October 27, 2025 • 62 mins
Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and author of Check Your Financial Privilege and Hidden Repression.
In this episode, Alex explains why Bitcoin is the most powerful tool for human rights in the 21st century, freedom money that protects people from surveillance, censorship, and financial control.
Alex breaks down how money evolved from an instrument of freedom to a weapon of control, how governments now use financial repression as their first tool of censorship, and why Bitcoin is the only technology capable of reversing that trend. He discusses his new essay for The Journal of Democracy, how it reframes Bitcoin as a human rights revolution rather than a financial asset, and why even stablecoins ultimately strengthen state power instead of limiting it.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This addresses the issues of people who are being spied on and politically debanked and censored.
(00:08):
And it addresses the issues of people who are being debased, rugged, and devalued.
The things that affect the most people, billions of people.
Taking that big red button away from authoritarians and government officials where they can just say,
Oh, we're going to make your time and labor worth less.
(00:28):
How do we rebel?
How do we resist with Bitcoin?
You don't see the bigger picture, which is a global revolution happening with tens, if not hundreds of millions of people where we are taking power back.
That's a life or death scenario for a lot of people.
We are pushing the freedom virus forward and it's spreading and there's no stopping it.
(00:51):
Mr. Gladstein, how are you doing?
I'm great. How are you?
I'm very good.
We're here in Nashville.
I know.
We've got the HRF Global Bitcoin Summit coming up.
Yeah, last time I saw you, we were in Indonesia.
We were in Bali.
So I was in your part of the world.
Roughly.
It's still like a five-hour flight, but it's as close as you get.
Closer than the USA.
That's for sure.
We did a lot of surfing.
Yeah, we did some surfing and saw a lot of local Bitcoin adoption, which we can get into.
(01:18):
I want to know, because I was with you there for a week or so, and then you went off and
did a bit of a tour around Southeast Asia.
What was that like?
Yeah. So one of the things we've been doing at the Human Rights Foundation is taking an alliance of some of our stakeholders, some of the world's leading human rights activists, some of the world's leading Bitcoin developers and builders, and traveling together in a particular part of the world for, let's call it a week or two to just see what global Bitcoin adoption is up to.
(01:54):
and in this particular case,
we were doing Southeast Asia.
So we started in Indonesia.
We got to see the Bitcoin Indonesia conference,
which was really interesting
and kind of more importantly,
saw the center that they have there,
which is this very cool
like three to four story learning center
with an outdoor amphitheater
and really impressive, consistent programming.
(02:15):
It's a really cool space.
And they're doing programming all the time,
both in Indonesian and in English
and other languages.
and they are pumping out Bitcoiners there.
So that was quite something to see.
And from there, we went up to Malaysia
and we had some meetings with people in the government there,
which was really interesting
just to get a sense of kind of where they are on Bitcoin.
(02:37):
And some of us in the group were very interested
in the whole thesis that Harris Irfan and Alan Farrington
are kind of spearheading in terms of Bitcoin
as Islamic money or halal money.
And that's very relevant in Malaysia.
We also met with Malaysian Bitcoin community.
we got to meet the folks building the Frostnaps, which is a Malaysian creation, or at least partly
(02:57):
made in Malaysia. He's an Aussie, isn't he? Lloyd. Yes, but one of his co-founders in Malaysian.
And they're doing some of the work there, some of the manufacturing there. And it was quite
interesting to see that live. We were able to obtain them and start using them. And I think
that's a really clever way to do multisig. So that was neat. From there, we went up to Chiang Mai,
(03:18):
where we got to visit Jimmy Castro's Bitcoin Learning Center,
which was fantastic.
I think it's probably one of the most well-made
and thoughtful Bitcoin hubs, community spaces in the world.
I mean, it's almost the same quality as Bitcoin Park,
but it's in Chiang Mai.
(03:39):
And it's like three floors, and you enter down a street,
and it has a street sign.
It's like, Bitcoin Learning Center, this way.
and there's this really cool street mural
of all kinds of sort of Thai culture
mashed up with Bitcoin.
And you get there and there's a gigantic flag
20 feet high that just has freedom on it.
And you go in and it's got a Bitcoin ATM
that accepts eCash.
