Alex Gladstein Bitcoin: Who’s For Freedom, and Who’s Not?

Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast. A show about Bitcoin. Today for episode two hundred and eighty-three, my guest is Alex Gladstein, CSO of HRF, Human Rights Foundation, and we break down some of the news around El Salvador and Bitcoin legal tender. We talk about the good, the bad, privacy, Lightning, the IMF, what could go wrong from here, as well as the opportunities and what this could mean for human rights and freedom. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin holds a deep conviction that Bitcoin is The future of money, and Swan's aim is to help you maximize your position in this dominant digital monetary network. As a Swan private client, you will have unlimited access to their team, strategic resources, and commitment to Bitcoin education. Bitcoin is an asymmetric investment of unparalleled proportions, rapidly becoming the preeminent wealth preservation asset for every individual and institution in the world. An opportunity like this to build and preserve legacy impacting wealth for your family or company will not likely be seen again in our lifetimes. The Swan Private team stands ready to earn the right to walk alongside you on every step of this journey into the future of money. Learn more at swanbitcoin dot com slash private or email the CEO Corey Clipston directly at Corey at swanbitcoin dot com. Are you looking to borrow against your Bitcoin or earn some interest on your stablecoins? Lend at Hoddle Hoddle is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin backed lending platform. With this platform on stablecoins, you can earn an average of twenty-five percent by lending them out, and if you need some liquidity, you can borrow against your Bitcoin. And remember, you still hold one key in the two of three multi-signature controlling your Bitcoin during the loan period. Hoddle Hoddle does not hold your funds, so this is a peer-to-peer lending and Directly between users, you set your own terms and put up offers depending on how long you want to borrow or lend and the interest rate. Go to lend dot hodl hodl dot com. Are you interested to get involved with Bitcoin mining? Compass is an online marketplace making it easier for everyone to do that. This is the anti-cloud mining option. You select an ASIC machine, it is shipped to a facility that you choose that Compass have vetted, and you can start mining. So for years we've heard mining was only profitable if you're investing tons of money, you know? But everyone's got access to a volcano. But now with CompuSt, everyone is able to tap into economies of scale and access reasonably priced hardware and cheap industrial power rates. So if you're unsure about how to get started, CompuSt offer hardware and hosting bundles. You don't have to have advanced technical knowledge. You can quickly get started. So go visit CompuStmining dot io and start mining Bitcoin today. Alex, welcome back to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here. It feels like an eternity every month in Bitcoin.

It does. So many things are going on. So for context for listeners, we are recording this basically the, you know, the mor- so for me in Sydney, it's eight AM Thursday the tenth of June, and we are basically the day after, the El Salvador Bitcoin legal tender, act or bill passing. and, Alex, I'm sure you'll have lots of comments on all of this, because President Bukele- Actually came into a Twitter Spaces hosted by Nick Carter and Alex, you were actually up on stage and I was listening in just as a pleb, but let's get your initial reaction to all of this. Wow,

well, where do we begin? I, I wanted to begin actually just by reflecting on, a essay that Alan Farrington wrote, called Wittgenstein's Money, and, I was listening to it the other day courtesy Guy Swan and his Bitcoin Audible work, and, you know, he's talking about this idea of like- How conventional economists and the mainstream media and policymakers, like, they don't think Bitcoin is money because it doesn't display moniness, right? Or, or it doesn't display the full range of moniness, or it's not money enough. And, you know, the idea is to kind of ask, like, well, you know, what, what if it was be-- what if it, what if it was becoming money? What would that look like? Like, and here we go, you know, h-here's, here's what it would look like, right? This is literally what it Later grow in the summer of twenty twenty onto the narrative of corporations acquiring it for their balance sheet. It would really strengthen around this narrative as digital gold and as a store of value a-after really proving itself over a decade as a, as something that not just preserves but dramatically appreciates purchasing power. It would be sent to stratospheric levels by Fortune five hundred companies like Tesla, for example, which were buying it by the billions on their balance sheet. And then that's, that's kind of like the- End of part one of the store of value, digital gold piece, and what you've seen happen in the last few days, sparked by a small community in El Zonte in El Salvador, and the amazing work of Mike Peterson and so many others, and, and, and Miles Suter, and, and then the incredible vision of Jack Maalers, and the, the curiosity of a, of a young, kind of brazen government, has brought us to the point where now we are all of a sudden thinking about, Bitcoin as a medium of exchange in a much more serious way, and, and not just as a store of value, but this is what it would look like, like, you know, you're gonna have over time the evolution of this money, and you're gonna have these historic events which, which trigger step functions in, in, in the munniness of the, of the good, right? Of the, of the, of the asset of the network. Yeah. And here we are. So now you have a really big surprise because most people, like, I think you, you That government adoption was inevitable, but, but we pro-- you know, I, I, I'll speak for myself, I thought it would be a central bank adding it as like, you know, an asset on the balance sheet. I didn't think it was gonna be, legal tender first, a-and with a focus on, payments and networking and transactions. That to me is, is really shocking, and I think it really shocked a lot of people. You know, and, and on, last night, President Bukele mentioned that, yeah, they So this, I think, was really surprising, and that's what I wanted to start with, is just that, like, we continue to be on this journey of Bitcoin monetizing its way into existence, right?

