have that personal connection where it really can improve the lives of individuals. But it's also the geopolitical. I mean, Roya, obviously, you know, had to flee the Taliban. I don't think we need to get into her opinions on them and what they think about women's education. However, she does think it's broken that the previous regime, I mean, this guy, Ghani, was so corrupt. I mean, what a grifter. I mean, he went to like, taught at top universities in the US. He wrote a book about fixing failed states. He gave a TED Talk. He started the Institute for State Effectiveness. And yet when Kabul fell,

he escaped with $170 million in cash. Okay, so I mean, it's just like unbelievable. So she blames a lot of the problems on these people, these elites who didn't care about the average person. And she also like questions like the US role in terms of like, what were we doing there for 20 years? Like we invested, you know, the whole war effort was like something like two trillion. But, you know, a lot of that was like war, like 145 billion was invested into Afghanistan as a line item in the budget of that two trillion.

OK, and what's crazy is that 80 to 90 percent of it went right back to America, meaning it was paid out to American contractors. I mean, that's the playbook. Right. But it's like, when you think about why we were there for 20 years, was it really just to enrich a small group of people? I mean, it's hard to say no, when you actually look at the total outlay here. Now, with regard to this idea, like, you know, what Roya is basically saying is that the dependency that Afghanistan had, it was so fragile, you know, obviously, I mean, it fell with alarming speed, and people

couldn't believe how fast the Taliban were able to take over. And that's because 20 years of investment wasn't going to establish a robust political structure. No, it was going to line the pockets of some people and build some things. And then's about it like it was not like a well thought out thing um it all it would do it it was like largely a mirage it collapsed so fast um it was just so much corruption and waste so many things that are you know that that the american taxpayer would be aghast at i mean if you think about the i was looking at some numbers the other day if you if you lump together af and Iraq, these forever wars, the American taxpayer is on the hook for $10 trillion. So you've got two, that's not including what we already spent, right? We're talking $2 trillion that was debt financed, okay?

$6.5 trillion that we're going to pay on interest between now and 2050. And another $2 trillion for paying for veterans. We have 4 million veterans who fought in these wars and their benefits are going to be very expensive. So we have we're on the hook for more than 10 trillion. And for what? You know, for a situation where if you looked at it, it was you know, I get it that the Biden administration is happy that they can freeze the assets of the Taliban. But it's it's a broken system when a country, and you talk about its reserves, which is really its savings, when more than 99.5% of its savings were in New York. That's broken. I'm sorry. I just think that's screwed up. So yes, it's great that the Taliban

only have access to whatever, 0.2% of their reserves. But it is a broken system when 99 point whatever percent of that country, you know, that country's sovereign assets are in New York City. I mean, that's just that's not OK. So Roya hopes for a new Afghanistan that's that's more independent, that can really stand on its own. And, you know, I think both of us really believe that Bitcoin is going to be a big part of that story. I agree. You can look back at Iraq, sort of, as you talked about. There's, I mean, there's big Hollywood movies based on books. The Green Zone, that wasn't exactly the story, but what they pulled off in Iraq was absurd. Basically, the money went to contractors, as you said, to build shopping malls on American

bases and to send in a thousand tanks that sat and rotted and were never used. And really at the end of the day, it's hard to make an argument that that was not the implicit plan in both of these countries. But interestingly, you use the meme, I guess, which is an accurate one, Bitcoin fixes this, but something that we say about everything, definitely the case in the examples you gave, but are there things that our community likes to say Bitcoin fixes that it doesn't? Well, of course. I mean, the point is that there are many things it literally fixes, right? Like it literally fixes, you know, if you're in a situation with bad inflation, okay, this is fixed. You can now be in a currency that the government can't manipulate or debase. If you live in a place that's economically constrained and you don't have Western Union, it literally fixes your problem.

You can receive value instantly from family or friends, especially with the Lightning Network. I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean, I would encourage your audience to download a wallet called the Moon Wallet, M-U-U-N. It's an open source wallet available for iPhone and Android made by a team in Argentina. And it's just this beautiful, brilliantly designed Bitcoin lightning wallet that is so easy to use. I mean, I remember a few years ago, you would be getting your haircut. You try to pay your barber in Bitcoin and it's like you're helping them download this app and it's like, OK, write down these 24 words.

