What Bitcoin Did - How Bitcoin Is Changing the World | Erik Hersman, Phillip Walton, Eric Yakes & Mark Kamau

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Erik Hersman, Phillip Walton, Eric Yakes & Mark Kamau join the show for a deep dive into energy, mining, and the reality of electrifying Africa — and why Bitcoin is quietly unlocking possibilities no NGO or government has ever managed to achieve. We get into the wild journey across northern Kenya to the forgotten village of Saru where communities live without electricity, refrigeration, or basic infrastructure, and where abundant energy would completely transform life, opportunity, and even culture. Philip and Eric explain why transmission lines will never be built, why NGOs fail 90% of the time, and how Bitcoin mining finally makes it economically viable to electrify the most remote places on earth. They break down how Gridless finds stranded energy, models profitable solar and hydro builds, and partners with local elders, schools, and entrepreneurs to create real markets — not handouts. We dig into the coming era of “energy first, mining second,” the circular Bitcoin economies emerging across Kenya, why M-Pesa makes Nairobi the easiest city in the world to live on Bitcoin, and how Lightning will become the payment layer for off-grid power. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Erik Hersman: https://x.com/whiteafrican/ Phillip Walton: https://linkedin.com/in/philip-walton-nairobi Eric Yakes: https://x.com/ericyakes Mark Kamau: https://x.com/mark_kamau

For Bitcoin to succeed, human experiences need to take a forefront and they take a backseat. Our first goal is to mine Bitcoin profitably. And we do that by pushing energy to the edges in Africa and decentralizing the Bitcoin network. That's the whole mission of gridless. We have crossed the chasm in the conversation about, no, this is not a charity. This is something that needs to work. It needs to work for you as well. And you need to have a stake in it.

We have no cold storage for medicine. If you're having a baby at night, you're doing it under the light of your phone flashlight. The story of human progress is the story of energy. In five years time, you will not fund an energy project that doesn't have Bitcoin mining attached to it because it won't make financial sense. We need a beer. We need a beer. Yeah, definitely don't need a beer.

It's a lot. It's a shame we weren't doing it at a different time so we could have a beer. There we go. That's better. It would be better if we're sitting on the shores of Lake Turkic. Hannah doing this conversation. Well, that was the plan. But then nothing in Africa runs on time, apparently.

This is one of the things I've learned. We've completed Africa. Yeah, yeah. Completely completed. I don't even know where to start. I think we should start with you, Eric, telling everyone what we've just done. Because I could try. I could say we've been to the Ethiopia border, but I was basically just in your car.

I was a passenger for the entire word. Like you tell everyone what we just done. I think you want it in more like more flowery language without some hyperbole. Exactly. Which means that he should tell us what we did. Okay, Philip. Take us away. Explain this trip.

Yeah. So we set out actually on part of the Trans-African Highway. So that is the main route that you travel north to south. It felt like the main route, didn't it? There was a road for some of it. So the challenge was like we, when we were initially looking at it, there was a place that we could have cut into the interior, but we decided to go all the way up, almost to the Ethiopian border, and then essentially drive across the Ethiopian border.

So what's funny is, like, we went through this town, so right after breakfast, we went through this town called Isseolo. That used to be where the barrier was, and they would like check you into the Northern Frontier District and wish you, wish you luck, because, like, they would not support you past that point. But for us, we just drove through it today. I mean, now it's like a modern road. Well, you were saying that was one of the most dangerous roads in Africa? For a very long time, that was the most dangerous section of any road in Africa.

You told me that after the trip. So the funny thing is, this was meant to be, like, we were coming here, we were going to get, well, going to go into Kenya, we were going to go do safari, we're going to hang out with you guys. And then like, I don't know, two weeks before the trip, Eric calls me is like, do you want to go on an adventure? Hey, listen, we had some guys drops. I was like, hey, there's only a couple of us now. We could do something that most people would get to do. You know, so yeah, it's like, Danny, you want to be something a little different? You've been on a safari before already.

Let's do something different. And it's like this idea is like, hey, let's go up to this area that used to be called the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, which is really like the land that time forgot, right? It's like north of Isiolo. And let's look at one of these communities that doesn't have any electricity. And the government of Kenya has no plans to ever bring electricity. There's no plans that they'll ever have electricity there. So why are they forgotten?

Because I know like Saru, which is the time we went to at the end, isn't even on the map. But like why is the no plan to try and bring electricity there? Is it just too hard? Yeah, it's just too hard. I mean, the transmission lines alone, if you imagine where we went, you'd have to build 300 kilometers of transmission lines, right? But 300 kilometers of transmission lines is a hell of a lot of money. And you're going to send it to, what, 5,000 people? Yeah.

They'll never get a return on investment, right? I mean, in 5,000 people, you mean in the entire region? No, I mean, in Sari. It's Sari 5,000 people. It is. Oh, wow. But it's 5,000 in the greater metropolitan community. Well, that was one of my favorite things about turning up to this town.

I'm going to make sure there's like pictures on the podcast because otherwise it's very hard to explain what we actually saw. Yeah, and I'll send you the math that actually shows the government's plan for building energy. Yeah. And you'll see, I've got Sauru overlaid on it because it doesn't show up on the math. It's not considered even a village in Kenya yet. And you'll see that it's not only not going to have any electricity ever planned for it. A thousand kilometers south is the same thing. So it's like this whole section of the country. But the idea was, can we get up there?

Can we get off grid, like really off grid, and show you what Africa looks like to the people who never get there? Because this is the kind of place, and Mark, you can speak to this. This is the kind of place that Kenyans never get to. I was going to say, like you guys have been places most Kenyans would not in their wildest, you know, horror dream think about going. Like nobody would go up there. In fact, just hold that quite close. In fact, actually, normally when we're leaving, sometimes when we come out of places like this, they literally tell me when you go back, say hi to Kenyans. because they actually sometimes don't even feel like they're Kenyans

because they're totally ostracized and when we stopped at one of the places somebody came and told me actually thank you so much for coming here because hardly anybody comes here and the the Kenyan gentleman was in the car with you guys Andrew is his name Andrew yeah Andrew was telling me in fact he

he finds it difficult to connect with people who've never been to them because he feels like there's a fundamental part of him they don't understand and when you drive with him to this place is the conversation you're serving with me in the car was different because it's like now you see where I come from now you see where some people live in this country and yeah it's super super remote I am a Kenyan nobody I know has ever been and I'm what like I'm not a young man And I've never been any man here that far.

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advisor to understand how these rules apply to you, and then head over to mining.borsolutions.com forward slash WBD and you'll get one week of free hosting and electricity with each hosted minor purchased. It's funny because like I've been to Nairobi before then we went and did safari. So we saw like the Masamara which was somewhat similar to that but again very very different. Yes. They had green. Exactly.

And there's a real stark contrast even just in Nairobi. Like we went to Kabir on the first day. That's very different to like where all the consulate buildings are like there's sort of two sides to Nairobi. Then this is an entirely different side of Kenya that it was really shocking to be honest. Because like it's got to be one of the harshest places in the world to live. It's hot as hell. It's windy. There's no water.

There's no food. No vegetation. The funny thing is, like, I was talking to Mark when we were in the car. And I was like trying not to say it. But I was like, why do people live here? Because it's so hard. And I was very happy that Mark as a Kenyan was like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, to me, it is like to me, in fact, you have these places where you have a little bit of

and oasis and then you have the harshest, rockiest exposed places. And then for some reason, that's why they pop the village. Yeah. And then I'm like, you literally are exposed to all the elements. Yeah. The harshest winds, and you saw the wind can be super harsh. Crazy. And I'm like, what's the logic behind choosing this particular spot for the village?