Yeah, absolutely agreed on the point about it's just continually getting bigger and bigger and better and better. And it's funny that the detractors of Bitcoin, they're always trying to say, "Oh, see, you can't actually spend it," or "You, you know, there's not that many people using it, you know, digital tender anywhere." So,

and then it's like Time, neoclassical, or whomever, whomever, and the rise, like, well, you know, Bitcoin's not money because it's not a legal tender anywhere. Okay, so now, now we have it. Ever-shifting goalposts, right? And now they've come up with other excuses. Oh, it's, you know, a small country. Oh, it's, you know, it's all this cope. So much cope, so much salt from so many people, and you can really see out there

who's, who's for freedom and who's You can tell who's not, because they're like, "Eh, " they're just like, you know, complaining, and cope, and salt, and, "Oh, it's like bad news somehow. " Let me tell you what would have been bad news, Stephan. Bad news would have been the China coin. Yeah. Okay. Bad news would have been a ban of Bitcoin. Bad news would have been a CBDC that's gonna track all your stuff. Adopting freedom money as your legal tender isn't bad news, and not for anybody. So I

just, I The law, but some of the key points are essentially that El Salvador will now have, in some sense, dual main, legal tenders, right? You'll have US dollar and Bitcoin, and taxes may be paid in Bitcoin, in terms of the accounting for businesses in El Salvador, they can still do their accounting in US dollar, but now the government, and as you're touching on this, they are now running essentially this development bank in El Salvador will be operating a trust fund which will hold some Bitcoin and essentially do the auto conversion Because they understand that for some merchants in El Salvador, they may not be willing to take the Bitcoin price risk. So the end user customer may pay with Bitcoin using a Lightning, maybe using Strike or some other light-- any other Lightning wallet, and that's important, a-- and then the government fund, will essentially pay out in US dollar and take on some of that price risk for the merchant to sort of help ease this process. Now, one point that some people have said, and I think there is a-- there's some truth to this, but I think it's just more like we Recognize that on net it is a benefit, which is that the government is now mandating that people accept Bitcoin, which is a coercion, right? So I, I think the-- if we were gonna be purest libertarians about it, which, yeah, you know, not everyone's a libertarian, first of all, but if we-- if I was gonna be purest libertarian, I would say it should be, there should be no legal tender laws. You should be allowed to use whatever you want instead of the government forcing people. Now, some people were latching onto this, people like George Sel

First, right? They could have started their own shitcoin, they could have started surveillance coin, you know, they could have worked with China, they could have, banned Bitcoin, right? So, yeah, there could have been no favorable CGT, they could have, they could have, used, you know, they could have talked, spoken about it like crypto instead of very specifically saying, "This is a Bitcoin legal tender, right?" Yeah.

No, I thought that was amazing when, when, people were asking the president about the other coins and, and he Of Bitcoin bill. And yeah, I mean, look, with regard to Article seven of the bill, it's not good and we should try to get it repealed. I mean, no one should be forced to do anything. But there is Article twelve, which I feel like a lot of people just like conveniently ignored, which basically says that for anyone who's been unable to or somehow cannot, get, whether it's, I guess, a wallet, essentially on a, I guess, on a smartphone or on a, you know, some sort of payment technology,

I, I just get the sense, and maybe I'm wrong, we will see how this plays out, but I get the sense that this, the goal here is a government that wants to aggressively transform its payments infrastructure and, and wants to be leading the world and innovative and wants to hire Jack Maalers instead of SWIFT. So like, you know, if you think about that, that's so crazy. Instead of like going with the US government, IMF, SWIFT, kind of mafia, we're gonna go with Jack Maalers and the Lightning Network. I mean, to ba-- to handle Really amazing. I mean, it's, again, they're not going with like a mega corp here to build their government wallet and to, to advise them all this. They're not going with some huge, you know, multinational corporation. They're going with Jack Maillers, and who's a hardcore Bitcoin activist, who's completely into the values that, that you and I, I think, care about. So, I don't know, I think it's really interesting, and I get the sense that these articles and this thing was pushed through so quickly for a pretty good reason. It's not like ready for this, like we're not IMF, the US government, the State Department, they're like not sure what's happening. They aren't talking, they don't know really what Bitcoin is versus blockchain or crypto, they're just like not very well. Like maybe people do at like FinCEN, okay, maybe. And I've even, I would even say a lot of them like even at FinCEN don't really know what the Lightning Network is, but at the State Department, no man, they're clueless, like they don't know like Bitcoin from BitConnect,

Big wake up call, and I think that Bukele and his, his clan or whatever knew that if they forced this thing through quickly, what are they gonna do? What is the US gonna do? So, you know, I think that they were worried maybe about the U, the IMF. I mean, he said he had a meeting with the IMF tomorrow. I mean, we'll see how that goes. But, you know, people are worried about, retribution, like risk premium on bonds, artificially imposed, worried about like complications with, you know So we'll see. I mean, those are all kind of like, you know, very nineteen seventies, eighty Cold War style heavy handed tactics. I don't know if the US government's gonna do that stuff anymore. We're just gonna have to see. But I think they rushed it through, and I think a lot more dialogue would have per-probably, I, I think we could have gotten seven out of there had we had like a sustained conversation. And I don't think that's really-- I don't think that they, I mean, first of all, I don't think that they The main currency, so, people will still use dollars. So, I, I just, let's see. I mean, I'm very-- maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I, I don't really see a situation where someone gets like fined or, or like arrested for like refusing to use Bitcoin. That seems like not what's happening here, and there's, there's even an article that's, that's specifically lays out that that shouldn't happen. So, I do agree with you that no one should be compelled to do anything. But on the other Money. I mean, this is, this is something that I don't think we, we saw coming this early in this cycle. you know, I think a lot of people had, you know, price predictions that have been unfulfilled, al-although sixty-five K is, is pretty serious. But I don't, what I don't think people were predicting was, was this. I mean, this is, especially just so few months after Tesla, that was early February, so we're, we're four months, four months or so after a Fortune five hundred company puts it on It's an extremely short period of time, things are happening really, really quickly. And then as you saw, almost like from Mexico to Argentina, to Colombia, Panama, to Paraguay, to, Ecuador, to Costa Rica, I mean, there's Latin American politicians all across the region now saying we should do something similar. We had the chief informa-innovation officer of Colombia on the Twitter Spaces last night, and he was like, "Yeah, we're, we love Bitcoin, we're gonna try and like put this through sim-something similar, we're, we're talk-we're discussing