It's not going to work, man. You're not going to make it. So this is really brilliant because the way it works is it, it, it frames, um, backing up as a process and it tries to come to you on your terms. So you can immediately download the wallet without having to do any of that. Like it works right out of the box and you can just give me your lightning address without anything else. And I can just send you lightning. The whole thing's non-custodial non-KYC. It's amazing. And then in the second tab, it just has, okay, well, let's back up on your email. And then second step is let's create a backup

even if you lose your phone. And then it gets into what it calls an emergency kit. So it's super smart the way they've designed it. And I think they've designed it in working with people over time. But basically in the interviews I've been doing in places like West Bank or in Cuba, et cetera, the person on the other end, I've asked them to download this thing and I've sent them a dollar or two or whatever over lightning. And we're all just marveling

at this. It's freaking incredible. I mean, it's literally instant global settlement, regardless of whatever sanctions or whatever country they're in or whatever currency they're in. So this is what we mean when we say Bitcoin fixes this. It's a powerful meme. It obviously doesn't fix everything, far from it, but it does fix many important things that are broken in our financial system. And I think that's important to point out. So you made the example earlier about paying cash. And obviously that gives you privacy and that's the best function of cash. So doesn't that mean that central bank digital currencies are absolutely terrifying?

We know that money is going digital, but if that eliminates cash, even, you know, aside from Bitcoin, which we can discuss in that context. Yes. Isn't a central bank digital currency just a horrid, horrid thing for the average citizen? I mean, I would argue it's disastrous for civil liberties. I mean, what you're going to hear governments say is that it's going to help in a variety of ways. So they're going to tell you that it's going to basically reduce power from the corporate sector and reduce power from the banks. Okay. The average person likes to hear that. They're going to say it's going to make it easier for them to disperse stimulus. Okay. The average

person likes to hear that, right? If you had like a phone, anyone who had to deal with like getting a stimulus check, like all the paperwork and all that nonsense, like it took months for some people, et cetera. Obviously, yes, it would be easier if you just had an app that was directly connected to the treasury or the Fed and they just pressed a button and it just went into your wallet, right? So they're going to tell you it's easier for these things. And they're going to tell you it's going to help fight crime and all this stuff. The reality is that it's going to give them micro control over spending. It'll allow them to like socially engineer certain parts of society.

Like think about it this way. And this is what's happening in China. If like there's a protest or like a strike in the auto industry, the government could literally like, you know, gift a thousand dollars to everybody in the auto industry just to like chill out, chill that out. So it's going to give them this fine grained control over the economy, but it's going to allow them to do blacklisting censorship. It's going to allow them to do forced spending. Like, so, so your money might have an expiration date on it. Right. And they might, and they're going to introduce, obviously the Europe obviously already has negative interest

rates. You know, meaning you're paying your bank for storing your money. But that's going to come to the fore with CBDCs. I mean, they're going to be able to introduce aggressive negative interest rates if they don't want you to save, right? So I just think for all these reasons that it's going to be a disaster for civil liberties and for human freedom. And that's why I'm just grateful that we have Bitcoin. I mean, that we live in a world of Bitcoin and we can opt out. Do you think that CBDCs are inevitable even in the United States and elsewhere? I mean,

even just in the context of things going digital and being a superior system digitally, or do you think that some will preserve it? And do you think that any of the countries will actually preserve the privacy and will make a step to do that? Yeah. So I do think cash is going to be phased out. I think that's inevitable. I think children being born today will never use paper money meaningfully in their life. It's going to be like a curiosity of a different age. And you can just see that. I mean, if you look at the trends and charts, like only about a third of all transactions now are done in the US with cash, but in places like Sweden or South Korea or urban areas in China, it's below 10%, right? So we're going from 100% to zero. This is a very clear trend, folks, like it's happening. It just

is, the debate would be over the timeframe, but it's happening. Now, whether or not like your daily use of money gets replaced entirely by public or private mechanisms is unclear. Like right now, obviously you would say that it would be, it would be FinTech. It would be private companies that would take, take the role of cash, right? If you think about your Apple pay and your credit cards and things like that, there is a case to be made that the government though wants, you know, in China, basically what, what the government's doing is it's afraid of the power of the tech companies, kind of. It wants to, like, you know, bring them down a notch.