I would try to find a tree as rare as they are. I pop my my house there. So even for me, it's like, so I come from hardship, but there are levels to hardship. When you go to these places, you're like, okay, like I'm lucky. Because if you see how the deck is tucked against these people, we have access to the internet, we have access to power. Now imagine being born there. You had water, even the basic necessities already are difficult. And you're like, man, the deck is truly stacked against this.

And that's why things like electricity potentially internet would be, can you imagine what that could do in such a place if you electrify, like gridless electrifies or helps electrify people in Kangema, in Muranga. And that's already quite a step. But there, it's transformation. Do you know what a man told me when we were doing the survey? We found an elder having the Ethiopian beer. And then we walked up to him. and Andrew asked him, this guys want to bring solar electricity

to this community. He told me, dude, if you do that, I'll give you two acres of my own land. Oh, wow. You can have anything. Just do it. He's like, if you do that here for this village, for my people,

I'll offer you two acres of land gratis. He's land. That's how important it is to him. So there it would be a game changer. So let's actually, so you asked earlier, what's a recap?

And so let me just see if I can get it done quickly. So first off, you landed and we, Mark took us down to Kibera, the big slum in Nairobi, one of the big slums in Nairobi that has a pretty great circular economy of Bitcoiners. Then the next morning at 5 a.m., well, then Eric landed at 10 p.m. And by 5 a.m., we're dragging him out of bed, throwing him in a car. We drive for 14 hours to get to our first place to sleep for the night. And then the next two days we're trundling across some of the harshest places that you can drive for a total of 1,100 kilometers. But this isn't 1,100 easy kilometers.

These are the hard miles. And so we visit a community up there that doesn't have any electricity. We go through a bunch of other ones that we don't stop at, right, that don't have any electricity or they had something that was built by an NGO and it has been defunct for three years. Then we finally get to Lake Turkana and we do a little bit of fishing very little bit because they were slow There was almost a fish caught and then and then we spent a night on an island and then we got back in the car We saw Africa's largest wind farm and then we jump in an airplane fly back to Nairobi so we could get to this event Yeah, that's our that's the recap that was our crazy four days. That's four days During that I'm just gonna flash up pictures so people can see because you can't understand this it was like I would never have guessed

what we were going to do. Like, you told me it was going to be wild. It was more wild. We undersold it. You can pack a lot in a few days. You didn't realize that, did you? That was a crazy part is just, it's like within all of northern Kenya, there was, I don't even know, like, I felt like we drove through like 10 to 15 different, just like, it looks like a completely different country in a different part of the world. And it's just like you drive for 30 minutes through this like very harsh desert. And then you enter this like beautiful oasis. And then we go up into the highlands and all of a sudden I feel like, you know, me being from Colorado, that was one of the first thing I noticed was a lot of the vegetation up there was very similar to like what I'm used to in Colorado and I was like I would never would have guessed I'm in Africa up here. And we hit all of these different places. And yeah, it was it was wild. I think seeing the the most interesting thing to me, I feel like that I learned on some of it was and we were talking about this when Philip and I were when we were,

met the community up in Saru. If these people have basic needs, then it gets them to a certain standard of living where I almost feel like, you know, where we come from in the US and we have all these people living in apartments and they're sitting in this box and they're looking at their phone all the time

and we have all these mental health crises and all these things that are happening nowadays. And you see these communities and it's like, oh, this is how we evolve to live. And this is how we're used to. And I was blown away at how happy a lot of people were in these communities. And the way that they were interacting with us

and with each other. And I was telling Philip, I was just like, honestly, I'm like, I'm like jealous of a lot of the connection that you can see that they have. They have these very compact communities. Everybody knows each other. You know, there's 40 little kids running around. Like the second we hop out of the cars,

we're getting sworn. And Eric was the main attraction. I was like they somehow all congregated to Eric. And yeah, this Eric, Eric, C. That's quite interesting though, because Philip, you were talking about this, how community, like, what we think of as community in the West is very different how they be community out there. In what way? Well, I mean, we saw it. So, one, think about where in the West would, like, an entire little town allow all of their children just to run around, go up to strangers.

You know, there's no parents around. But what was interesting at one point is they did start to cross the line of being pestering. Yeah. And a guy came over and like, you know, made a single call and they all just scattered off. So I mean, you can just see that there's an expectation, you know, the whole community is interacting together at every level. And it's not like my pocket and your pockets. Right. Right.

Because in the Western world at least, like we have, you know, people have communities around churches or like some other organization that's involved locally. And that's fine, but I think the difference is like when everybody lives with each other like that, like there are no secrets. Everybody knows who each other are. And, you know, they're right around the corner. And I think that really changes a dynamic with how they interact with each other. It's like it's a very real and authentic community that you're saying. And you can also see it in the decision making. So let's say you come to me in Nairobi and you say, oh, you don't have electricity. I can give you electricity. Right.

The knee-jerk reaction in an individualized society is, oh, install it in mind first. But when you go to these communities and you say, oh, we have a project where we want to electrify your community, the immediate reaction is wait and speak to our collective decision-making structure. So that's why we had to wait until we talk to the elders who represent everybody. And that is, instead of a person saying individually, oh, come, let me show you, my home is where you can install electricity, it's like they think about the common good. And so they say, let's look at this as a holistic benefit for a community. And let's discuss it at a holistic level and how it benefits everyone.

And that's a different way of thinking about the community fast and not sell fast. So it says, wait with however nice your project is. Electricity is amazing. But before we can make a decision, let's fast. consider everything for the community and we have a structure to do that let's use that structure and for me that's beautiful because and we saw this with the elders like so Eric and I got to go sit down with the elders and literally the only question we ask is is there a piece of land that we can we can put this on and these guys

they're old guys they're sitting underneath you know a tree in the shade chewing Mira which is like this stimulant so it's a plant that's that's grown in the north and they're just sitting there like chewing these leaves and spitting them out. And most of them didn't say anything. I mean, they just kind of like sat there, you know. And then, you know, the senior guy, and they were speaking, you know, their local language.

So we didn't understand a word they were saying. But you could just see this interaction, this older guy. It was like almost argumentative, you know, like, whatever, and then this guy would like give a response. And then occasionally one of the guys that's just sitting there chewing these leaves would like say a word or something. Yeah. And, you know, at one point I kind of felt like maybe it was going sideways.

And then all of a sudden, like, okay, we've made a decision. This is where we want you to put it. And they immediately walk us out to this plot of land. Like, it was quite incredible. So I realize I've done a really bad job as the podcast host here. Philip and Mark have never been on the podcast before. So Philip works at Gridless with Eric. Mark, you're like OGUX designer out of Kenya doing a lot of stuff on Bitcoin now.

So there's the context. But the thing that I've also missed is why we were even in Saru. So maybe, I feel like you should explain, like what are gridless trying to do out there? You know, so gridless, we started out by focusing on finding stranded energy and helping to monetize it with Bitcoin mining. We very quickly realized that the real need in Africa is developing new energy projects. And so we've kind of been focused on predominantly finding hydro. And we've been, you know, pursuing hydro simply because of unit economics. So there's a couple months ago, you know, Eric and I got on a call with some,

some folks down in Namibia. And basically they enlightened us that the cost of solar and storage has come down so much that we're approaching the same unit economics of hydro. And for those that don't think of Bitcoin mining like this, it's just energy. Like it's an energy arbitrage. So Bitcoin mining pays X.