You could see kind of, you could see where this is potentially going, where like maybe they become this region which is very Bitcoin friendly, where most of the countries have Bitcoin as, as legal tender, where a lot of Bitcoin businesses in Latin America, I mean, that would be interesting. So, so that's one potential outcome where we're going. And I think what's so interesting, just to conclude this piece here, is that these-- this is an alternative to the dollar hegemony, right? Which, which I've been writing about lot lately with regard to how it got created with the petrodollar See, the like alternative to US foreign policy was like communism, it's like, you know, radical redistributionist violence, right? The fact that the new alternative is Bitcoin, which is this peaceful, like, free money, is really staggering to think about. I mean, if you think about the geopolitical path of the world and, I mean, violent guerrillas and stuff, and it's like, okay, now, now we're just gonna go with Bitcoin, really? I mean, is that happening?

and yeah, yeah, go ahead. And I'll tell you one thing that's funny with are voluntarily restricting their own power, right? Now, if you look at the way someone like Mises would have thought about sound money, it was actually-- it's like a check on the government. It's like in-- it should be thought of in the same category as like a bill of rights or like it's something to protect you and me and all of our rights. And so it's interesting that they are voluntarily restricting into this, right? Absolutely. And he

said this when we asked-- I asked, somebody asked him about it, and he was like, "Look, we're gonna do it, You know, and I think they know that at some deep level. I will say it's very, this is the world we live in, and, and, and everything will follow from here, and we, we don't get a do-over. But I think a dollarized country was, was a good bet for this to happen because they already don't have that power, right? they have some of it, right? They can freeze bank accounts and stuff, so they can do that, but they can't really debase the currency so much because they literally use dollars, dollar accounts, and, So a dollarized country was probably likely to be one of the first anyway, and this gives them like a hedge against US foreign policy, and that's essentially, or rather US monetary policy, and that's what Jack Maillard said in his amazing, you know, speech at, in Miami at the Bitcoin conference was essentially that these people face the negative externalities of extreme debt monetization, and expansion in the United States, which benefit the coastal elites and asset holders, but, but not the lower classes, and, and certainly not El Salvador, which is like this client state. So this young president and his family, and we can get into, to how, you know, democratic or not they are later, but the point is, they're, they're looking at this as like a hedge, kind of like an alternative, like, okay, well, we'll do the Bitcoin standard and, and see where that goes, and, and they're looking at this from a perspective of foreign investment, excitement, you know, think about it this way, this is a country that's had decades of civil war, unrest, super high murder rates, I Dark tunnel. and if you think about it, for the president himself, it's kind of like this thing that's like, we're really-- I was talking about this with a lot of people at the Bitcoin conference, like people like Gigi and others, but Bitcoin's kind of got this, chemical impact on your brain. Like, when you start talking about it publicly, you get a lot of engagement, "Oh, like, maybe I should talk a little more about it," and then, "Oh, wow, like, maybe I should learn more." "Oh,

And that's what he realized, and he noticed Bitcoin Beach, and I know this 'cause he-- Mike Peterson was on the space, and he was like, "Mike, you, you guys really-- you were the ones who started this." And noticed the circular economy, noticed it spreading, noticed Jack Ma's, noticed Strike becoming the biggest app in the country, noticed the fact that Salvadorans have this huge reliance on remittances, twenty-two percent of the economy is based on money coming back from the US, noticed the fact that the infrastructure sucked, and seventy percent of people don't have bank accounts, These long bus rides that are really dangerous to go get the cash that their family sends them, risk getting robbed, and notice that internet access is on the rise, and it's now about fifty percent in the country, and it's heading higher every day. And he, he probably looked at that, you know, maybe analyzed that a little bit, but at the end of the day, the bigger thing I'm guessing based on what I've observed of this guy is that he's a narcissist, and, and he, he knew he would get really famous. And, and like, he's really famous,

Laid out like the, the optimistic case for why he did this is he thinks he can transform his country and really bring a lot of foreign investment and interest and infrastructure. Fine, but we can also just take the, the more cynical view that, that he knew at some level that he was watching what was happening and he was like, "If I do this, I'm gonna be famous for the rest of my life." And lo and behold, no one had heard of this guy outside of like Latin American politics before, you know, now he's, now he's gonna be very famous and he's gonna Right? So Bitcoin did that for him, nothing else. Bitcoin did that for him. You know, we'll see, we'll, you know, we may never know what is, you know, what was actually the, the reasoning here, but he seems very open. Really crazy was on the Twitter Spaces, was I, I like asked, someone messaged me, 'cause like I was one of the handful of people on stage, so I was getting all this inbound from like people being like, "Can you ask him this? Can you ask him that?" So I asked him a question about the wallets Like some government wallet only, and you get arrested if you have some other wallet. So I wanted to clarify that for our freedom-loving friends. And look, he could be lying, but he said, his answer was like, "Definitely not. Like, we're gonna work with Strike to make an o-an official wallet, but like, you can use any wallet you want, and that, that probably logistically makes sense." The other one I got to ask was, "Are you gonna do mining?" Yeah. 'Cause there hasn't really been a lot of state mining, or, or really any-- We know Iran, we know Iran's kind of like taxing miners and some countries are incentivizing them, and the Chinese government allows a lot of it, et cetera, but like, it doesn't appear that there's a lot of like, if any actual government operations. So I was like, "Are you guys gonna mine? " And he was like, he literally was like, "I haven't thought about that yet. " And then he kind of stopped for a second and was like, "You know what? Like, actually, we have all this stranded, geothermal energy because of

