So Samson, Samson, mal Mark Xcelion, Mark Moss, Thanks, thanks for sitting down with me. I want to talk about your big project that you're working on, which is the biggest project and probably the most important project, which is like sovereign state nation state nation state adoption. But let's start back a little bit on some backstory. So Blockstream. Yeah, right, So Blockstream potentially arguably the biggest, most important kind of company in the bitcoin space.
Still is one of the most important companies. Okay, and I was there, Yeah.
You were there, So what was that? What were you doing there?
So at Blockstream, I was the chief Strategy Officer, which kind of is a very broad title, and I was handling a variety of things, basically business, product and marketing, but trying to take the stuff that we're building and
make it more palatable for the masses and accessible. So Blockstream is a very engineering heavy company, a lot of very talented skilled engineers at the protocol level, but then making something that people can use as a product or app on their phone, I think is a slightly different
skill set. So that was what I was bringing to the table and trying to do that and also get more liquid adoption that's the bitcoin side chain, and I ended up working with Al Salvador on their bitcoin law push and the subsequent digital securities laws.
Yeah, so what products were they that blockstream graded that you were pushing for adoption?
Basically everything, So green wallet it's a bitcoin and liquid wallet, the liquid network itself. We're trying to bootstrap the federation and get more members involved, more exchanges to integrate and basically be prepared for high fee environments where there is congestion and kind of like now, yeah, well it's past now, but yeah, it'll it comes up from time to time,
and it shows that you still need that use case. Right, Lightning is good for payments, micro transactions, but not great for moving large amounts of bitcoin back and forth very rapidly. So again this is a great time to reiterate that
you need tech like side chains to let people move quickly. Right, everyone can technic open a really big lightning channel to an exchange, but at that point you might as well just send it on chain R. So it just shows that it's very it's a very critical piece of bitcoin infrastructure.
Liquid be in a side chain, yes.
And then blockxom also had blocks from Satellite which is the satellite constellation in geosynchronous orbit that's broadcasting the Bitcoin blockchain all around us right now.
Yeah, that's a big project.
Yeah, that's another critical piece of infrastructure. So that one actually helps prevent against network splits. So if an undersea cables cut to a particular region with a lot of mining, which.
Is a potentially big attack.
Vector exactly, So that would mitigate that because as long as one person there is running a Bitcoin node and then to the satellite, then they will kind of bridge all those transactions with the rest of the network. So that's another way to prevent high level attacks on the network.
What about let's talk about that just for a second. So this is something that I've been thinking about. We saw something I will get into, but I mean, we're seeing the rise of censorship centers, of a movement of communication obviously payment technology, etc. And if it doesn't you don't have to go too far back. As a matter of fact, I think I saw like Chinese submarines were like hovering over, like Taiwan's like internet cables. I think
I saw like a news headline, right. I think it was in the Arab Spring Egypt cut the internet going into Egypt, right to try to cut that down. So I think in the US there's somewhere three to five cables that give all the Internet here, so we just cut those off and then there's no Internet. And so that seems like it would be an attack on bitcoin,
right if you'd cut off the Internet. So does the blockstream satellites do they prevent the help attack, help prevent against that attack or just against the bitcoin network attack?
Probably just for bitcoin for bitcoin, Yeah, but it's it could be scaled up. I mean, I think Adam Beck is working on bidirectional colms through bloxtoom satellite, and in that case it could potentially help with other things, but it's never going to be able to sustain like a country level load of data transfer, right Yeah. So but I think that kind of attack is mitigated now with things like starlink, right, so you're not completely dependent on
terrestrial internet. So blocktoam satellite was the first step to kind of decentralize away from trustrial internet, and then you have starlink as a second layer on that.
But in regards to the in regards to the just the blockstream satellites, could you still transact bitcoin? You just can't use the Internet. I'm not saying like the whole country move onto Internet, Like we have starlink for that, but would you still able to use bitcoin?
Do that? You can keep your note in sync, but if you want to send the transaction, you'll have to find a way to get it over SMS or something else. Got it until Adam finishes bi directional got it? Okay?
Okay? All right? So those are the big projects.
Yeah, what else was there? Blockshream mining was another thing that we started.
Like kind of one of the later projects, right.