It's got giant like white paper poster.
(04:00):
It's got a beautiful podcast studio.
It has an event space, super high end.
And they're really positioned well
because they're right in the middle of China,
Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.
So right in the heart of Southeast Asia.
So, so many people from those countries
come there to learn more.
So that was very impressive.
I was speaking to Jimmy a little bit when we were in Bali.
(04:22):
You were saying they get a lot of people come across from Laos.
And Burma.
So they have classes in both of those languages.
And I think the way they basically do it is because there's a lot of expats there too.
I met a bunch of people who founded Bitcoin companies who live there.
But basically, they'll do classes in Thai.
They'll do classes in English, and they just rotate.
(04:43):
From there, we went down to Bangkok and we visited Bob Space, founded by Piccolo and friends, which is really quite cool.
Because there, they're focusing more on the sort of deep tech and privacy tech and self-sovereignty tech.
We got to see some of the presentations from some of their grantees.
It's basically an incubator.
And we've been supporting that.
So that's been a lot of fun.
(05:07):
And so when you were in, was it Malaysia you spoke to the government?
We spoke to someone who is in the ruling party at a very high level.
Okay.
But is someone who is a friend of ours from a long time ago.
The background is that the leader of Malaysia today used to be a political prisoner.
Oh, I didn't know.
And was put in prison by his predecessor.
(05:27):
And his name is Anwar Ibrahim, and he's now prime minister.
And we helped work on Anwar's case when Anwar was a political prisoner.
And he spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the event we do in Norway.
in 2010. And we helped on his case when he was put in prison after that. And now he got out and now
he's leading the country. So they're trying to figure out their digital asset strategy. And,
(05:50):
you know, CZ is being very aggressive there. But it's good to know that there's some people who
are thinking, you know, very clearly about Bitcoin. But, you know, it's a tough situation
for most of these folks because there's so many competing interests coming to them, right?
Everybody wants a piece, you know?
But it was good to go and provide some straightforward talk on why Bitcoin.
(06:10):
And I imagine there's a lot of people trying to throw money at them to do things that are in their interest.
Oh, CZ, yeah, of course.
But he must get the necessity for freedom money with his background, you would imagine.
I think we're going to get there.
You know, I think it's just a tough road, but I think we get there.
And in any event, to kind of marry that point to Thailand,
(06:32):
And after we visited Bob's base, we did an event at the Thai parliament, which is a spectacular building and very storied history in Thailand of democracy and then no democracy and military coup and democracy again and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
And we were there at the behest of a guy named Thanatorn, who is one of the opposition leaders of the country.
(06:53):
And he actually won his party sort of won an election during COVID time, like 2020, 2021.
and he was one of the leaders of that new government
and he walked into parliament
and was only a formal leader for a few minutes.
And then the sort of military government
and the royals and some other sort of regime forces
(07:13):
kind of dissolved his party.
So they also sort of tried to ban him for life
from running for political office.
And they do this to like anyone
who really threatens the system.
But now he's still working away.
And even though he can't personally be
you know, a contender, his colleagues are,
and they look like they're gonna be very competitive
in the election in February.
And do they have free and fair elections?
(07:34):
No, but the question is,
at what point will they respect the will of the people?
And it's not this sort of North Korea type thing.
Like it is very possible that in February
they win so overwhelmingly
that the old guard has to negotiate.
So it's gonna be very interesting.
But that person, you know,
is very interested in Bitcoin
(07:56):
And that group of people is very interested in Bitcoin.
So we got to do an event in front of media, human rights groups, all sorts of people from across Thai society.
And we talked about Bitcoin and we talked about Noster.
And instead of the usual, well, you know, that you encounter in the United States or in Australia or in the UK, isn't it criminal money?
(08:17):
Or what about the, no, none of that.
Just, I want to know more.
Tell me more.
Can we use it for fundraising?
You know, can we use it to raise money for political parties?
Can we use it to get money to sister countries?
Can protesters use it?
It was fascinating.
They just didn't have any of the financial privilege that blinds, I think, Western politicians and Western civil society people and Western NGOs.
(08:39):
They were much more like, we are hearing what you're saying and we want to know more.
And it was fascinating.