Wow, okay. Today he's been tweeting, he tasked like the minister of energy with like setting up this volcano mine, and then he posted a video like two hours ago of them with a new well that they had dug this morning, whereas engineers, yeah, with ninety, ninety-five megawatts is, is no freaking joke, man. So now you're watching a country that has apparently about six hundred and fifty stranded megawatts of geothermal, I mean, they're gonna, they're gonna do very well there, and that's, that's just, that can go straight to the state people as There, it can power a grid. I mean, it can, it can connect, you know, you can use that income to connect, you know, other parts of an electric grid to that split space and create communities. There's a lot of things that can be done with that money. so that's pretty cool. Man, that's really exciting that, that in this age as, as Bitcoin Twitter people, we can just kind of meme things into reality. It was, it was really crazy, man. I mean, really wild. So at the end of the day, this guy, you Big, that he's changing, he's changed the world. And, and what's a little, you know, look, he's an autocrat in many ways, I mean, it's not a-- it is a democracy, okay? It's, it's what we probably call flawed democracy or like a partial democracy, just because he has this like very uncomfortable supermajority. He's done stuff like, he brought the military into the Congress last year to like force them to sign a bill. He sacked a couple judges. Now, his defenders, who are legion and, and the It's the old corrupt guard that he's like trying to get rid of, and that's just such a nuanced conversation, and that's partially very true. I mean, who are the other political options besides his party? Marxists on the left, and then the ultra right. So he's like this young millennial kind of character, and the older conservative guard doesn't like him. So, you know, maybe it's true that the judges are whatever, but as human rights activists, we don't like to see infringements on the democratic process like that. You know, we're, we're not gonna Action and the policy, for sure. and I, I think that's a nuance that's actually important. I mean, we think about things like the Mac-- you know, like we didn't celebrate King John, we celebrated the Magna Carta, right? So, you know, there's gonna be in history all kinds of bad leaders that like give, either give in to people power or give in to incentives and change their nation, and that action should be celebrated. We, we should be incentivizing leaders to, to launch the Bitcoin standard. This is like very good for freedom, for

Say that we now have the Bitcoin standard in, in a nation state, and here we are, man. I mean, it's, it's kind of hard, it's crazy to, crazy

to say it, you know? Yeah, of course. And this also ties into a comment, and I know this is part of, you know, something you've been talking about, is what we might term Trojan horse theory. So tell us a little bit about that idea, this idea of Bitcoin as a Trojan horse. Yeah, I mean, well, essentially,

just to briefly recap, in the classic The Trojans and Greeks cannot penetrate the city of Troy. So inspired by, Minerva, or Athena, depending on whether you're, you know, following Latin or Greek, Homer's, you know, Odysseus character, he gets this inspiration from Athena to create essentially this big horse and, trick the Trojans. So, and this is actually described in, in the Aeneid rather, by, by Virgil. And you, you read this and, and essentially they create this big, beautiful, kind of really enticing-looking prize, and then And then they, they're, but they're really hiding, you know, nearby, and they leave one soldier behind, and then the Trojans are like looking at it debating. Cassandra and Lachonean are like, "No, no, no, it's a trick, let's not do it." But then they get dispatched, and the, and the Trojans are like, "Let's bring it in," and they bring the horse in, 'cause they think it's gonna like give them power. And, at night, of course, the, the Greeks come out of

Is that people adopt it for their own self-interest because it's shiny and pretty and because it has NGU technology, and, and that's largely what we saw right before, at least the previous few days here, was we were in that kind of era of Bitcoin as like digital gold, right? And it was being adopted by institutions, by individuals, as like something to hold onto as like this asset. And those people were always very careful to not really go into the cypherpunk qualities of Bitcoin or talk about its, you know, censorship resistance or programmability, or they would never mention anything You know, they wouldn't really talk too much about the Lightning Network, all these incredible things that makes Bitcoin a strong freedom tool, they didn't really talk about. But the thing is, like, the, the NGU and the Freedom Go Up, the FGO are like tied together. So you, you, you're kind of getting this, you know, you're sitting there and you're looking at this really like enticing asset to, to invest in or buy, a-and you're acquiring it, but in doing so, you're like strengthening what's inside of it and you're allowing that financial freedom

About a couple months ago in Bitcoin Magazine, where not just corporations, but one day nation states would go after Bitcoin, what it brings them. Now, maybe that's fame, maybe that's fortune, but they can't separate it from the impact it's gonna have on, on the rest of the community, the rest of the network, right? So again, I don't know whether it's fame or fortune that this guy's after. He's certainly, you know, I don't think you can call him a democrat, you know what I mean? I don't think that's what he's after here Him anyway, even if he doesn't, if he doesn't think, even if he doesn't realize it, like he's now gonna be aggressively pursuing a program to get Bitcoin into the hands of all his citizens, which over time reduces his power over them, right? It's like that's Trojan horse theory, and we're, we're literally watching it play out, which

is, yeah. And so I, I am thinking here of some members in the Bitcoin Twitter space and Bitcoin community world who maybe are a little more bearish on that aspect right now. Of course, I'm bullish, unlike you

them go up long term. And so I think we can, even if there were some concern about the coercion aspect, I think, well, it's a net win. We should be positive, we should be, you know, celebrating this idea. But there are some people out there who might say, well, look, Bitcoin's been out there and actually it's resulting in, you know, capital gains tax to the state, and therefore the state's getting bigger, or, you know, you guys talk about this thing of it's making the state smaller or giving people back their freedom, but we're living point of view, but there are people out there who maybe they're might, maybe a little bit more paranoid or a little bit more-- and hey, look, some paranoia is good. Pe-pe-people need to think about what are the risks, you know? And maybe that ties into the next question. Yeah. What could go wrong here, right? Could it be that the IMF bring pressure and say, "If you don't, kowtow to our way, we won't give you loans, and then you're gonna struggle." Or maybe if the US government, you