As long as Y is substantially less than X, then you make gross margin and you can successfully fund this energy. And so, So, you know, we started down this road of like looking at modeling out, can we do solar? We, you know, with Bitcoin mining, we really need them to run 24-7. So obviously storage is required. And then a few weeks ago, Eric took his family just on kind of a fun trip up to this part of the country and ended up finding this little village. And so we're like, this is perfect.

I mean, this is a village nobody will ever, ever, ever think about taking electricity to. and we can go there, build a pretty substantial energy plans. It will make sure that they have as much electricity as they want for, you know, the next three or four decades. And we can do that profitably because of Bitcoin mining. So it's just a great story. So that's a really important thing, I think. And we've talked about this on the podcast before, Eric, but this isn't like a philanthropic

play. Like there's massive benefits to the local community, but you're doing this because it's highly profit support. Yeah, I mean, nothing we do. I think some people look at gridless and they think that we're a non-profit or a charity. We are a for-profit VC-backed company. We are, our first goal is to mine Bitcoin profitably. And we do that by pushing energy to the edges in Africa and decentralizing the Bitcoin network. That's our, that's the whole mission of gridless. So we would never look at a site if we were going to make money. Yeah. So this idea, we were talking to this actually Namibian, a very large-scale

Namibian solar guy who told us about the new pricing changes, we like triple verified this with different Chinese manufacturers, European guys who knew the few. And sure enough, the prices have dropped. And so in Saru, we're like, okay, this community might start with like a demand of maybe 20 to 50 kilowatts.

But we can drop a megawatt in, right? Now a megawatt of solar only gives you about 250 kilowatts of always on energy because if you have a megawatt of solar you know three quarters of it has to fill the batteries during the day and so you can only use a quarter of it to mine during the day and then all night you can run it okay so it's a one to four ratio basically and but the numbers work the numbers actually work finally the economics work what's interesting about that though is it means like what we were doing gridless is known for run of river hydro that's what we are mostly do we have a couple of we have a geothermal we have a biomass but really

Runner River Hydro is what we're good at. And as we start expanding across the continent, we're saying, hey, we're going to have, you know, about maybe 10 to 20 megawatts that come online over the next year or two. That's great. Can we double that now? Because solar is a lot faster. We can put up a solar site in three to six months. Whereas with hydro, you're looking at, you know, 12 to 18.

So there's something really interesting here. And it's like the numbers work, the economics work for the Bitcoin. mining, even if nobody were to buy a single kilowatt of power in Saru, which we wouldn't like, right? But even if nobody did, we would still be profitable. Now, if they buy, we make more money. So it's incentive, like the incentives are aligned for everybody to come out looking good on this. And if they pay more than Bitcoin mining, right, their price is still going to be less than

what we pay in Nairobi. So they will actually have some of the cheapest energy in the whole country. Well, this is one of the things that shocked me, because what's the town called that was about an hour away from Saroo? So, Dukana. Dukana. And so there they have a solar site set up. Was that from an NGO? Yes.

Okay. And then they set that up, and then there was some controversy in the town. Politics got involved. And now they're paying 72 cents a kilowatt hour. Yeah, 75 cents. So that's like, I don't know, four times as much, three times as much as a normal U.S. household? Well, and in Nairobi, we paid 25 cents a kilowatt. Crazy.

So it's three times as much as people in Nairobi pay on the national grid. But the reason that happened is this NGO set it up. And then, you know, they weren't really monitoring and managing their stuff very well. People started tapping the line and stealing power. So they turned everything off. The community became a little upset about that. The paying customers did. And they said, well, stop these guys from stealing.

They didn't stop them from stealing. So eventually what they ended up doing is just saying, fine, we're going to turn it back on, but we're now raising the price from 50 to 75. Yeah. Crazy. And like these towns don't have tons of spare capital to be spending that much money on electricity. So I assume what happens is just people who use far less of it. And then the benefit is obviously way small.

Way less. I mean, so you're dealing with the people with the least amount of disposable income in the country, and they have the highest cost of energy. Crazy. It's ridiculous. It's upside down. And so they're paying 75. cents a kilowatt hour in DeKana, what will you be able to offer it to the local people in

Sal Roots? So the wholesale price coming out of where we are will be something like 12 cents. Now that's wholesale. So then... Sorry, we had a little bit extra noise around here. So let's say we wholesale it to 12 cents to either the community co-op or the local little mini-grid distributor, right? He might charge another five or six cents on top of that. So let's call it, let's call it 18 cents total. And then he makes a little profit, so he has another two cents. So 20, 20, even if you were to charge 20 cents or the local co-op were to do 20 cents is still cheaper. Yeah. Significantly cheaper. It's actually 20% cheaper than Nairobi.

That's amazing. And like one of the interesting things was in the school, someone had put a solar panel on the roof. And I think the only other place that I saw was solar was the pharmacy in the village. But the solar on the roof of the school is no way near enough. He said it can only actually light two of the classrooms and they had eight or something. And the interesting thing as well is they're not just using for that everyone's going there during the day and charging like their phones and external batteries and then in the chemist he said that or the pharmacist he said that it doesn't even run the fridge all night so like they are vastly underpowered they have it will make an incredible difference to that community yeah if you have no cold storage for medicine uh you if you're

having a baby at night you're doing it under the light of a of your phone flashlight right um if you want to study at night where do you go right so everybody everything everything is worse when you don't have energy, right? That's it. In fact, when we were interviewing the community to find out what having access to energy would mean to them, one of the people we spoke with is the headmaster of the school. And when it's exam time, he literally has to carry his printer on the back of a bike, all the way to de Kana, to print the exams. Yeah, that was inside.

You can't print the exams at the school. And he's like, yeah, if you brought us energy, that would actually help because of that. And even the vaccines. So for young children, some vaccines require refrigeration. And they have a small solar fridge and the capacity that they have. And you heard all of them say they get very cheap Chinese batteries, which are super expensive, $320. And every year or so, they have to replace them. And so for them, they're like, if you could take that cost out of our hands with a

reliable source of power, that would be a game changer. There's even, there's a guy who was telling me, I was like, he's got the business where people were having alcohol and he's super entrepreneur. It was like, listen, I actually don't even like selling alcohol. My main passion is welding. And there are all these bikes that are beaten up on this terrain. Can you imagine if I set up a shop to repair the bikes welding the frames? That's actually my passion. And so it's like, if you immediately come over with power, that would be super helpful. But I think for me, the... We've got some serious background that's going on.

Yeah, so, yeah, you're right. Like, there are so many ways for health, for education, for nutrition even. Yeah. Because somebody who said they only slaughter a good strategically. Yeah, because they don't have a fridge to keep. Yes, they don't have a good, they don't have a fridge to... So they actually don't even provide the right nutrition because of some of this constraint. So another aspect that, you know, when you look at like these solar home systems, these like rooftop, tiny little, it's like the bare minimum electricity to provide function.

But it's not abundant power. And I think the difference in what we're talking about with gridless is going into that community and not giving them just enough to survive. Yeah. But going in and making enough electricity available that the welder can actually set up a business because he has reliable power. that he can run his welding machine, he can fix bicycles. And I think that's one of the challenges in some of the efforts. And Eric, remind me, who was the organization that counts, like, solar home systems towards the energy?

Oh, that was Power Africa. Yeah. So, you know, their numbers sucked. Like, they're not, like, all of the effort that's gone into bringing electrification to Africa has picked. I mean, you know. And so in order to make their numbers, look better, they change the definition.