And I think that country is going to be one of the leaders, I think, in the next decade in terms of Bitcoin adoption by just different parts of the country there.
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(11:12):
What kind of form?
Because like,
are they thinking of
a strategic Bitcoin reserve
in a way of like...
No, no, no.
Operationally.
Okay.
Remember, they're not in government.
Now, once they come into government,
we don't know what that looks like.
But right now,
they're an opposition movement.
So they need to fund
political parties
and election monitoring
and, you know,
civil movements
all across the country.
(11:32):
They need to fund lawyers.
They need to fund
people who've been debanked.
They need to work
with sister groups
in other countries
that are even more
hardcore dictatorships.
like Cambodia and Burma.
So for them, it's an operational tool.
They're not thinking about it as like a financial asset for their economy.
So you weren't talking to them about the IMF book you wrote
and ways that they can get out of those kind of perpetual debts and things like that?
(11:55):
No, I mean, I think that that's a conversation for once they're in power, right?
So this is about Bitcoin is Freedom Money
for people who are critics of the current government and who are opponents.
Once you're in power, then those are different factors and different considerations.
I mean, I think there's no way you could have segued that better into your latest piece,
(12:16):
Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money.
I needed this piece.
Like we've spoken about this on the podcast before, but with like the growing just constant
talk of sort of the financialization of Bitcoin as being used in different power structures,
it's nice to hear a piece about freedom money again.
Because when I was first getting interested in Bitcoin, that was the narrative.
And it seems to have fallen back a little bit to this, you know, how it's infiltrating
(12:40):
Wall Street or those kinds of conversations.
I mean, up through 2018, 19, it really was.
And then we've had, you know, the sailorization and the Wall Streetization and the BlackRockization
and the ETFization of Bitcoin.
And I listened to the show you did with Pete Rizzo and it was interesting because he was
talking about the different narratives and who holds power in each cycle.
(13:01):
And I think in that case, he's reading it correctly.
There's a current narrative that is very dominant now that Bitcoin is a financial asset alone and that people don't really like to talk about the freedom properties.
And that's so different from the early, the first decade, you know, essentially.
But the original use case for Bitcoin remains the use case.
You know, the first actual documented probably real life use case for Bitcoin outside of people experimenting with it in a small scale was probably WikiLeaks.
(13:29):
Fundraising in Bitcoin when their fiat rails were shuttered.
And that continues to be the use case for Bitcoin in my view.
So for background, I didn't choose the title, which is really quite nice that they chose one that I like.
I think another contender was, why do dictators detest Bitcoin?
Which also would have been good.
(13:49):
But this one, this is a classic.
So happy they chose why Bitcoin is freedom money.
Just for background, the Journal of Democracy is a top 10 global academic journal in political science.
When I was a political science student 20 years ago, it was one of the things we read all the time in our classes.
(14:10):
And we would use these chapters and essays in this journal, which is a quarterly, as core texts in our work.
So this essay is going to be read by a lot of students and a lot of teachers, which I was very excited to see.
It's also a top academic journal.
It is also very establishment.
(14:30):
It's not some sort of radical thing. It's actually something that is funded by the U.S. Congress, not the White House or, let's say, the State Department or something like that.
But essentially when the idea of America as a – and obviously we can differ about the effectiveness or the, let's say, the honesty of it.
(14:52):
But, you know, a lot of American bodies were set up to promote democracy during – especially during the Cold War, right?
And one of them was the National Endowment for Democracy, which has a budget of $200-$300 million a year.
And one of the things that it works on is this project, which is a journal.
And they publish debates and discourse about, you know, the evolution or the regression of democracy.
(15:17):
So it was actually here last year that the editor in Nashville at the Global Bitcoin Summit, I brought him here as a guest, a friend of ours, Sergei Popovich, who's an activist.
to help to bring down the Milosevic regime in Serbia in the 90s peacefully without a shot fired Serge introduced me to this person and this person came here and started to get very interested in Bitcoin and Bitcoin related stuff
(15:44):
And in the time since they published about a year and a half ago, like a small blog type
post for me on their website that was very popular.