know, could NGU bros or whatever, I don't think that comes from a place of realizing that Bitcoin is, is, is the best money and it's just gonna be very valuable for humans because it's really effective at what it does. I think it comes from a place of realizing that the NGU people will actively cooperate with the state and its surveillance and control mechanisms to try and capture as much Bitcoin as possible and to make lives miserable for Bitcoin users, which is a real risk, right? So, so the interesting part is, laws and regulations restricting the use of Bitcoin and co-opting it Funny, 'cause that's what we were worried about a few months ago. So much so that I wrote this long essay for Quilliet called "Can Governments Ban Bitcoin?" And it's ironic, 'cause at the end, I, I kind of, again, I hinted the Trojan horse thing, and I'm like, "Well, the incentives say that ultimately they won't ban it, they'll actually adopt it," and it's just, again, kind of crazy to see it happen in front of our eyes. But sure, I mean, I think that, you know, what could go wrong with And like kill Bitcoin. I, I just don't agree fundamentally. I don't think that's how it works, and it's not how it works technically, and I don't think it's how it works from an incentive point of view. But a lot of people say that. Here in El Salvador, what could go wrong? Well, there's a lot of things. I mean, yeah, as you mentioned, foreign, you know, at the foreign level, you could have US or IMF influence to force him to like backtrack. I guess what I'm saying is that the incentive structure is such

Tomorrow. Like that's what we used to do to people who, like, did stuff like this to us, right? Did, did, did the Soviets or the Brits or any, any like empire, right? So I just don't know if we're doing that anymore, man. Like, you know, Russia's threatening our monetary dominance and we're not even gonna go after the Nord Stream head, for sanctions. We're not. So, I mean, I think we reached the apex of our power about fifteen years ago, you know, sort of af- right after the Iraq War, Can do that stuff anymore, so we'll see. I just think also Bitcoin is catching people by surprise and it makes it harder to go after if you don't really know what it is, right? So, we'll see. I think, you know, IMF, US power, that could be one thing that, that throws it for a loop, but let's say that happens. I mean, the people, this is a genie that is, is open source code that's out of the bottle, man. Like, you can't, it's like out of the lamp. Like, all of It's in all the coffee shops, it's in all the taxis, it's, it's in all the work sites, it's at the water cooler, it's everywhere. So what, what are people just gonna forget? No, they're not. And like, so I don't know how reversible it is at a social level. That is a threat. I mean, I think in El Salvador, a risk is that it becomes too centralized in terms of the network and it basically becomes, like a too much of a bank. Now, that's where Bitcoin's attributes are really helpful because, Can pay out of Strike to, you know, any other Bitcoin or Lightning address. I think that people need to know that generally speaking, Strike is, like for a Salvadoran when they're holding it, it's like, it's a dollar-denominated USDT account, right? That has KYC, right? So, I mean, what we really want is the ability of Strike to be able to, receive payments instantly, from anywhere in the world, and then obviously this is in a custodial way being run by Strike, and it's, and they're, they're Or pay out to another invoice, I think we're good there because it allows people to have this dual setup where they have like a, like a custodial checking account, and then they have their like non-KYC sovereign savings account that they control. And, and I think that's probably the best compromise we could ask for for like a nationally built system, at least for now. So some, some Bitcoiners may be upset with that 'cause it's not like pure Bitcoin, but I mean, let's just be realistic, that's probably the best we can hope for here. and as long as Bitcoin Beach, they, obviously, you know, they made their own wallet there and, and people use Lightning in, in, in a way that's not reliant on, on any sort of app or whatever, i-i-meaning you don't have to rely on a custodial service or whatever. Yeah, so I think that's pretty neat. Yeah, and you're right. And so, so those are, those are, so those are risks, right? Those are risks, both from foreign and internally. You know, I think he's so popular right now, rather has so many This has given like some hope to this nation. Like, I don't think they're gonna go backwards on this. So if anything, the challenges are gonna be foreign or like technical, right? but I look, you know, this is the full Bitcoin standard package, right? It's like legal tender, mining it with local resources and attracting foreign capital, building Bitcoin communities, building a Bitcoin payments infrastructure, and then eventually getting it into the central bank. That's the full Bitcoin standard stack right there. So they look very much on that track. And again, I think that there's more ups. Sides than downsides, certainly. I mean, I guess one, one other downside I'd mention, of course, is, is that we lionize this guy too much. But look, Bitcoiners gotta know, you can't, you can't have heroes. We just went through this, right? Like, don't, like, lionize this guy. Like, he could be really bad. I like what I see in terms of, like, what he said about Bitcoin, and I like what his advisors are saying, and I think it could be good for the world. Just remember that he's

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Yes. So if, if the government wallet doesn't allow, you know, payments to outside the system or withdrawals, yes, then we have a huge problem. But I think that Jack Ma

But maybe too much trust in him, I don't know. Like, let's, we all just need to be vigil, vigilant and, and watch this thing. But I'm very encouraged that they're hiring him, of course, in his team, rockstar dev. I mean, come on, rockstar dev, is he really gonna n- frickin' dagger us? I mean, maybe, but I, I, I, yeah, I mean, probably not, man. So, you know, I think that if anything, if they're gonna be the ones building out that infrastructure, they Type service for the people, because that's just where we are in the world right now. I mean, it, it, but, but it'll have the ability to like just use native Bitcoin also. Again, getting back to Alan Farrington's essay, you know, if Bitcoin, you know, if it, if it was money, what would it look like? Well, it would look like this. It would be, again, it'd be going through this process where it's not just like, it doesn't just go from store of value to unit of account in a day, it goes

dollars, but hey, it's bullish that in, in some communities in this country, the unit of account is already satoshis. So I think that's, that's really crazy. So again, we're on this journey of monetization and,

yeah,

this is just such a massive, step in, in that direction, man.