You know, it's not real energy access. It's like, but, you know, there's a solar panel nearby, so we're going to count that as being energy access. And I think this is where we have to completely change the narrative. You know, there's no reason that a community like Saru, which is unheard of, not on the map, like, there probably are, other than the people in Saru and maybe a few people around there,

probably nobody else in the world has ever heard of it until right now. like you know so sorry is being announced to the world but um why why do they not deserve to have the economic potential that abundant energy abundant cheap energy would bring and and let's see what they do with it yeah of course they do but the interesting thing here when we were talking about this a little bit is like the philosophical implications of of them having like abundant energy like that's real africa that's how africa's existed for however no however long but if they get abundant energy, like how does that change the community? What happens there? Well, yeah, and on that, like, because that was one of the questions I had. It's like, let's assume we have just like

the complete abundance of energy in one of these communities now. You know, they're able to have refrigeration, you know, they're able to create these basic necessities. They're able to have more entertainment because of it, you know, all these different things. What are they constrained by then? Like, what's the next follow on? Because it seems like, like, one of the things I was noticing culturally is that people have time that's not a scarce resource in these communities they have time to do things and and I think that's because people are less less punctual because of that and and the question is is okay well now that if they have enough energy to where they can actually be

leveraging their time more efficiently then what are what are going to be the constraints in terms of being able to do that like so if we take the guy who wanted to be a welder for example you know where where is a lot of the inputs for his welding going to come from. And I was curious as to how, like, what would be the next step that they would need if they had abundant energy? And then what would that allow them to do

to really, like, you know, not industrialized, but you know what I mean, have some sort of greater degree of sophistication around how they're running their communities. But I mean, we've actually seen this to a certain degree. Danny's seen it in Bondo on Mount Melange. You know, like that's, that is a similar kind of socioeconomically positioned community. that has now had electrification for, you know, a decade.

And I don't know about you, but I mean, just like interacting with the people, there is a lot of similarities. Oh, yeah, totally. You know, and even interacting with the elders. There's a lot of similarities in talking to the elders that are on Mount Melanjay in Malawi and the guys that are sitting up in Saru. So I don't think we're going to like take away something from them. I actually think we're going to catalyze them to, you know, continue to live the lifestyle that they want to live, but have that ability to keep food fresh, keep vaccines. But I don't think you're taking away anything either.

It's just it's an interesting dynamic where they're essentially being teleported from the same way they'd have lived, you know, 500 years ago, basically, to the modern world. Probably 5,000 years ago. Yeah. So it's wild. Like that, that is like an overnight shift in how their society works, how they're, it's, it's, it's. It's going to be really interesting. Yeah, and they get to determine that for themselves, right? Yeah.

And that's the experiment. Because that's the experiment as well. It's for them because different people pick different priorities and we don't dictate what they do. And then you tried, for me, that would be a very good experiment, like you're saying. Imagine if you took this trip five years after getting adequate power. And what would we observe? What are the differences we'd see?

Right. And how would they counteract any potential, you know, opportunity? I mean, how would they take advantage of the opportunity of power? Right, right. What I was curious about is, are there communities that export goods in some sort of, like, is there a community that's, like, very well known for if we create this one thing that we're actually selling to a lot of the other communities? Yeah, like even in a very small scale, the little electricity that is available, another town over,

basically it's almost like the small export of Dukana. Like the fact that you can come here to store your vaccines and then take them over. The fact that you have to come here to print your stuff, there's some economics that are now playing out between these two communities because one has electricity. And now you can imagine a farmer, I mean a businessman in Dukana saying, what if I could store some vegetables? And I'm the guy who actually exports vegetables to Saru.

You can see already some, some play of them. So you know what's interesting about the north is that a lot of the ethnic groups up there hold their wealth in camels right like you guys saw this right and it is one of the places in the world that has the most camels per capita right it is a lot of camels and very few people but do you remember how much a camel's worth a thousand dollars yeah there we go a thousand dollars right and so you'd see herds of hundreds of camels. So they're asset rich, cash poor. And what that means is when, first of all, when you want to build power up there, you want to do something up there, they can sell a camel

to finance another business, right? They can do that. So to buy a welding machine, they can do it. A lot of the communities that we go to, they don't have that high value asset. So when we're down in Malawi in Melangay, they grow pineapples, they grow tea. they grow some vegetables, right? That's it. They're not sitting on a lot of wealth all the time. So when you think about what do you do with the energy once you get it, right?

It really is determined by the community what they want to do, by the entrepreneurs in the area. That's like everywhere in the world, it's the same, right? And but I think the thing that the people from the north have going for them is they have an asset they can liquidate in the form of a camel and they can finance their welding machine. They can finance a refrigerator and they can make a business out of that too. In Nairobi, I actually know a person who actually sells a lot of expensive.

Actually, I know a guy who said... This timing's amazing. If you actually go to an Nairobi supermarket, you'll see these camel milk products that are super expensive. like 10x normal cow milk. And he's made a business out of that. So imagine if now I have refrigeration as there is a way to actually transport my caramel milk and add value to it.

And that would be an incredible partnership because his challenges he doesn't have enough caramel milk. There's a lot of people who want this camel milk problem. It's super high value. Yeah, it's really expensive. Yeah, and so I could see they have carmel. And if you have refrigeration and so on, imagine a partnership where it's actually economically viable to take some of the milk from them

and then take it to sell it to the bourgeoisie Arabians. And you just reminded me we skipped an important cultural experience which is having camo milk chai. I'm not too sad we missed that one. Oh no. It's like smoky. Like it's still not sad he missed it. Yeah. I'm also not as a lactress intolerant guy.

I mean, maybe the coolest cultural experience was Eric slaughtering the goat. You should tell a story. We were going to have a goat. We were going to split a goat with the Saroo tribe elders for dinner. It was like a gesture of goodwill as well to wanting to work with them. And they brought a goat up and I never slaughtered a goat. So he raised his hand. So I said, I'll take this one.

And it's funny because Danny and I were talking about it. Danny's like, I couldn't do that. And I was just like, well, we're going to eat it. So I know the greater man swatters the goat. He looks to go in the eyes. I know I was being hypocritical, but that's like that's up-clotion day. I don't know. Yeah, it was, but then what was interesting is one of the elders, he wanted to do like, you know, like the last cut because it's halal.

It's halal. He needed to technically, a Muslim needed to slaughter the goat or something. But it was a good goat. You did the hard work. I did the heavy lifting. It was a good goat. And I said to Danny, Danny, you have a good camera. Will you film him?

And Danny's like, I don't even want to see that. Like doing that with the community is actually a very interesting thing because, one, we gave them cash. We bought the goat at a market price. So they actually, they earn the asset value. They got paid the asset value. But they don't go around slaughtering goats all the time. They're not sitting there gorgeing themselves on meat. And so to have somebody else buy the goat and then invite you to enjoy the goat and not have to worry about eating as much as you want.

It really is an incredible gesture in a community like that. And it's fun. It tastes good. So, you know, most of the time we focus on, we're just on energy and Bitcoin mining. I mean, we're kind of simple. That's all we do. But it does, if you think about it, like it does beg the question, like what else could be done with Bitcoin and, these same places, right? If they already understand assets and in the form of camels, could

they understand assets in the form of Bitcoin and have more liquidity? Because it's actually pretty easy to sell one camel. It's hard to sell 10. Right? And, you know, there's, you know, often people ask us, hey, you know, what do you guys do with the community for Bitcoin? We're like, well, we don't do very much. Our job, we have a small team. We mine Bitcoin. Our operations are that. But if anybody else wants to come in and be introduced to the community, to learn about Bitcoin and do something of Bitcoin in that community, teach them about it, we'd be happy to do so, right? And we've done that up in Kenya and a number of places.