Not that late. I think that started around the time I joined because I kind of foresaw that China was gonna clamp down on mining, so we wanted to start that movement of hash rate out of China. I think we're one of the first to set up in North America actually. And what else is there? At Blockstream? It's been a while since i've shield blockstream stuff. I think
there's gotta be one more lightning of course. Yeah, that's the early blockstream project, but a lot of the things also blo info it was the one of the first really important block explorer projects too, because this is another potential attack factor too, like coming off of the block size wars, it was actually a bit of a precarious environment because the big blockers were controlling all the block explorers, so they could just flip it to I don't know, be cash and say this is the real chain, and
you'll confuse a large chunk of the world thinking well, yeah, my transaction is not there while it's on the real bitcoin now right right. So having that and then mempool space coming out I think helps with that because that mitigates one more attack factor. But if you look at it from a high level, a lot of the stuff that blockstream is working on is to kind of augment Bitcoin and mitigate high level attacks.
So let's talk about the high level attacks. Because you were around and somewhat instrumental during the block size wars, the nerd wars, the civil wars or whatever, right, which was basically trying to do that change the block size. So what was your position in that? I mean, I know you were someone instrumental. Explain that and it seems like that same conversation is popping back up again today.
Yeah, but it's a it's a bit less of a threat these days. I mean, it's just a bunch of guys with NFTs, so it's a bit different. Back then, it was almost every single miner, mining pool, and almost every exchange, so it's a very different landscape today than it was back then. But yeah, like you're saying it was an attack, it was people trying to change the bitcoin protocol and force that through through just the being
big players in the space. Right you had coin Base, blockchain Info, bitmain basically everybody, and then you had just a few bulwarks of resistance, like Blockstream is one. But Blockstream was under heavy attack at the time because it was the RBTC guy saying blockstream controls Bitcoin, so they can't really do much, right, They're kind of pinned down.
And then I was a COO at BTC China at the time, and I came in and basically allied with Adam and Blockstream, and it was a credible outside voice that kind of said, yeah, they don't control bitcoin, No one controls bitcoin. And then I think another exchange that was on the side of fighting for small blocks was bitfinex, and they opened up some of the markets that later on helped kill some of those forks.
Yeah, so in that I mean basically the chain was forked and so we got the big blockchain BTC or b BCH a ry and then now the BSV hard to keep trap BCH. So that's the big blocks, and then we kept the small blocks and the chains forked and so then it was about who was going to choose which chain to run with? Yeah, and so then with these big players, which one were they going to start signaling? Is that kind of how went down?
Well, more or less they were. There were several forks that they were supporting. I think it was like bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic. It's like with two x and then be cash came. But they were just pushing every single one trying to find one that's stuck, and none of them stuck and none of them succeeded.
Yeah, so the fight was over trying to increase the block size. So you get more through put on that, do you think? Because blockstream was already working on Liquid as a side chain, So then they realized that the scaling solution was not to increase the block size, but was to do some sort of side chain like Lightning or Liquid. Is that why I kind of where Blockstreams kind of ideology was on that they realized the scaling solution was something different.
Yeah, So I think it's Adam's thinking, which is very based on computer science, right, which is yet to scale technology and layers. Otherwise you can end up with gigabyte sized blocks or terabyte blocks, and then the network just centralizes again back to data centers, right, which is kind of the problem with ethereum. Right. But if you want everything else, yeah, if you want bitcoin to be decentralized,
you have to keep the block small. But that was the battle on the surface, which was we want to scale it to help people, or as Roger Vera would say, so everyone could buy coffee with bitcoin right.
On the main chain, on the main chain, because I need my coffee to be immutable for all of history.
Yes, that's what we're seeing.
Today, Like I don't want to be censored on my cup of coffee exactly.
It's so important. Yeah, but we're seeing a little of that today with the pictures on the chain, with the ordinals and all the other stuff, right, Like, you don't need your picture in the chain and immutable for all time because that can be copied. What you really want is a certificate or a pointer or a timestamp. Really, but that's a we can get in that later if
you want. But the fight was on the surface level that we need to help if you help everybody and scale bitcoin, right, But I think at a deeper level it was about fighting to change the protocol and using a very innoculous, seemingly friendly, helpful way to do so, which was because we want to buy coffee and let the unbanged to use bitcoin. But if you can change
the block size, you can change everything else. So it's a very slippery slope and it would set a very bad precedent that bitcoin can just.
Like we were talking about before we start recording, just like with ethereum. So Ethereum changed the monetary policy to be the ultrasound money.