Yeah, I'm, I'm very excited to see it. And I also was reflecting back to some of my early years in the Bitcoin space and now I, I often speak about this, in twenty thirteen and fourteen, there was this whole idea of merchant People would pressure businesses to say, "Hey, right, you should take Bitcoin for payment." Yeah. And they did. Right. And then very few people actually paid, right? And so, and then it's sort of like, "Well, this time around, eight years, seven or eight years onwards, now we've got Lightning, now we've got more education, we have so much more adoption, you know, maybe this time isn't really gonna be a lot more different." And I guess, this time it might be that it's not instant, everyone's just gonna instantly convert and use

But, you know, what if they set up all this infrastructure and very few people actually use it? Yeah.

Well, I think it's time. Like, this is Bitcoin's time, because, this couldn't have worked even a year and a half ago or two years ago. We are at a time now where the infrastructure can support it. And pre-lightning, obviously in a high fee environment, you can't, you can't do, you can't do daily payments with Bitcoin. I mean, the, the fees are gonna get ten, twenty, thirty, forty dollars. They're gonna It's like on, on both fronts, right? So now we have Lightning and it's robust enough and it works, and like as someone who's been trying to follow Lightning apps and use it, like really, I mean, we're really, really making some big leaps here. Like I was able to really easily send Lightning payment within seconds on stage with Jack Dorsey, which was a nervous experience for me to try and do that. I'm like, I'm either gonna be the enemy of everybody involved in Lightning, if this doesn't friggin' work, or, or it'll be

I really just wanted to do it to show the world that it was doable, and I'm just like, "Alright, I'm just gonna take my, you know, non-custodial Moon wallet, I'm just gonna make a quick payment, and I'm just gonna teleport a bare asset around the world on stage with Jack Dorsey. I just think that's cool. So we're there with that. And, and I know that you've got these eng-- you know, devs and engineers today reflecting on Twitter, I mean, this is a moment for them to, like, take, take a And we weren't a couple years ago. So I think like, as for why it could work this time around, there's two main things. One is just like the technology and development infrastructure is just where it needs to be, is so much better than it was before, and in the right way, you know, not the big block way, like the, the sort of like, you know, actual way to scale Bitcoin. Number two is the socioeconomic thing, right? So it's like, it's like we thought, people like me, especially, I thought this was gonna be this like decade Bad money drives out the good thing. What I didn't see coming was this, was the government like, and I, I just, I mean, I knew it was a possibility, but I just didn't see it coming this quickly in the second year of the decade that, like, you'd have legal, legal tender. Like, okay, so now all of a sudden, what happens if merchants prefer Bitcoin? 'Cause that was always the idea in my head is like, I thought it would switch to like tiers law or whatever, which is like that the good money drives out the bad. I thought that And they would only-- they would, they didn't, they wouldn't want your fiat, they would want Bitcoin. That is now like set to an accelerated pace, the idea of that happening, especially in, obviously in El Salvador. But you're gonna have merchants who, who really either they want Bitcoin, they like the experience of Lightning, whatever it is, they like the ideology of it, they like the ease of it, whatever they like, they, they don't like the state, whatever it is, whatever it ends up being, and they may prefer Bitcoin, and they may provide a discount

For, for a payment, you know, and that's where you start to see this tiers law thing happening, and that's where, that's where the payments could actually really come alive, and it helps that it organically has grown out of, or, of Bitcoin Beach in an organic way. I think if it's, I think the one main issue, I guess, with the earlier stuff, when you were getting involved early, was it, was non-organic. It was like people trying to force it to like make it work, and now it's just like flowing, it's just doing it on And that way it's like there are gonna be people at every step who are using it, our users, right? There's tens of thousands of users spread across El Salvador, so now it's gonna be like, oh, like, I don't know, we've used this Bitcoin thing now, oh, well my cousin or like my nephew or my son, he knows how to use it, I'll have him come tell me. So I don't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't under, undercount like the network effects here. So I'm much more bullish about it actually like unfolding and for us

I, I will admit, I, I didn't see coming this, this early.

Yeah, that's really cool. And to add to what you were saying there around network effects, I remember one of the things people used to say was, "Oh, it's one thing to take payment in Bitcoin, but then if you, as a merchant, can't pay your suppliers with Bitcoin, you can't close that loop." And there was this idea of, "Oh, someday we're gonna close that loop, we're gonna have the circular economy. This is actually gonna be a really interesting experiment because

With Bitcoin, right? Because everything's Bitcoin, right? So that's at least one step towards. It's gonna be really interesting.

Right. And apps like Strike allow you to seamlessly connect anywhere in the world via Bitcoin, like, but through dollars as well. So it's like-- That's why, I mean, Strike's like this great bridge technology, you know? Like it is a technology of the moment. Like it won't last forever, in my opinion, I-- I mean, meaning, or the company may, but like the particular product as of now acts as this like neo bank, is

Between where we are and where we wanna go. And to get there, we do, you know, as evidenced by what you're watching, like if there had been no strike, there'd be no bill. Okay, there'd be no bill. There'd be no legal tender in Salvador. We'd have a different, outlook on Bitcoin. We'd be, we'd have different ideas. Like, we've, we've really been jump-started by this, by this product, which is a way to really connect the old and the new systems. And, and again, what would it look like