But it makes me think, like, when you look at that sorrow community, could you, you know, could you see a path to them, maybe, first of all, paying for their electricity tokens with lighting, right? And then if they're using it for one thing, could they use it for another? Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Well, Leather makes that possible. They're the global leader in Bitcoin-back lending, and since 2018, they've issued over $9 billion in loans with a perfect record of protecting client assets. With Leiden, you get full-costly loans with no credit checks or monthly repayments, just easy access to dollars without selling a single sat.

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Well this kind of gets back to what we saw in Kabir. Because like just for context, we went to Kabir, which is I think the largest slum in, yeah, yeah. But that's the largest slum in Nairobi, right? Yes. And so we went there with me, Mark, Mitch from Afrobit. We looked at that community. They have maybe the best circular economy I've seen. I think there was something like 56 different merchants that were. 65 merchants that were accepting Bitcoin.

And one of the cool things is, like, the problem that I've seen with these circular Bitcoin economies is how does the Bitcoin get there in the first place? And then we were speaking to the guy who owns the trash collection business. And he's getting paid in Bitcoin and then paying his 25 employees in Bitcoin. So it's like naturally getting into this like circular economy. And you were saying that when you went to set up the Starlink out there, you were also quite skeptical of this. And then you saw someone buying oranges in Bitcoin.

Yeah, it wasn't a setup because sometimes you're walking somebody who's showing you their community. And they probably have told somebody over there, oh, could you stay there? We're bringing someone to talk to you. And so while we're talking to somebody here, I'm looking at all the skewer codes for blink. and I'm seeing somebody actually scanning

and another person scanning taking a couple of oranges and I'm like, wow, this is pretty cool. That is the average person. It's not like a tech savvy guy. It's the average mom buying oranges for her kids. And they're scanning a Bitcoin QR code. Yeah, because that was the question

I kept asking Mitch. I was like, is this just like you and your smaller Bitcoin community using this? Or is it everyone? I was like, this guy on the street. Is he going to be using Bitcoin? Mitch is like, yeah. And the thing that, like, to get back to Saru, the thing that I think made me realize is people will find a way to pay for it.

Like if you're offering, you know, electricity and the only option they have is paying sats, they're going to figure out how to do it. And then what's the benefit to them of doing that? And we're going to inject. I mean, this is the other thing. It's like, this is, this is Bitcoin, this global, you know, marketplace that's injecting capital into that community. Yeah. Because we're going to use the Bitcoin we earn to pay the salaries. We could pay those salaries in Bitcoin.

So that's now injecting, you know, real capital into that community. And there is actually another dynamic I saw, which I actually saw a use case for Bitcoin. You saw they're drinking beer that's not from Kenya. Yeah. The beer is from Ethiopia. Because it's cheaper. Yeah. Yeah.

And even there is friction in currency between the Kenyan consumer and an Ethiopian trader. They're darker cameras. They actually buy those from Ethiopia. And so if you think about the currency situation between Kenya and Ethiopia, there's friction there. And if you imagine that, in fact, is another way that Bitcoin could actually help in cross-border trading between Kenyans and Ethiopians. Yeah. So one of the interesting things that, like, when I see this type of adoption happening, and if we think about how money worked historically, and when we think about how, you know, when people were adopted, adopting money naturally in private markets,

it had certain properties that made it good money. And one of those properties is just like a wide acceptability. And that's something that's actually used today often as just like a criticism of Bitcoin. And it's like, oh, it's typically goods that were used in primitive societies, like cattle, like salt. They were things that were naturally held by most people. Everybody wanted to have cattle naturally.

And then it's natural that it can become a form of money because there's always a constant demand for it. And when we think about that with Bitcoin, it's like, okay, so how are we gonna naturally get Bitcoin in their hands a bunch of people? And I think that when we think about how, you know, how will these communities grow over time when they realize that the rest of the world

who's connected to the grid has some floor clearing price that they're always able to sell back onto the grid with. And now Bitcoin's just that for the world that's not connected to the grid. And so, that has major implications. And I think it could be something that becomes incredibly foundational to any sort of like off-grid form of energy investment.

And when we think about that, it's like, okay, so if you're a community and this becomes just like a basic utility function for any sort of off-grid economy, then you're naturally gonna start trying to economize around that. And I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see communities, you know, do something similar, do something natively, where they're actually getting more interested in mining the Bitcoin

ourselves like okay well you know if we have our own capacity and like Eric you're doing a great job space on the racks for me yeah you got some space on the racks for me exactly and like I wouldn't be surprised if you start to see that as they grow over time and it's like that's that's actually a really interesting thing too and then maybe there's like little you know many forms of exchange that are happening between communities because of that but like that's something where I can see it's like if you want like bottom-up Bitcoin adoption and you want to have like a natural reason that makes it widely

accepted for the monetary use case. Like, this is definitely the most natural incentive-aligned function I think I've really seen that would create that outcome for people. You know, I think so, too. I mean, there's something really interesting about energy is this base layer for human progress, right? This is, the story of human progress is the story of energy. Okay. And so you see that when you come into a really raw situation like what we've seen over the last week, right? So when you walk into a place that has nothing, it's very different, very different, right? You drop in your energy, but you're also having to drop in what?

Distribution. Somebody has to drop in distribution. The interesting thing about being in that position of power, not energy power, but power, right, is that you can say, the way this is paid for is this. Use these meters that pay in this type of way. So lightning and PESA, something like that. And we get our, and that can kickstart the acceptance of Bitcoin. in a community, they don't actually have to care about all of the things that we think are interesting about Bitcoin. All they have to care about is, oh, this is how I get cheap electricity.

Yep. That's the only thing that matters. And from there, from that one seed that gets planted are a number of other routes. It can go towards the route of value aggregation. It can go towards the route of, oh, I could use this for cross-border trade. There's a lot of ways it can grow from there. So having a base-layered need met, with a requirement of paying it with Bitcoin could be really interesting. Yeah. But I actually like Eric's idea,

because I don't know that I had necessarily thought about it, which is, you know, do we get the community to sell five camels and buy, you know, 10 minors? And that money comes into a community fund. Right, because that's a school bursary. Yeah, into the school bursary. That's a perfect example, or to fund the health clinic. Because the thing is like, we, like, we're at this huge,

advantage that we have the economic justification to build this energy source. We have the economic justification to build the infrastructure around it. But it's then up to us to get creative about how we monetize it. And we can monetize it ourselves or we can sell them, you know, cheap inside the, inside the four walls energy for them to mine Bitcoin. And that could almost be like table money. Yeah, exactly. And it's also, I saw a use case as well that is quite interesting.