They can change to be anything they want, but.
The fact that they changed it means they're not exactly Yeah, so by changing to become that, the change actually proved that they can't be that.
Well, yeah, the FED could become ultrasound money too. Yeah, but they can also print and they can tighten. They can do whatever they want. So it's the same with theorem. They can change it at will. But the block size war was too was over that discussion like can it be changed? And the answer is no.
Yeah, on the ordinal piece. To your point, putting the jpeg in there seems a little silly. Putting the King James Bible in there doesn't seem so silly, right, I mean, people today, over the last decades, decades, two decades, have been literally risking their lives, laying their lives down to sneak a physical copy of a Bible into China or North Korea. And now it can just be in the censorship resistant network. Whatever they want to censor. Three D
gun schematics could be in there. So while the jpeg seems a little silly, I mean, there could be good use cases I suppose for that type of script. Yeah.
Well, I think Michael Saylor said that he'd put his will on the chain, and.
The will would be a good example.
Yeah, that could be good too, But I think you can get the same effect if the If there's no censorship of the thing, then you don't need to put it on. But if there is, then maybe it would help.
Right, But if you need censorship resistance and immutability.
If you need censorship resistance, you need. But most use cases, like the will, I don't think it's cool, But no one's going to censor your will.
What about those movies you know where like they sneak into the library and they get the dad's will and they change it.
Well, you can do a timestem.
You can have it your a journey.
I mean, you can hash it, right, So you just embed the hash, right, and that solves ninety nine point ninety nine of all use cases.
Right, And embedding a hash would then point to the location where it's at.
Yeah, you could do that too, but the key thing is you want to hash it so you can show that this was the actual original document, right, And that's enough for ninety nine point nine percent of every single use case.
Yeah, and that's a good point. Not everything needs to be decentralized. Not everything needs to be censorsive resistant or immutable like a cup of coffee. And I think that's one thing that kind of swept over the whole, you know, blockchain world is like, not everything has to be decentralized.
JPEGs don't need to be decentralized. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons why things actually shouldn't be decentralized or and specifically like achieving consensus for example, like emails sort of decentralized, but it doesn't need to achieve consensus to work correct something like that. So let's fast forward past that. So you were working there, you guys started working on this whole volcano bond thing, and I don't know if this started.
I mean, you know, I don't have any inner working knowledge of blockstream, but just you know, following along at the back on podcast, et cetera, you launched this mining thing, which then you kind of had a bond or some sort of security for the mining.
The BMN, the blockstream mining note.
Okay, the big struck. Yeah, okay, did that kind of then move into the kind of volcano mining in nel Salad or is that kind of how that started or.
What kind of So the volcano stuff, it kind of started as a meme because people say, oh, you have volcanoes, you can mine bitcoin, so you should start a volcano mine. And then I think Alistair Millen Max Kaiser said make a volcano bond. But it was just like an idea.
But because we had constructed the blockstream mining note, I kind of took that and created the actual structure for what the bond could look like where they could potentially get rid of their debt in ten years by creating this bitcoin bond, which would be so the bigcoin bond is the superstructure, and the superstructure is really just half of the funds raised would go to buy bitcoin, hold it for five years, and then share sell it and share the upside. The other half goes into doing a
revenue generating productive activity. So it's like also to be the best bond ever because it's backed half by hardest asset on the planet and the other half is revenue generating, whereas most bonds are just pure debt, pure debt and nothing backing it except for hope. So I think it's a more pragmatic way to create this type of instrument as we move to a future where money could evaporate
and disappear one day. So you denominate your debt in dollars, but you back it with hard assets and a productive revenue generating activity, which in al Salvador's case would be bitcoin mining. But that can be transplanted to other places too, So there's interest in Ecuador and Costa Rica in hydro bonds, so using hydropower to mine bitcoin, and potentially you could.
Volcano bonds hydro bonds that's really just a power source, but ultimate it's a bitcoin bond.
Well, technically you could do it with anything. It just has to be a revenue generating activity to cover the coupon of the bond. So right now we're talking to some people in Africa, and you know there's tons of rare earth minerals in Africa. So you could construct a bitcoin bond where the revenue generating activity is mining, like real mining to extract rare earth minerals for whatever, and then you still have that bitcoin component, so that's.
The holding bitcoin and then of the revenue generating activity. So then they started picking up steam in El Salvador, but then did they get put on hold? Right?