So that's one of the reasons it's rolling out the CBDC thing. companies by basically taking the transaction share down and putting more of it into, let's say, quote unquote, public government hands. So I'm not sure how that fight between CBDCs and fintech is going to pan out. And they may actually work together. But the point is that all the digital money you'll use in the near future will be, you know, in their territory, at least confiscatable, freezable, you know, obviously easily debased, things like that. So you're going to lose purchasing power. You're going to lose control. You're going to lose freedom.

That's why it's so important that we have this Bitcoin option, you know, to opt into. You talk about the three stages of money, store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, of course, which every Bitcoin is somewhat familiar with. Where do stable coins fit into that equation? Because I've heard a lot of compelling and ridiculous on both sides arguments that they've sort of replaced the cash element of what Bitcoin was meant to be because they're faster. We all know they're, of course, they're still just dollars, right? I mean, they're pegged to the dollars, they're subject to inflation, but what is their role for settlements for people in these other countries? Right. So I think you and I both know that Bitcoin and digital currencies, regardless of what

project you're going to name, that the vast majority of the daily volume of these things is done through trading. It's not like we all know that, right? The same could be said for Tether. I think it's pretty unquestionable that Tether is the second most important global cryptocurrency in terms of use. And that's crazy because it's obviously highly centralized. They have blacklists. It's questionable. We don't, you know, like we're always debating what its reserves are. But the reality is, if you interview people in these places, tether is very important. When I was talking to folks in the West Bank, there's actually a loophole in the Bank of Palestine where you can't

use a Binance account to buy Bitcoin, but you can buy tether. Okay. So Tether in many places is like the way USDT is like the way that you get into the digital economy. And then from there, some Palestinians, then they'll buy Bitcoin for savings, or they'll just keep USDT as their checking account or whatever. So I think it's important to acknowledge that Tether has a big role out there in varying degrees. Like in some places, it's not really used, but in other places, it's quite important. And look, I think that it's a bridge scenario. And I'll lay out why I think that eventually stablecoins will be not that useful. But for now, stablecoins are probably the most, again, I think they're the second most important project in

cryptocurrency beyond Bitcoin, are stablecoins in terms of human use case. probably the most, again, I think they're the second most important project in cryptocurrency beyond Bitcoin are stable coins in terms of human use case. Now, some of that is people who need essentially deposit accounts in Asia for trading and they don't have a dollar account, right? But again, other times it's like you live in some country where things are tough and you don't want to be prone to the volatility of Bitcoin, right? So here's where I think we go, though. What's interesting now is that we've seen how powerful it is to have a Bitcoin lightning wallet that's completely disconnected from the financial system. It's just incredible. However, like your native Bitcoin, right? Your long Bitcoin, right? So watch this though. After Taproot activates later this year,

I would say in the coming 18 to 24 months, people are developing something that will basically allow you to have an app like the Moon Wallet, where you can choose to not be long Bitcoin, but you can actually choose to peg your lightning balance or your Bitcoin native balance to fiat currency, to the dollar, for example. And how this would work is on the back end of the wallet infrastructure, there'd be a

marketplace. There'd be some people who are long Bitcoin and some people who are essentially short it or their dollar exposed. There'd be two sides to the trade. And this way, I mean, think about how mind blowing this is. That means that I can now send instantly $50 of value to somebody in Cuba using the Lightning Network. And if they want to, they'll be able to choose to keep that in dollars.