And it's, it's remarkable to watch it unfold live, and we're all just watching, you know, we don't know what's gonna happen or how long it's gonna take, and none of this is priced in, you know, it's so crazy to me. I was thinking like, okay, we've got nation state adoption, we've got Taproot activation, we've got a growing global user base, increasing mobile adoption, incredible mobile improvements in user design, we've got all the smart macro investors now are in, right, Dalio, all the rest, tons more in, you haven Like, and, and that's the signal, and the noise is literally everything you read in the newspaper or watch on TV or listen to on the radio. So like, those of us in the know, I mean, how much-- I'm just so much more excited about Bitcoin now than I was a few months ago when the price was, was twice as high. Like, this is, this is the signal. The freaking nation state adoption of Bitcoin is, is really what we're after. And of course, it'll be great, like, in the future when the price is higher, that'll lead to political point of view, political philosophy point of view, and economic point of view, this is what we're going for, and out of nowhere it happens, you know? I think a lot of people had seen Bitcoin Beach, a lot, some had even gone, and Peter McCormick, you know, he's really been like, he's just been ranting about how amazing it is the last like six months, and, and apparently it was, you know, apparently it was so amazing that the president of El Salvador was like, "I'm sold, let's make it legal tender." Like,

That it was more than just like a small circular economy, that it was like a template for how you would change a country and a nation. So I'm excited we're gonna have Mike Peterson come to my event, the Oslo Freedom Forum, that which we're gonna have in Miami in, in October, and we're gonna have him try and do some stuff around how to build this kind of community, 'cause now there's so many other people, activists from other countries, who wanna rebuild what they built in El Salvador, they wanna do it in Guatemala, they wanna do it in Lebanon, and we wanna facilitate

get down to Bitcoin Beach myself and, when I can get out of here, which, it's gonna be soon, I'm gonna get out, so I'm gonna-- Oh, yeah, dude, it'll be soon. I'm gonna get over there and I'll try to get over to Miami for that as well. and let's chat a bit about HRF. I know you did some grants recently, so tell us a little bit about some of the grants you just did for that. Yeah, well, essentially at

HRF, at the Human Rights Foundation, we Around interviews, talks, state, you know, inter, you know, public events, and then, and then we have, you know, activist, trainings, which we do kind of privately, but we've been doing those consistently, teaching activists, human rights activists about how to use Bitcoin, that's been going really well. We've been, we, we, we were able to work with some of the folks on the teams at Blue Wallet, Moon Wallet, others to, understand how to, how to earn, receive, s- Store, send Bitcoin, love it, and then we're working with Paxful as well too, when they need, when these people need to sell it so that they understand how it works, right? into fiat, as, as effectively as they can. but yeah, on the dev front, we started the development, the Bitcoin Development Fund about a year ago. We've given out around, at to, you know, at today's prices, somewhere around eight hundred thousand, a little more than eight hundred thousand dollars of, of Bitcoin, and dollar grants Resilience and accessibility, but it's funny 'cause like, obviously, like every, every, every dev you're gonna, you know, you're gonna support is, is related to freedom, right? It's like, it's all connected. But we ended up, being able to do a really large round because, two guys from Korea, a, a, just an investor and then a, and a teacher, an educator, they, they gave us a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of Bitcoin to give out, and we got some other money from, Able to parlay that into a big round where we did fifty K dev grants in USD, but, but in Bitcoin, but like fifty K of the Bitcoin to, Calvin Kim, and we're working on, working on, we worked on that with BitMEX, so they gave him a hundred, we gave him fifty for the next year to work on what he's doing relating to UTXO and making it easier to run a node, which is really exciting, obviously. then we gave fifty K to Druv, to,

to, to,

Druv Meta Also being supported by, by, by, by Gemini and by Square Crypto, Square

Crypto and

Gemini,

yeah.

And he's working on, helping nodes fight Sybil attacks, which is really, really neat, and then we also gave, we're, we're in the process of giving fifty K Bitcoin to Abubakar, who's, in northern Nigeria actually, and he went through Chaincode and now, now he's trying to work on like, some software that, that is like wal-- good wallet software for, for the Nigerian Funding is bridge funding to then go apply to something more formal later this, you know, later this year or something like that. We're really happy to support all three of them. We also gave some gifts to, the Breeze and Sphinx teams to do some privacy stuff that, that, that we wanted to collaborate on. So I think at Breeze they're gonna put that to bounties to help with Tor adoption as well as, integrating with Matrix, which is neat. And then, on the Sphinx side, they're, they're building out this like, like a We really would like to, make it easier for people to tip activists, and I, I'll, I'll mention another idea related to that in a second, but, and then the fi-final gift was, to support Arab Akhodol, who's been doing this incredible work translating stuff from, from, you know, everybody from Safe to Breed Love to, you know, Nick Carter, all these different people writing about Bitcoin, he's translating it all into Arabic, and he's incredibly productive, so we wanted to give him some money to keep doing that. So, so it's I love devs in the US too, but like it's kind of our mandate makes us well placed to support people in emerging markets and stuff, so, you know, or at least outside of the, of the common areas. So, you know, of that round five of the six gifts were out there abroad. And then the last thing I'll, I'll just say on this note is, for people listening, we're really interested in this idea of like, a passive alphanumeric, lightning identity that, that, that you could put into, for example, your Twitter bio, right

People started doing it, then Twitter would be sort of like forced to integrate, like, like it would force them to add a feature. Do you know what I mean? Like if we could kind of front run them a little bit, kind of like what Clubhouse did. They, the, you know, Clubhouse, okay, Twitter Spaces. Well, if all the activists in the world could easily just add like a, like, like a, like an alphanumeric to their, to their, to their Twitter bio, and then that could be like a lightning tip,

place. I Are divided and that's fine, and it's exciting to see different approaches. Like some people think you can do it with like LNURL, but there's like an IP address issue there, if I'm not mistaken, with regard to privacy that people are debating about how to solve. Other ways to do it, but basically, I talked to a lot of Lightning folks when I was in Miami, and, I think there's like consensus that it's doable and it's like maybe, maybe, you know, maybe in the next year, but I'll, I'll just say that if Research and talking to the activists, this is what they need. it may not be necessarily what devs wanna work on, but I can tell you that this is what the activist world needs is this sort of a functionality. so that's where we're probably heading next, and we'll announce another round, kind of in September or something like that.