You have situations where there is long periods of drought. So I was Andrew in the car and he was showing me skeletons of camels that died. And he said to me two years ago, even camels couldn't survive. And so imagine a situation like that where you're like, okay, right now it's not the right time to keep this camel. I'm going to sell mine to Ethiopia. Keep the money in Bitcoin. And then when we have the conditions again, and maybe that's the time for mining, where like it's too much solar for even camels,

but it's excellent for mining. So if I have miners, I actually could continue mining. And when the conditions are better, I have a lot more liquidity to actually purchase. Oh man, that's a great idea. Like transfer your camels into miners during droughts

because they're going to die anyway. And then extract them backouts. But so I mean, we had a bunch of interesting experiences along the way, but coming into Saru with the piles, white bones. Yeah. It was a bit unsettling and I finally asked Andrew and he's like yeah during this drought like some people came and said they would buy these bones from us. So if we would bleach them in the sun they would come by the bones for us and so I guess they went around and collected up a

bunch of bones and then the guys you know reneged and didn't uh didn't buy them but it did look a bit sketchy. But obviously of all the places we saw there's massive opportunity in we probably saw 10 villages that could have had the same thing. Like, what's the big restraint from doing this? Is it just capital? It's now it's just capital, right? So before, so the massive expansion in solar and battery storage has already started, right? And it's one of these things that if you just look at the data, you can see it clearly,

globally, it's going like this, right? And Africa's no different. And what's happened, though, is that with the US tariffs on China, the Chinese are looking to deploy them faster in other parts of the world, right, like Africa. So the pricing is really good. And, you know, the expansion can be massive. So, like, what we figured out is that for a million dollars, you can put up a megawatt of solar array, 5,000 megawatt hours, it's all right, 5,000 megawatt hours of battery storage. And five megawatt hours.

Sorry. See, let me do this again. $4 million. You can put down one megawatt solar array. You can put five megawatt hours of battery storage, all the miners for 250 kilowatts, and the containers for them, for that $1 million. And that's a profitable deployment that's making money from day one, right? So that's by itself without selling any energy to the community.

So if that's true, the new model for rapidly electrifying the continent, is going to say, oh, where can we drop in one megawatt to 10 megawatt-sized sites? It's just capital. We get good returns. Phil, what was the IRA on that? Oh, it's like almost 30%. So a 30% IRA. Like, it's kind of ridiculous.

So the crazy thing is that that's the baseline just doing Bitcoin money. If you sell to the community, it'll be even better. It's premium. Yeah. So there's always the problem with, okay, we've unlocked a new model is saying, okay, well, let's go get this started and tested. And then people get confidence that you can, okay, I can put my money here and I will get my money back out. Africa is always one of those places that has a risk premium attached to it for good reason in certain parts. And so you need to be

able to go out there and prove and show this. So that's what we're doing now. It's like, hey, let's go build one or two of these sites, quickly deploy it, quickly show that it can make money. And then let's turn the gas on this thing, you know, and let's build, you know, 15 of these year in multiple communities. Like there's no stopping it. And open the model so that everybody else can do it too. Yeah, because that's one of the interesting things is like with the cut to USAID, like all of these solar panels like they're out there in these communities are basically NGO work.

And so that if with that being cut, it now needs to be industries like you doing. Well, and I won't get into that too much besides saying thank God USAID was deleted. Because they bastardized the whole economy. Yeah. Because all these NGOs are propped up. So you didn't get a real market. somebody who's looking at this as a real market and saying, I'm going to come in there with a business and solve this problem. You got NGOs with concessionary financing coming in, building a site, 20 kilowatt site.

The wind flips over the solar panels, and they don't flip them back over for three to six months. And then their battery storage that they put on them, it dies in the first year. They never fix or replace them. We saw that in Saru. They had the solar right up front. They're just like, oh yeah, it's just perfectly good set of solar panels, but there's just like some sort of infrastructure that was off to the side of it that they needed that was broken. That was been that was for the well. So there was like three solar panels above a well. Yeah, right. The well had never worked because they never plugged it in. So it never. All they needed was like three pipes and the thing worked. Yeah, like just very, all this money invested in that. Three pipes are missing. This is like this is so much so many of the NGOs that work in Africa are are you know, they have about a 10% success rate. And they keep getting money. No business will keep getting money if you fail 90% of the time. Yeah. Right. So having a market-based approach to solving a basic necessity like energy

profitably from day one means that it's good for everybody. So when I first went in and I ambushed those elders the first time and I showed up at the school and said, hey, I want to talk to people about electricity. And I sat down with them. We spent probably two hours together. And I said, I am not an NGO. I'm not going to give you anything for free. I'm going to invest a bunch of money into building this energy, and we're going to make that profitable. You are going to figure out how to do the distribution. You need to put your own money into that. You need to have your people who want to be members of this co-op sell camels. So, but how do they receive that? Because these towns out there, everything they've ever had in terms of this is like NGO money that comes in

and it is giving them something for free. Even if it like distorts the economy, it doesn't work, you end up paying 75 cents for your, a kilowatt hour of your energy. Like, how do they receive that when you're saying you're going to have to put a hundred grand before life? Well, they're also used to business, though. These guys, you know, in the world of, again, we keep going back to camels, but it makes sense there, okay? Like, everybody who's like, why do they keep talking about camels? Because camels are everything. That is your wealth, right? So, I mean, the business of camels is a business. They're used to business, too. The guy who runs a little duca over their little shop is a business, right? The guy who sells diesel is, you know,

out of Jerry cans is a business. So they know business. Now, they're used to white people coming in and giving them handouts. And, you know, so the reset that they need to have, which is, I was very, very direct on the conversation, was like, hey, we are not an NGO. Nobody's bringing charity money here.

That's gone. That's not happening. Right? We are a business. We need to be profitable. And you need to think about this as a way that helps your community, yes, but also is run profitably by you. if you're going to do a co-op, right?

And they sat there for a while. We went back and forth, 30 minutes on this, asked me a bunch of questions. And I was like, and they were like, well, how much would we have to spend to buy a transformer? It's like, well, it costs you like $15,000, let's say.

And that's like 15 camels. Like, yeah. And how about for the poles and the cables? And it's like, okay. So they sat there for a while, they talked amongst themselves, and they came back, said, what if we just started by putting the grid

in the business area where we were sitting, right? And then the other people could get power later. I was like, that's up to you. Right? That's up to you. But you need to make the decision on what that needs to be. And there's no reason why you couldn't have like a mobile swapping station for batteries. Where people who lived in, these are mostly nomadic people.

So people who live three, four kilometers away could just bring a battery in and then take it back to the house. And they're like, we can do that? I was like, yes, you can do this. Right? This is the kind of thing. And you need to charge for it. And so we finally, I think we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we. have crossed the chasm in the conversation about no this is not a charity yeah this is

something that needs to work it needs to work for you as well and you need to have a stake in it is funny when sorry you guys and then i was just going to say this illustrates some of the things we were talking about um yesterday with with mark and femmy which is um and i think in this broader context you know what eric's describing is we're going to bring this electricity and you guys are going to figure out how to make money with it because that it's your nature like you you want to figure out how to use this new tool, this new technology for productivity. But when you talk to, you know, Eric and I went and met with, I want to say the name, but like some people that have been funding energy projects to limited success, if you will,

you know, they're spending all their effort thinking about like, how do we create things that will use electricity? It's like they want to force the consumption of electricity with their little gadgets instead of simply making the electricity available. and seeing, you know, how do the communities ultimately use that? Yeah, so like people, like, you know, like, we're used to the free market, right? And we say the free market, like people will figure out for themselves what businesses they need to build, how they make money, right?

NGOs come from this perspective of we need to help you figure out how you can make money. We need to tell you how you need to make money. Yeah. It was funny. When we were like on the drive into Saroo, Eric was like giving us all the rundown of what you wanted people to do because Philip was going to go do a site survey. He was like, will you guys go and speak to the community? I was like, yeah, cool, interview them, see what they want to use energy for. Like, will they build businesses?