So the president, well, we announced it together and it was supposed to go out like in spring twenty twenty two, and then they got caught up fighting the gangs and trying to stabilize that. And I think there there was a piece that was needed before that, which was the digital securities loss. That was something that we were advising
them on. Sala could pass that, but that would allow them to issue the bonds themselves under their own regulatory framework, and that has passed I think a few months ago, so potentially they could come out end of this year, and I think the bitfec's team is more involved with them now on the issuance, so I think they said something like maybe end of this year they will do something, but I'm not too involved in that anymore.
Okay, okay, but you saw enough of that and enough potential that you decided to leave Blockstream and go move your career onto helping nation states adopt bitcoin.
Yeah, so that's Jen three.
That's where you're at now.
Yeah, so it's not just nation states. We want to accelerate hyper bitcoonization or accelerate bitcoin adoption around the world. So while Blockstream is one of the most important companies in the space and they're doing excellent work, what I want to do is get more get bitcoin in the hands of the masses. So we're trying to relaunch our people. Yeah, the people.
So we're reading and that is that a top down I'm sorry, I bottom up or top down?
It's both. So right now we're doing all the nations state stuff we're doing is the top down stuff, engaging with politicians and governments. But at the bottom up level, we want to launch Aqua and start to get more adoption and focus on Latam first. But the angle that we're taking is that we want to be a bitcoin and stable coin wallet because right now in latinin they are seeking dollar denominated value, so they're using tether already
at big time. It's dominant in Latin America. A lot of people in the US don't really understand that because you know, you have excellent banking and everything. Well maybe not anymore.
But at one of the meetings last night, I talked to somebody from Central America, maybe maybe Latam and he was saying the exact same thing. They're moving, you know, one hundred million dollars. He's like, we're doing it over tether.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. But most bitcoin wallets don't have tether, right because they're Bitcoin and lightning. Yeah, but we plan to have bitcoin as your savings account, and then we have a spending account section which is tether and Lightning and liquid.
Now that would be a custodial wallet.
No, non custodia because Tether is actually on liquid. So because we're a bitcoin and liquid wallet, you have everything in one view. And we're hoping that we'll take away some of the transaction volume and aum from the ship chains and bring it onto liquid.
Yeah, you can already use stable coins on ethereum, right, so you could self custody that yourself and the other chains as well.
Yeah, but then you have to use ethereum.
Right. So this way you can put using liquid, you can put it on the Bitcoin chain and.
It's on the liquid chain, right, but it.
Would just a side chain of Bitcoin.
Yeah, but the wallet supports built, so you generate one seed and it will spawn your Bitcoin wallet and your liquid wallet.
Yeah. Okay, so that's the big project right now, and that's that's important because people in Latin are really for anywhere. I mean, unfortunately, I think we agree there's an evolutionary process to bitcoin and bitcoin adoption and the evolution from a collectible store value medium exchange. And so for shorter term purchases, stable coins are still a pretty good solution, especially in emerging markets. Is that kind of the theory.
Yeah, But it's more that I think there's a bigger cognitive leap you have to make to get into bitcoin, whereas for them they're already seeking dollars, right, paper dollars or any way they can get them. Yeah, anyway they can get them. So you're kind of just giving them the thing that they're looking for already, and you don't have to say you should get bitcoin. But when they install Aqua, they'll see, oh there's bitcoin that's hop there. Yeah, and it's for saving. Yeah, this is for spending.
Yeah.
But ironically, like people in developing in the Global South with runaway inflation, for them taking dollars to saving, right, But at least we can get them onto the track of using bitcoin and bitcoin side chain.
Yeah. So you know, I kind of have this theory. It's not really a theory. I think it's just human nature, is that we don't really move until the pain's high enough.
Yeah.
I believe in chiropractic, but I don't typically go unless my back hurt's reel bad, right, or like someone that needs rehab, they don't want to go to rehab unless they hit rock bottom kind of thing, right, And so in the US, most of us don't have pain high enough. In Canada, during the Trucker rally, the pain was en But in Latam the pain is high enough. Right, they're witnessing double triple digit inflation. So like you don't need to explain why they need to get out of their
fiat currency. Like into something else.
Well, the other thing is a lot of the central bank regulations don't let them get out of their currency too, right, there's limit, yeah, capital controls. But also in Argentina they have their official rate which is like half of the real rate. Right, so if you wanted to do it too, you're gonna get cut right at the start.