Yeah, that's cool. And so, yeah, on the donations point, it's like, yeah, there's, bit forty-seven stealth addresses or p-nims if you're using Samurai Wallet, but then

First of all, it's all on chain, which is just sort of a non-starter 'cause we really wanna focus on lightning here. But it's also like, it's a little-- I mean, I, I love what they're doing, the Samurai wallet, incredible, and I recommend it all the time, but it is a little limiting and just because it's the only-- and I know that there's reasons for that, don't need to get into the politics of it, but the reality is that like all the other wallets don't incorporate it with it, right? So

Either trusting someone, right? They might have to use, say, Open Node, right? Which again may not, may not, depending on the political or the KYC aspects of it, yeah, you might not be able to do that. And then the other way is, well, spin up a BTC Pay server, but again, that's not right, that's not feasible for everyone, and you need-- and even then, you still need Lightning capacity, and you still have to like give them, somewhere to go, you know?

Right. So I'll just, we, we We love them, and they're gonna be coming to the Oslo Freedom Forum too to help folks. I mean, we wanna get as many activist groups as possible set up with BTC on their websites for incoming donations, and of course, we accept Lightning, and we've gotten tons of, of that, and we, we, we have had a lot of amazing help from the community to help us with, with inbound liquidity, et cetera, et cetera. But that's, it, that's a lot. I mean, it requires a staff member on your team to spend a lot of time learning

And then as they come in, you would be sending to cold storage, like you'd be sweeping it in like over time, right? But just the ability to have this passive identifier that could dump into your wallet, in a way that's privacy protecting is, certainly the dream. So we'll see, we'll see where we go with that.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's also the reality for many new people coming in, is that, you know, while we would love everyone to come in and be fully self-sovereign from the get-go, the reality is a lot

be custodial, right? And so exactly, and I think that's gonna be the same story with El Salvador, a lot of the new people coming in will use a custodial service, they may be using, you know, the Strike or the government wallet, they may be using Blue Wallet, Wallet of Satoshi or some of the other ones out there, and then the hope is that over time, people graduate up into more sub- more levels of sovereignty, and perhaps then that's a similar thing in terms of what this means for human rights, is that it will accelerate.

This is what Make a strike, URL right now, but like you gotta do KYC and it's like, we're looking for something that's a non-custodial, you know, and again, you know, where the p-public keys being rotated between donations type thing. I read, of course, Anthony Roning's great piece on lightning privacy and, you know, the cool part is all of these issues can be probably mitigated at the wallet level, right? So it's like a lot of the issues with lightning can, you know, are being improved now and, and we know Receiving inbound and, you know, you have no way of knowing where it's coming from. That's, that's really the key, I think. And then, hey, if you tip somebody and you want them to know, you just tell them, "Hey, I sent you this, this amount." And that's kind of how it works with us. But anyway, yeah, really exciting times at HRF, obviously, as well, and just, yeah, just that final comment on, you know, a lot of people are, "Oh, this, this, this guy Or had some China Coin or Surveillance Coin, but he went with the Freedom Money option and he can't stop it. And, and I, I, I think there was always gonna be a first country to adopt. I thought it was gonna be like a rogue regime. I thought it was gonna be like a North Korea or like a Venezuela and Iran or something like that. I, you know, El Salvador is, is, you know, a US ally, it's, dollarized, it's, got a democratic process that, that's not, certainly not perfect, but it It was, it was kinda crazy to see it happen in a country like that. so, I mean, where, where, I mean, it's-- at the end of the day, people are gonna complain about everything. Oh, I wish it could have been a different country. Well, which one? Like, it's not gonna be in advanced democracy 'cause we're too comfortable and we'd never-- we would never be that radical, and we're too trying to preserve what we have, and we're much more likely to be rolling out the CBDCs, to be honest, out in

Like one of these like fringe countries, and you know what? It's like, it's, it's pretty ideal, like compared to what it could have been. Like really, it could, we could be talk-- we could be arguing about Iran right now, or about Venezuela, or about North Korea or something, and that would have made it really difficult, even though I still think it would have been something to be cheered. This just is just really like an interesting fit for a lot of different reasons. So what, what a remarkable moment in time here.

Yeah, it's crazy, hey. Alex on Twitter at gladstein. Find him, find him at hrf dot org. Is there anywhere else you'd like people to find you, Alex? No, you can just follow me on Twitter.

Check us out at hrf dot org. The dev fund, if you wanna learn more about that, is, is hrf dot org slash dev fund. And then if you wanna, come to the Oslo Freedom Forum, we're gonna have a Bitcoin track. It's gonna be really cool. It's gonna be October 4th and 5th in Miami. We will have a full day We'll, we'll start with like the political history, of Bitcoin, which I think is important, and the cypherpunks, which I think is important for activists to know about, and then we'll go into like, you know, more like, you know, how to use wallets, how to use multisig, how to use lightning. We're gonna have Mike from Bitcoin Beach talking about how to build a community. we're gonna have a lot of hands-on help from the BTC Pay team too, because we want any activist who's at that event, whether they be So we're, we're, we're pretty excited about that. So if you go to ozlofreedomform dot com, you can, you can, you can apply to attend and just, just put in that, that you're a, you're a Bitcoiner and, we'll, we'll get you the reg link. But, yeah, excited about that and everything else that's to come. And thanks again for having me,

Stefan. Thanks, Alex. So get the show notes and the transcript over at stephanalivera dot com. Thanks for listening, and I