And he was like, maybe just start in the business district. You kind of sold that wrong. This was not a business district. Yeah, okay. When we show the videos or a picture of it, yeah, you'll be like, okay, maybe district might be a strong word. But the interesting thing was, the things that they wanted was like, obviously, lights for refrigeration they want to watch the Premier League everywhere in Africa

Premier League TV is number three on the list yeah it's light actually is probably phone light TV yeah yeah and we're already seeing you already saw people actually using the little power that they have for business because when I saw people with a smartphone we were asking them how do you charge your smartphone yeah and they say oh there's a guy over there with a shop we actually pay him 20 shillings for one charge. Yeah. So already there's already anecdotes of power being used for business. And so if you actually expand that capacity, then the question is how, in what different ways will they monetize it for themselves? And they'll figure it out themselves. Yeah, and they're doing

the same thing in the school. I think they'd go to the school, charge a phone and pay 20 Bob or whatever. And the other like missing piece in this is internet access. Because like they have cell signal there, but they're using like small bits of data between using their phone and turning data on and off. Like you could do basically what you're doing with Feddy at the moment, Mark, where you can put a Starlink up there, start charging SATs for like unlimited internet access. Yes, that actually would be a very easy sell to actually set up a star link there if you have power and put connectivity there. And it's actually another way that Bitcoin actually gets into the community because they would pay with sats, you know, and that, that'd be cool.

The other thing that Eric actually pushed on with the community, which was interesting, is institutional customers for the energy. We already asked the school, which only lit half of the dorms, because they have, like, a bunch of classrooms, but they have solar that is enough to light only four or something like that. I think there's only two rooms. Only two. Yeah, only two of them they could light. And then Eric, and you were asking, if there was power, would you light the entire school? They say yes. And then we're like, yeah, but who would pay for it?

And he says, I get a budget every quarter and I determine how to spend that budget. Budget from the government and the Ministry of Education. And they're like, oh, we would be a customer because I would actually choose to light so that people can study and so on. So I feel like even after Bitcoin mining, which is profitable, you already are seeing that's like a solid customer who would consistently buy power. And so, actually, I'm very excited. I hope we get to do this. Okay, I got a question for you guys. Okay, so you've been to Africa before.

You've been to Egypt. Yeah, which is considered Africa when it's like, you know, trying to go to the World Cup for the Olympics. But the rest of the time is not. So what are your thoughts now? Because you, you know, you had already, you know, invested in Gridless. Yeah. And you had never really seen kind of what this situation looked like.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna talk, I'll tie this all into a broader point. Gridless, what you guys are doing, I think my primary takeaway is that to build out this thesis of stranded energy in Africa, like you guys are like the only people that can do that. Like that's the number one thing that I realized doing all of this.

And I think that the broader point, when I think about what's happening with this, Bitcoin mining. We take a step back and it's like, okay, so we have we have hash rate growing this exponential rate. And with that trend happening, the question is, well, the break even cost of mining is something that is, you know, the energy cost is lowering and lowering every year. You have to get more and more efficient with the type of energy that you're using. And at some point in the future, there's only certain types of energy that are even going to be economically viable because Bitcoin mining is going to be so competitive.

So it's like, well, where does that energy exist? And it's in these off-grid stranded areas where you get the most economically viable energy in the world. So when I think about the future of mining and I think about like, well, if we're trying to skate to the puck, where is it going, it's going to the stranded market. There's going to be a future where the only economic form of doing this is in these types of markets. And then the question is like, okay, so now let's think about that within a competitive environment. And within a competitive environment, we're going to see the economics approach the closest cost to, what is the capital cost to deploy an energy project? And, you know, what's my payback period on that?

And ultimately, even within the stranded market, I think the areas where you can maintain as much of a premium over that payback period on the capital cost to deploy energy, those are going to be the markets that are most advantageous and those are also the markets that are the hardest to access because those are going to be the least need and have the most need those are going to be the least competitive markets so it's when I think about Africa is like for energy assets I think about it as a moat the question is is are you somebody who's behind the moat or not and that's what I think about gridless is you guys are behind the moat you guys have grown up in this place you obviously know everything about it you know we've slaughtered a gun together.

And it's like, okay, cool. So like, there's very, very few people in the world, I think capable of attacking an opportunity like this. And I think that like that's kind of my key takeaway from the trip is like, that was awesome. You guys are absolute experts. Nobody else in the world is doing this. And there's a massive opportunity here.

And the way that it's gonna be unlocking and enabling value in economics from Bitcoin, from energy, from other things, I view it as just like, if you guys can build like a very large energy footprint in this market, I think there's going to be a future in the next five to 10 years where everyone's going to be like, okay, well, we're the best places to go mine energy. Where are those assets existing? Oh shit, Gridless owns a lot of them.

Yeah. And I think there's going to be a lot of value placed on that. Yeah, there's no way anyone else is coming to this market and doing the things that you're doing. Like me and Eric were joking the other day. Like, we'd have died on the first day of that trip. Yeah, yeah. If the first set of spikes across the road, it would have been touched. But like for me, the, obviously I came to Africa a couple of years ago, we went to Malawi,

and that was honestly one of the most pivotal things I've ever seen in Bitcoin. I've said, I've told this story a number of times on the podcast, but it was when we were at dinner on, like, one of the last nights, and we were in that field. It was all lit by lanterns. We're having like a nice meal, but everything was pitch black everywhere. And I remember sitting at that meal, it must have been like 11 o'clock looking around and looking at Mount Melanjay, and there were lights there. And the whole place was darkness, but there were lights there.

And I was like, holy shit, that's what Bitcoin did. Like, that is what Bitcoin enables. And like seeing this trip, Saru, obviously very, very different to Malawi in terms of, like, how the place looks. The vegetation. The vegetation. Yeah. Water. But like thinking that the only way that this makes economic sense to go and build these

sites there is because of Bitcoin. And the downstream consequence of that is, you know, it is electrified. Africa. I'm putting an energy. It still blows my mind. Yeah. Yeah, the downstream effect is just good things happen. Yeah.

And it's like, why is this magic internet money doing this? And it still trips me out to this day. Yeah. So, okay, so you know, both have some good takeaways from this. If you were to tell somebody else to come to Africa to do, to see things, we covered a lot of things in four days. What do you think is the thing that you would say, yeah. that you would say, yeah, this is what you need to see. Now, not many people will get to Saru.

You know how hard that is, right? But, you know, what do you think it's interesting, especially for Bitcoiners, right? Like, I mean, that's who listens to this podcast, right? So if you're going to come to Africa, you've been to a couple places, you've been a few places now, what do you think is interesting? What do you think actually matters? Is it Afrobit and Kibera, the circular economy, that kind of thing? So I think both Afrobit, the circular economy, and Tando is, makes Kenya maybe the best place

in the world. Explain Tando. So Tando is like this very basic app. It's not the prettiest app in the world, but it works insanely well. So you can essentially pay for any good or service in Kenya with Bitcoin using Tando. And the reason it works. Yeah. So the reason it works is because Kenya's economy basically runs on Mpesa, which is mobile money. And so they've found a way of integrating Bitcoin into that. So you pay an impasse a bill with a lightning invoice and there's a swap in the background. And you can live on Bitcoin in Kenya, maybe better. than anywhere in the world. In fact, almost certainly, I can't think of anywhere even close.

Well, no, because essentially 100% of the businesses in Kenya can take Bitcoin via Tanda. Yeah. And the reason is, you know, M-Pesa is completely ubiquitous. I mean, we never carry cash. We just all carry our phone. And you just send shillings like P to P, you pay at the till, you can send money to businesses.