What do you mean by that? So the real rate, being like a black market rate, is different than the official rate.
It depends which way you're looking at. If I say the real rate is the I think it's called the blue rate, right, they call it blue.
It's not black.
Yeah, it's not black, but it's the rate on the street, the street rate. And then you have the official rate, which is really bad. And that's the one at the bank.
Okay, to exchange their local currency to a dollar.
Yeah, Argentine pays of two dollars, right, Okay.
So they give you a horrible exchange rate, but on the street you get a much high rate. Yeah. Yeah, And that's to prevent people from going into dollars. And it's probably not that easy to go into dollars.
It's actually quite easy. There's a ton of money changes everywhere. Okay, But then you won't be able to do it at the bank, right, So you're going to you know, various streets they're called quava caves, and you go in there and you change your money and they take tether and dollars or whatever.
Okay, so then people are using tether. They have tether wallets, they just not have a wall that has tether and bitcoin in both.
Maybe there's some shit coin wallets that have bitcoin, but you know it's not ideal.
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, So that's the plan. So then that's like a decentralized approach from the bottom up. Now when you talk about like from top down nation state adoptions specifically going to like the governments, then you're trying to get them to go to like you know what else Overeigty did making it like a legal tender. And I hear people in the United States going, you know, we should make it legal tender or whatever, And I think, does it need to be legal tender? Because whatever we
want to be used as money is money. If I want to trade you this iPhone or I want to give you three hours of my labor, like we say, what the medium of exchange is?
Right to a point, the benefit of legal tender is that it removes cap gains, right, So that is really what you need. Legal tender is cool, it's an endorsement and you can do all.
These nations in Latam have the cap gains issue if it's not legal tender.
Some of them okay, but at least in the US and Canada. Right, technically, if you if we did the trade phone for bitcoin, then it's a taxable, taxable event, right, and that prevents bitcoin from being used as money. But if a country has no cap gains, like Switzerland, they could just adopt bitcoin and say yeah, because there's nothing stopping you, right.
But in Latam or Argentina, Peru has massive inflation going on right now, obviously Venezuela, et cetera. I mean, they could just start using bitcoin without it being legal tender.
I mean, you can always use bitcoin. The question is how above board is it? And can someone go after you for using bitcoin?
So it's better curious in those countries that you're working with down there, that's kind of your target market, the Latam countries. So in those countries, do you need to kind of have that top down approval of it for the people to be able to start using it.
Well, not really, because you already have communities that use it, right, But I think getting the top down is beneficial because of two reasons. First, you make it above board, so every transaction you do is completely legitimate and no one can come after you for paying tax on whatever. Right. The second is mitigation of nation state level attacks. So my thinking is if we get them to adopt bitcoin, embrace bitcoin, mine bitcoin, have a bitcoin bond, they're less likely to attack the network.
Right.
If they're a minor, they're probably not going to ban mining. Right, if they're holding bitcoin as a treasury asset, they're not going to ban non custodial wallets what was the term again, self hosted wallets, right, like they are in Europe. So I think you have to engage on some level with the governments otherwise you end up with very poor policy decisions, like in ther Conunion. So it's sort of like defending bitcoin by educating people in the government.
Yeah, so it seems like in the G seven countries at least, there's a massive attack. To your point, Europe's trying to ban self hosted wallets. We're seeing a rise of just censorship period, Right, they want a sensor movement. We talked about being in Canada right sensoring movement. The G twenty agreed to putting a passport system in health passport system in as the G twenty censorship of information. So now the G seven have all put in laws
against disinformation and whatever, hateful speeches, et cetera. And now censorship on financial transactions. So lots of laws going in in Europe to your point, self hosted Wallace potentially, and now the US with the restrict Act. I mean, it's just insanity. But that's like the G seven, Like we don't really see that happening in Latam or are you
is there a fight going on down there? Or do you think this is maybe where game theory starts playing out, where like good, okay, G seven, G twenty, go ahead and do that to yourselves, but it's going to grow down here.
Well, it's definitely going to grow down there because I think it's like you're saying, like, unless the pain is high enough, people aren't going to do something. And the pain in the Global South has been high for a very long time, so they're just fine looking for a way to get out. But until the advent of bitcoins, is no way out right, there was no there's no there's no exit, no exit, but now there is an exit.