I mean, now again, I haven't thought through how this will change trading and maybe for trading purposes, stablecoins are still very important. But for usage, this will just completely eliminate the need to deal with Tether. Why the hell would you want to deal with some sketchy stable coin or something even like USDC, which is going to be completely controlled by the US government? Why would you want to deal with that when you can have your native Bitcoin and peg it to the dollar. That's going to be wild. So just stay tuned for that. I'm very excited for that. I love the notion that if you're in the stable coin or dollars that you're short Bitcoin,

first of all, I love that notion. Well, you are. I mean, that's the thing. The Bitcoin vision is to completely escape from the existing system and to provide an alternative. Quite obviously, stable coins aren't that. Stable coins are literally less regulated euro dollars. And again, I'm not like discounting how massively used they are around the world and how important they are to quite a few people. And I'm mainly talking about Tether here. But it's something that's a transitionary technology.

Like you don't need a stable coin if the fiat currency is not that desirable. You don't want to be pegged to a fiat currency if your fiat currency sucks. Now, there's still a lot of good fiat currencies in the world, which is why stable coins are important. And most of them, I mean, the stable coin economy, I think, as you know, is like, what? It's like 95 plus percent stable dollar space. It's all USD. So some people actually argue that stable coins are good for America and they help push our influence, et cetera, et cetera.

But at the end of the day, I think still this is a transitionary phase and eventually you're not going to want a stable coin. That's not going to be helpful to you, but we'll see. It's interesting though, you obviously have discovered Bitcoin, you know that it's superior, but as a human rights activist, you also probably cheer someone having the ability to get to the dollar from their broken currency, at least in the midterm, right? Because you've talked about that there's very few places in the world that there are stable currencies. So for a lot of people, even just getting to a stable coin from their inflating currency is probably a huge benefit. Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's yes, a hundred percent. I'm happy that Tether exists, but it's hard to cheer for Tether. You know, it's like, it's not like. I'm speaking more conceptually than the idea of Tether specifically. Yeah, no, what I would, look, I mean, I think it's quite important that people have access to these technologies, but I do try to warn them about the risk. I mean, again, like this is essentially could collapse at any moment. Now, Tether has outlasted what everyone thought was possible.

And it looks pretty robust, honestly. I mean, I don't I don't think anyone's calling for it to be collapsing anytime soon, especially after it survived, you know, basically a slap on the wrist from U.S. regulators. So we'll have to see. We're going to watch it against, you know, against the slap on the wrist from US regulators. So we'll have to see, I mean, we're going to watch the Gensler regime, and we'll see what happens here. But it looks fine, which is kind of crazy to think about. I'm not sure I would be cheering it. But I do want to, I think it's important for us to acknowledge its role. But beyond Tether, I mean, I think the other thing that's important to acknowledge, though, is that like, you know, globally speaking, at least, I mean, the other cryptocurrencies

are just not, they're not at that same level. There's not as much usage to bear a human illustration of its value outside, of course, outside of trading. So I think that's also important to keep in mind. I mean, I've got a lot of people who come to me and say, oh, can you help me with my coin project? Can you help us get adoption in some country? I'm like, no, dude, like, definitely not. That's not how it works. Like, I mean, these things are organic, they grow, and they grow to meet the needs of people. And if you are some like VC, or, you know, you have you

have you want to mint your coin and then try to get people in some country to use it. I think that that's just not going to make it. I'm not a fan of that. In your mind, is there a use case or benefit to any of these other coins? Or is it pretty much a Bitcoin and everything else? No, I'm very into Bitcoin and I'm not really into the other coins. But again, as I tried to describe here, Tether is widely used. Like you can't deny its use case. And that's something that Bitcoiners need to work on.