And the fact that Tando allows you to just basically take your sats and send it p to p send it to the tills send it to the the merchant it's absolutely incredible and then with mimmo on the other side of that so tando is only an off ramp and then mimmo is basically the opposite it's the reverse where you can turn and paste it into bitcoin and so if you want to live 100% on bitcoin you should probably live in nirobi just for context for people i was looking this up last year 300 billion dollars was transacted on impesa Holy shit. Wow. That's a big market. Yeah, it's close to 70% of our GDP. Yeah. It's on these more money and I didn't even think about it to just this minute. I actually

bought the goat with Bitcoin. Like because Eric Eric's like hey can you send this guy, you know, the money for the goat and I literally just went on Tando and like I sent it to myself first before I p-to-peed it to him but I mean I effectively bought that goat with Bitcoin. I didn't even think about it like it was just in salary. That's crazy. I wonder I I wonder if that's the first goat purchase in Bitcoin. I don't know. It can't be anymore. The first live goat purchase.

Wow. Maybe. But like as Bitcoiners who live in Nairobi, how much are you using Bitcoin? Are you using it for like almost all transactions or? It just kind of flows with, like, do it with a lot of transactions. I don't know how many that is, but I know I'm one of the larger volume users of Tondo. I've asked them, you know. So I use quite a bit.

What's interesting about Nairobi in the Bitcoin community too is that it's actually fairly active. We have a monthly meet up at Wait a bit, which is a little coffee shop, right? And there's a great coffee shop. 30 to 40 people there every time, right? And amongst them you're going to find Bitcoin engineers, lightning engineers. There's usually five or six different people who represent companies building tech there on Bitcoin for Bitcoin. Yeah. And then other people who are, like, there's three or four guys who are doing circular

economy things in and around Nairobi. So it's actually a really active good community in Nairobi for Bitcoin. Yeah. One of my other big takeaways, I think probably from the last trip, but then especially this trip, is that the Bitcoin tools and services that people use in all these different countries in Africa need to be built by people in those communities. Because you can't just like port Phoenix wallet, which I think is great and I use all the time, but you can't just port that to Kibera for a number of reasons.

Like, you have to fund lightning channels. And then the big, yeah, that's the thing that I never knew until this trip. Mark, you were telling me about this, is that if you have a Bitcoin app that's, you know, a couple hundred megabytes, no one's downloading it there. There's like a very hard ceiling on what people are willing to spend data on. Even that's actually that's what I find in my UX research work. Think about it with all the utility of a person. It's the most used tool.

But only 5% of people download the M-Pesa app because it's heavy. Crazy. Even with its huge advantages, you cannot exist economically in Kenya without M-Pesa. And even that, they don't download. So how much worse is your app going to get in terms of acceptance and downloads if it's big? If it's beyond 16 and B, forget it. 60 megabyte? 16. 16-16.

Yes. Damn. Actually, I would have said 8. I would have said eight. And it's even lower because while Africa has the highest growth of smartphones getting here, they're low capacity smartphones made in China with low capacity. And so somebody has to make a decision. Am I going to keep my family photos or my baby's photos or your app?

Guess who's going to lose? Yeah. And for Bitcoin, while you're talking about using Tando, Some of us who got into Bitcoin late, we're actually trying to keep as much Bitcoin as possible. So I'm actually using bin more. So in Cabera, it seemed like everyone was just using Blink wallet. Is that because of the size of the actual app? So it speaks to what you're talking about.

And it speaks to the work I do, like human-centered design and you work with the communities. Blink has done two things. Number one, it's very easy. Their experience is simple. The KYC is simple. The onboarding is simple. So all these things work for Blink and it's small. That's number one.

And then Blink has made a point of having community engagement days. So Blink has certain features that have been built into Blink purely because of the use cases in Kibera. So they're responding to feedback and they're engaging with the community. Yeah. What other people are doing is building one wallet and they hope it, that it would work homogeneously across different use cases. And the way money works in Kibera, as you saw, is different from the typical use case in the US.

Yeah. And so then there is a fundamental dissonance between use cases while it's a built for versus the realities of our money moves in Africa. Yeah. And I think that gap is why building specific use cases for Africa is important. Yeah, and I think, yeah, that's super interesting. Because really, these people aren't Bitcoin as necessarily. No.

So they don't need to understand how to fund lightning channels and things like this. It just needs to be a very simple app that works. Yeah. And that's why I think a successful Bitcoin wallet, for Bitcoin to succeed, human experiences need to take a forefront and they take a backseat. Today, the technology on-chain, all this is what is at the forefront. The human experience is hardly mentioned. And I think it's time to flip a switch.

Because people look at this as, I'm only using it because it's an amazing tool that enables me to do what I need to do. The fact that it's blink or any other wallet is irrelevant. It really is. But this is why I have a lot of faith that if you do this in Saru, people will just find a way of doing it. If they have to pay in Bitcoin, they'll figure that out. There's a quote by Clay Shirkie, which is communication. technology only becomes socially interesting when it becomes technologically boring. Right? And, you know, we think that Bitcoin mining needs to be this boring enabler for businesses.

We think that the Bitcoin wallets need to be boring things. Of course you have it and you use it, but you don't talk about it because it's boring. Like, it's like email. Nobody talks about email, but it's the thing that's probably used the most by everybody in the world for just day-to-day kind of communications activity, right? So the same thing, in Bitcoin, whether you're building apps or services for people to use Bitcoin, or whether you're doing things on the mining and the Bitcoin network layer, like make it something that's useful and boring, and you'll get a lot of adoption.

Make Bitcoin boring. We've done our best for the last hour. So this is, we've got... But it's fine. Everything's fine. That's been the quote of the trip. Every time everything went wrong. When you get... got like slapped in the face by another wave it's fine yeah that's the title of the episode

everything's fine everything is fine i really hope you put all these visual references when he talks about slap on the wave when he talks about oh i will fish almost caught eric has got video of this so i think the visuals on this would be amazing ben who edits this video is going to absolutely hate this one but we'll make sure it's all included um but we i mean we've our time's up we've got to go to the airport the africa trip is over um thank you a huge huge thank you this is something that yeah There's no way on earth I would ever have done this trip in my lifetime if you guys didn't put this on for us. So I appreciate it massively.

Where's the next event? Thank you guys for being good sports. Yeah, thanks for putting up with all the craziness of Africa and the lack of timeliness on things. Yeah. So it happens. You guys rolled with it. Before we did the trip, we got an email from Eric. I'm not going to like, made me a little bit nervous.

It was like, because we got things go wrong in Africa. Yeah. We can have airy back insurance for you. Yeah. everything was fine. Everything was fine. Everything was fine. And the truth is, we would never do that for ourselves.

It was just because you guys were coming, we're like, all right, we should probably do the right thing. And in Africa, you learned you got the watch, we got the time. Yeah, exactly. That was one of my quotes was a trick. I love that. So when we come back in a couple of years time, what's the next thing? My friend, there is more adventures across Africa that can be done, and more adventures in energy specifically in Africa.

and that those energy adventurers will always be led by Bitcoin. I was talking to one of these concessionary funders in Europe, and we didn't care about them because we'll never take money from them. And I said, in five years' time, you will not fund an energy project that doesn't have Bitcoin mining attached to it because it won't make financial sense. I love that. I want you to plan the next trip. Philip, Phillips, too, out there. I'm scared of going on the truth.

He's like, let's go to Saddam. with current genocide yeah yeah yeah but this has been awesome thank you guys no it's been great guys man it's been it really what's a fun trip Africa's done man it was amazing we did it off to Abu Dhabi let's go all right