So the fight I think, like the G seven countries are basically doing it to themselves, right, whether they understand it or not, they're just killing themselves.
Yeah.
But the fight I think in Latin will be against the global organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, which are trying to prevent them from getting out of that debt spiral, right, or getting out of debt slavery. So in Argentina, you know, the IMF a couple of years back said we'll give you a loan, but you shouldn't adopt Well, they said crypto, but no one cares about crypto. Is about bitcoin. They said, you know, don't adopt crypto and we'll give you a loan. And they said, okay,
But I think there's a new election coming. There's actually a lot of elections coming up in Latin, and that means there's a big opportunity for the landscape to just change completely.
So they might are most of those elections going like communist, socialist. I mean what we saw in Chile, they tried to you know, they adopted a card carrying communist with a new communist constitution in Brazil like that seemed to be a pretty socialist communist you know, coup that happened there, whatever, if you want to call it that. Are you seeing that? I mean, is that? Do you think that's hurtful for adopting something like bitcoin.
Well, you have to run with the tides, like the political tide will change, yeah, and sometimes it's changing for the worst, like in your examples. But in Argentina they have a pro bitcoin candidate, Heavier Milla, and he's spoken about bitcoin in the past and he could potentially be a champion a bitcoin. I know there is a potentially pro bitcoin presidential candidate in Guatemala.
We have two in the US.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah, but one on both sides of the aisle.
It's pretty amazing, it is. So it's hard to say, but we'll have to see. And this is why we've been making trips like Jen three, We've been going on these missions and trying to engage the next potential presidential candidates.
Okay, so what's your prediction there? Which which countries do you think seem to be the most favorable and maybe might be not a prediction as to which one is the next one, but which ones, which one seemed to be the most open, most favorable, Which ones you think will probably move into some sort of maybe not even full adoption, but acceptance.
It's hard to say. I can't predict the outcome of the elections, but there are certain countries that could potentially adopt bitcoin. So I guess the question is what does adopt bitcoin mean? If it means bitcoin legal tender, and then I have no idea because it's really hard. Al Salvador is a unique oddity I think, in which they had a presisd Boo Kelly has a super majority of the Congress, right, so they can pass the laws very easily, whereas in most other countries it's very hard to get
anything passed. So if you ask me which country is going to put out a bitcoin law, I have no idea. But I think there are countries that could adopt bitcoin. And when I say adopt bitcoin, it's more broad. It could be mining, it could be with a bond or just having bitcoined, a treasury asset, or a law. It
could be any of those things. So Guatemala, I think is interesting because they have a law already called divisis, which is they allow you to use any foreign currency and with bitcoin as legal tender, and al Salvador it is a foreign currency. So that standing of bitcoin from Alsalva or adopting it is actually very important because that lets us do more interesting things with it because it has formal recognition. So Guatemala, they don't actually need a law.
Someone just has to say, basically interpreting the current law, that bitcoin can be used for payments and everything, and then you're done. And we're working with some people in Mexico to see if the Mexican law would afford that same option. And Panama is also interesting too because they don't have a central bank and it was founded on the premise that you can use whatever money you choose to. So Guatemala and Panama could potentially be the next ones.
But they would be easy because they don't need to do anything. Someone just has to say, yes, you can use bitcoin, Yes you can use bitcoin, and you're done.
So seeing as you've left blockstream, you've gone over here. This is your thing now now a nation state option top down, bottom up, and hitting both those approaches actively working with the governments, et cetera, trying to I don't want to say influence, educate education, educate potential people, right, the education you don't need to influence if you can educate them properly, I guess right. So then what is what's your goal? I mean, what's the outlook here?
I mean the goal is to ensure an orderly transition into a bitcoin standard. So if you look at the world today, it's still mostly on FIAT, but you and I both believe we're probably moving to a bitcoin standard ultimately, right, The question is when? On what timeframe?
I think it's certin We would certainly agree that all fiats are dying and they're on their last legs and there has to be a replacement, and there's not another Fiat replacement, so what is it? So then it's almost like we need a decentralized ledger that nobody can control. It's almost like that.