Like I think we need to make sure that there's no reason to use Tether. And that's going to take a couple of years. Ultimately, I do think that that will be something that will be displaced. And then I'm not, I mean i mean obviously i think it's like undeniable also like things like uniswap are very game-changing right i just i think i just doubt the like uh the global impact of stuff like that and i also doubt the claims that these things are like sufficiently decentralized to escape government uh influence like i'm always in these debates with people on Twitter

and stuff about Uniswap being decentralized. They have a freaking chief legal officer. I don't know. Does that count if they have VCs and a legal officer? I don't know. You realize that all of these other projects beyond Bitcoin are eventually going to come under influence from the government in different ways. I mean, you could say, or social pressure, I think you could attribute a lot, actually a lot of like the Ethereum proof of stake migration is bizarrely due to this like social pressure of like, we need to be environmentally friendly or whatever. Like, so, so a lot of these currencies are going to shift due to social or governmental pressure. And Bitcoin is just going to keep doing its thing. So I think it's just important to know the differences. In my work, in my interviews, if I see people using some other coin, I'll change

my mind. But generally speaking, outside of trading, it's a Bitcoin world out there, you know? So when you drill into the Bitcoin ecosystem itself, then can't you somewhat make the same argument for the platforms? I'm not saying for Bitcoin, we all know that the Bitcoin network will continue to be successful. We know that Bitcoin cannot be stopped. But the same sort of pressures we're describing clearly will affect the on and off ramps if you ever want to get your money in and out. Yeah, 100%. And again, I wrote this piece for Quillette back in February, and everybody's like, well, can governments ban Bitcoin? And I just like, they can try. They've failed miserably. Like the governments that have tried to ban it or get rid of the on ramps have seen usage explode in their countries, whether it be India or Nigeria, etc.

But it's like the game theory states that actually in this macro environment of like negative yielding government bonds and, and, and, you know, you know, eroding fiat currencies and asset inflation and stuff like that. It just, it just is much more likely that governments are like actually in corporations and the private sector that's close to the government, it's much more likely they're going to get involved with Bitcoin. I mean, we've- Is that good? No, I think it's, so again, the Trojan horse, I think it's fantastic. Like this whole El Salvador thing is crazy to think about. Like we have nation state level adoption of Bitcoin now.

And that's so good for the people, regardless of what the government does. I mean, again, with the El Salvador thing, they could have gone with a China coin or they could have gone with a CBDC. Instead, they went with freaking Bitcoin. Like this is like to be celebrated. And El Salvador uses the dollar. This isn't like Venezuela. Yeah. Currency is being devalued at a tremendous rate.

They're on the global world. And again, like there's like I would be very happy if the Taliban chose Bitcoin instead of some Islamic currency. Like the rogue regimes, folks are going to use these technologies. But you have to understand that Bitcoin separates money from state and it erodes the power of that government to control the people. So if they're going to be shooting themselves in the foot and adopting it. Fantastic. Let's do it. Because we want the people using Bitcoin.

And if that's the route to the people using Bitcoin. And I think there's always these burning debates about why the Bitcoin focus or Bitcoin maximalism or whatever. But my case for it from a moral, let's say human rights point of view, the reason why I'm in that camp is because at the end of the day, over the next few decades, I think that there's just going to be this enormous pressure on monetary systems that can be changed. And in Bitcoin, no one can change the monetary policy. And again, as we get back to the beginning of our conversation to like loop this together, the reason why Bitcoin is valuable is it is digital gold at the end of the day. Like it's also digital cash, but really its true value is that

no government can debase it or change the rules or that no rich person or elite has special access or privileges over anybody else, right? We're all equal in front of the eyes of the system. No billionaire can censor a refugee. Like everybody is equal in front of the network. And that's due to its unchanging monetary policy, which is held in check by user control, by full nodes and proof of work, right? So I think that's just going to be so, so important in the next coming decades when any other currency system, whether it be fiat currency, the dollar, the euro, or other cryptocurrencies, which are controlled by a small group of people, you know, like we don't, you know, You have predictability and you have unpredictability. I know exactly how much Bitcoin is going to be minted in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever.

We have no clue how many dollars are going to be minted next year. And we have no way of verifying that. We also don't know how many Ethereum are going to be minted in 2023. I can't get a single person to tell me because the answer is we don't know and we're going to do our best. Well, I understand that. And I'm sympathetic to the notion that they're going to try hard to do their best. But like, that's what we're getting away from in Bitcoin. We don't have to worry about bureaucrats doing their best. Like we're going to have this like known, unchanging, predictable monetary policy. And that's going to be the bedrock for our new financial system. You know, and all the other stuff, you know, might certainly might have its use cases. I mean, obviously, fiat money is very used by everybody in the world.