So if we are going there, then it's better to It depends on your time horizons too, so I'm thinking five to ten years, and in five to ten years that's pretty quick actually, and it means that countries need to start adopting now and having some sort of bitcoin strategy in place, because when it comes time when the shit hit the fan. You don't want people to try to figure out how do I get my feet into bitcoin? That's just mass chaos. And you've seen this historically through
demonetization events India and twenty sixteen had one. They pulled some notes out of circulation. People actually died because they couldn't pay for medical procedures, or they died from exposure from lining up trying to convert their old bill to the new bill. But just take that and imagine all fiat moneys are now failing rapidly and people need to
get into bitcoin. You need to have all those rails in place, all that infrastructure in place, and the government needs to know what to do because they control a lot of the money still. So our thinking is if we can get them onto some sort of bitcoin adoption strategy, now we can mitigate that chaos down the road, yeah, and have an orderly transition and people can move into bitcoin. So parallel tracks. So like Al Salvador, they're still on
the dollar, but they have bitcoin. You could be Argentina and be dollarized and with bitcoin, or you could be Mexico and have the Mexican peso and bitcoin. Sure, and this in my view, is the best outcome we can get for the next few years to have parallel tracks in multiple places.
Yeah. Yeah, And a lot of that could be driven bottom up, I mean, if there's demand for it. So in Mexico they have the peso, but they also accept dollars in a lot of places, right, not everywhere, and they get the real places they won't. But I also really like the bitcoin bond situation because now any country
that has excess energy could instantly start making revenue. And I think it's kind of interesting because if you look back through history, it was like the nations that had natural resources, you know, typically oil that flourish because they had that cheap amount of energy. And now you have a nation like Al Salvador who has really no natural resources bananas or whatever, right, but they have this volcano. Was a volcano good for Well, now they could create
revenue off of that. And then you look at like the landscape of like the South Pacific and all the atolls that have volcanoes on them, and like the ability for them to start generating revenue off of that. So it seems like the greed aspect is always a good angle, right If governments can create excess revenue and potentially raise extra revenue off of bonds without having to go through the IMF or whatever like.
Well, I think the biggest benefit of the bonds is that they can raise the capital to tap into those resources. So Al Salvador has to expand their geothermal generation capacity still, right, they only have a few plants right now, but they have a lot of geothermal potential, right, But the bond would let them build new plants, and then once the plants are built, they're good for fifty eighty years. And that's all bitcoin. And I think that transformation is not
yet fully appreciated by most people around the world. They don't yet understand that bitcoin is now money, and money is now bitcoin. Bitcoin is information and energy. So if you have energy, you have money. Right. So the Middle East has lots of oil and they've figured it out pretty easily. Well, oil is money. We can build cities in the desert. And in the case of the UAE, they actually pay you to be AMORTI. You don't pay taxes, you get paid. And this can actually happen in many
places around the world. It could happen in Al Salvador and Indonesia in the Philippines. So Indonesia and the Philippines have a massive amount of geothermal energy. So if they can just tap into that, they could be the next Dubai or whatever. Right, Yeah, and I think this potential is what we're trying to educate them on align their incentives. So if you think about bitcoin from a very high level, this is a piece of software that brilliantly aligns incentives
across the board between end users, miners, and everyone else. Right, And we can kind of take that and amplify that for nation states too and show them, well, you can mine bitcoin and you don't need to tax anybody, because every country right now is looking for ways to generate tax revenue. Sure, so why not just tap into what you have? And I think with the Global seuth they're more amenable to this concept. Right, like the G seven, I don't have a lot of hope. Canada has massive
amounts of hydropower. Right Technically, in Canada you could fit three entire bitcoin networks. Wow, and just mine in Canada. There's enough energy for that.
But Canada has no gold either, So yeah, for them, we have zero goal.
So until there's a seismic shift in the government, then I don't have much hope, but in the end, necessity drives.
A lot of change back where the pain's high enough.
Yeah, so we'll see what happens. Yeah, hopeful.
No, I love it, you know. You back to Saudi Arabia. I mean the benefits they have is they can get the oil on the ground and they can ship the oil. But you can't ship energy from a geothermal unit, like like you can't really transmit that very far. There's no way to package it and ship it. And so mining allows them to monetize that.
Yeah. And the beautiful thing is I tell them, like, even if you don't believe in bitcoin and you don't want it, just mine it and sell to someone else, right, someone else will buy it, will even if.
You think it's fools gold. Yeah, and people want to buy it, sell this.
There's this incredibly liquid market and there are buyers. Yeah, so it's almost negligent.
And have they been pretty receptive to that.
Well, that's usually the light bulb moment. Yeah, I tell them, first, your energy could fund everything through bitcoin, and then you don't have to keep bitcoin. You can just sell it all and.
You don't even have to mention bitcoin. It's like Hey, would you like to make an extra billion dollars a year or whatever that's way more or whatever that number is right, And then well, how do I make an extra billion dollars by running data centers? What the data centers do doesn't really matter, and you just kind of like work your way in. If you drop bitcoin too soon, they're like, oh, never mind, never mind, are kind of a thing like that. So is your theory? Then you
said five ten years, which it's always timeframe. Five ten years is actually seems pretty short. Pretty short time frame it is. But you think like a game theory will play out here where potentially the G seven, maybe even more than that, really get aggressive and try to clamp down because they're trying to protect the status quote they want their system to maintain. But the people who aren't
in the system, they don't care. They have nothing to lose, right, and so those ones will adopt, And if that happens out, then those countries will have the upper hand, the advantage. How you see it kind of playing out.
I think they'll try to clamp down, but they're going to face civil unrest at home just because their policies make no sense, right, Like, if you look at Germany, they shut down all their nuclear and then they're burning coal, right, and they're proud of that for some reason.
But they're they're they're chopping down forests and burning wood and they're proud of that. Yeah.
I think they're importing trees from the US to burn too, So I don't see how sustainable that is.
Yeah.
So they might try to clamp down or crack down, but they're just going to self immolate themselves, self destruct. Yeah, so I don't think they can successfully clamp down. And as Bitcoin's dominance grows, those globalist organizations lose more and more power too. So all you need to do is have a few bitcoin bonds in the wild, right, And that just makes and I am a I am f loan look useless.
Right, Yeah, that's the game theory. So as long as one or two people are doing it, then other people are going to see that. I did see Liechtenstein said they were going to start accepting bitcoin for government payments, and so again that's just like another little crack in the game theory, so to speak, you know, the more adoption.
Okay, well we're engaged with Litenstein, Oh you are, Yeah, Okay, we're engaged with a lot of countr Yeah, we can't talk about a lot of stuff yet, but yeah, yeah, if you knew everything I knew, you'd be super bolish on bitcoin.
I'm already bullish on bitcoin, but maybe so that's good. So okay, so you can't disclose it. But if we knew, if we knew what you knew, if we knew what was going on in the conversations inside some of these governments, it's pretty favorable, I would say.
So it's just pragmatism at the end of the day.
Right, I mean, I just go back to just human greed, like which government doesn't want more money? Which government doesn't want to turn more of the resources into money.
And they all do except for some of the G sevens.
Except for some of the G sevens, And that's the pain is not high enough. They can still just print for now, right, But the nations that aren't able to do that, like George Carlin, and there's a big old club, and you're not in it. So all those countries, they are not in it, and their choices either one go to the IMF and give up massive amounts of sovereignty, potentially change the entire makeup of their country. In Ukraine,
I saw this article this week. It was the third largest debtor to the IMF, and the IMF is making them change the entire property ownership of their government. Their country. Ukraine is the bread basket of Europe, right, some of the most fertile land, and they're taking all the land from the farmers and basically give them to the oligarchs. Yeah, and so like, if you're a country that doesn't want to give that up, what's your other option?
It's only bitcoin.
It's only bitcoin. Yeah, So okay, well I think we can end it with that. Man, if we knew what you knew, we'd be even more bullish on bitcoin. Anything else that you want to talk about or draw attention to. What can people do to get involved in this anything?
So last year when I was on stage, I said, you know, everyone should try to do something. Yeah, And I think that maybe stirred up some people, But a lot of people have started reaching out and engaging with us. So we have, you know, groups in multiple countries working with US, facilitating meetings and doing.
That with AQUA or with just nation state nation state.
Yeah. So I think the call, I would say is keep doing that, Like you can reach out. You don't need to talk to me or Jenna three, but you should try to do something and try to fix the system that you're in because it's only.
An awareness, change the conversation.
Yeah, it's only through our work that we can affect change. If we just sit back and wait, nothing will happen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. And I know we have a big international audience, So talk about it, share the information, continue to bring adoption or just education around it, and we can really have a bottom up approach. And I think kind of like we's on Al Salvador. You get that bottom up approach and then the top goes, what the heck is going on? Oh it's pretty good, let's go do that. So cool, all right, Samson, Well, thank you appreciate it.
Thanks Mark, It's been fun.
Yeah,