I mean, we should be realistic here. But like we're kind of creating an escape hatch here. And that's why this is just different from the rest. So I think these are just important dialogues to have because at the end of the day, like the human rights use case for Bitcoin, again, comes from its sort of unmanipulatable, unchanging nature. If a small group of people could change the rules of Bitcoin, I wouldn't care about it. It would not be very important to me. Before we go, I know we're running out of time, but we've all looked at El Salvador. You've brought it up multiple times that Bitcoin's being accepted at legal tender.

They're effectively are dropping $30 to every citizen so that they can get a feel for it and have some exposure to it. One thing I haven't heard an argument for or a debate on is what happens if the El Salvador experiment fails and maybe calling it an experiment is a bit minimizing, but whether it's just not adopted by the people, they're not interested, or we see the World Bank and the IMF and the United States government, all of these basically make it so uncomfortable for them that they abandoned it. Yeah, I would say it's unlikely that implementation and rollout is going to be smooth. It could certainly fail politically. But I think the idea is out of the bag, meaning like you have all these other

countries now looking closely at this and they're thinking about it. I mean, if you look at the leaked documents that came out of El Salvador, that they have to establish this like $200 million Bitcoin sort of trust to enable people to be able to instantly convert using the government wallet out of Bitcoin into dollars. And if you just think about for a second how powerful this is, what this means now with the government app, just putting concerns about government control aside for a second, just in terms of human utility, you've got now merchants who have this government wallet or an ATM, and you are a person in El Salvador, And again, 20, 25% of the economy's reliant on remittances, hundreds of 1000s of people who rely on remittances entirely

in this country. And you've just received, you know, Bitcoin instantly without having to go to a Western Union brick and mortar office or deal with any of that nonsense or pay a fee to a middleman. Okay, now you can immediately just go no fee to an ATM and get dollars if you want to just cash out right away. Or you can like use the government app to receive the Bitcoin if you want, and immediately choose to just cash out into a dollar balance. If you're a merchant or an individual. This is very powerful, very, very powerful. Now, they may screw it up and there may be all kinds of surveillance concerns involved. But, you know, I don't think this is going to be stopped just because they don't they don't roll it out properly.

I think a lot there'll be a lot more coming in the next decade in terms of nation states experimenting with Bitcoin in various ways. I mean, remember, we all thought that the first nation state wouldn't adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. That was like way down the road. We were thinking of it as maybe the central bank would buy 1% or 2%. And that's what you're going to start to see. I mean, we already know that like the Singaporeans have some and, you know, the Norwegians are exposed and the Swiss are exposed. And it's just going to start. It's a it's a gradually then suddenly thing. Like it's going to start happening, especially over the next couple of years. But you know, I'm watching it carefully, man. I mean, you know, we'll see. Yeah. And I appreciate you

having me on. And I just wanted to point people to, if they're interested in diving in and learning more about what we're doing at the Human Rights Foundation with Bitcoin, we have a dev fund. So people donate to us and we give it and we give gifts to open source developers making amazing things around the world. We try to give gifts to devs in the emerging markets. So you can check that out at href.org slash dev fund. And we also bring people together. So we have a conference series where we bring freedom fighters and activists from around the world. And we bring also Bitcoiners together. That's called the Oslo Freedom Forum. And the next one will be in Miami on October 4 and 5. And if you go to oslofreedomforum.com,

you can check it out. And I mean, it's an incredible event. So I would encourage you to take a look. I'm a Floridian, so I'll attend that for sure. We'd love to see you there, man. And where can everybody follow you after this conversation and keep up with what you're doing? Yeah, I mean, you can follow the Human Rights Foundation at href.org. And you can follow me on Twitter at my last name, Gladstein, G-L-A-D-S-T-E-I-N. And again, thanks for having me on. Thank you so much for taking the time. Really enlightening and a great conversation.

We'll have to follow up with another one down the road. For sure. Thank you.