And this spring, they invited me to do a full essay in their print edition, which I was
super excited about. It's long. It's like 8,500 words, but it gave me the space to run in terms of
(16:05):
I wanted to go deep into essentially the historic backdrop. How did money move from an instrument
of freedom to a tool of control, which, you know, is I think hinted at a lot in Lin Alden's essay.
Why is there a banking crisis in human rights work today? Case studies. Let's look at Afghanistan.
Let's look at Togo. Let's look at Cuba. Let's look at Hong Kong. Let's look at Belarus. Let's
(16:27):
at some of these other places. I wanted to look at FUD and I wanted to kind of tackle some of the
biggest FUD that I thought academics and students and NGOs would be facing, which largely revolved
around things like volatility, lack of adoption by merchants, the environment piece, and the
criminality piece. So I tackle all of that in the essay. A very important thing that a lot of
(16:50):
academics asked me to put in here is why Bitcoin and not crypto or blockchain. So I have a whole
section on why Bitcoin and not crypto or blockchain. And in fact, if someone says they're
doing something with crypto or blockchain, but can't be specific, huge red flag, huge red flag
right away. In fact, anyone who really uses the word blockchain outside of a highly technical
(17:11):
discourse about Bitcoin, a massive red flag, obviously, if someone has like a, you know,
the word blockchain in their X profile or LinkedIn, just immediately dismiss this person.
I mean, I literally recently brought on an assistant to help me with just running things.
And one of the things that I gave them advice on in terms of like monitoring inbox and stuff is if it says defile blockchain, just-
No, just immediate.
(17:31):
Discard it.
But I had to say that, right?
And then a little bit about the fact that this is not some experiment.
This is a huge global movement where I was relying on some of the data from the recent Cornell study, global Bitcoin adoption, 25,000 respondents in dozens of countries.
And, you know, looking at sales of hardware wallets, which is way past 10 million.
(17:53):
and then looking at downloads of self-custodial phone wallets, tens of millions, and looking at just exchange filings.
And even Coinbase alone has more than 100 million users.
And, you know, obviously a majority of them use Bitcoin.
So we're talking about tens, if not hundreds of millions of people here at one stop or another on their Bitcoin journey.
(18:17):
Yeah. Now, most of them are at the beginning where they don't really quite understand it and they maybe view it as something to trade.
but still they've begun the journey and then the journey goes from there and if you've got more than
10 million people buying you know the top couple uh hardware wallet manufacturers that actually
release numbers I mean the real numbers are bigger than that but you know we're talking about
(18:40):
serious numbers of people around the world who are self self-custodial Bitcoin users in a true
sense. And this thing is revolutionizing human rights work. And I really just wanted to put that
in a very straightforward way with tons of documentation so that it can no longer be
denied. And I'm really grateful to the folks at JOD for helping me put that in there in a
(19:05):
platform and format that can't just be dismissed. Because I love writing for places like Bitcoin
Magazine or whatever. But obviously, if I try to show up to a fight with Bitcoin Magazine article,
I get immediately dismissed
because it's biased
you know is what they would say
now if it's in the Journal of Democracy
print edition
okay
now we're doing something
(19:26):
a little different right
and you can see
like the way you approach the article
is different
because it was in the Journal of Democracy
not in Bitcoin
you gotta know your audience
you kind of started from the ground up
and then built the entire picture
throughout the
yeah I mean the thing I tried to work on
at the beginning
was trying to lay out how
like Bitcoin
like financial repression itself is so widespread and affects so many people way more than political
(19:51):
repression if you think about it like not that many people are professional politicians or human
rights workers but everybody uses money right and yet financial repression is just never talked
about in the human rights industry outside of the work we're doing really to be honest and a few other
people but it's it's getting there but like five to ten years ago nobody talked about it and and yet
(20:13):
it is so important and it never gets the airtime that election rigging or political prisoners or
censorship in the media gets. And it should be right there. I mean, financial repression should
be right there with censorship of the media, sacking of justices, you know, rigging constitutions,
(20:33):
fabricating elections, debanking and financial censorship is right there. I mean, if not
more widespread. So I think people are finally waking up to it. And it's time that hopefully,
any group that's pursuing a liberty-minded cause, a freedom-minded cause to empower the people in
(20:54):
their country, starts using this as a tool. And I hope this can be a nice little helpful
conversation starter, if not a blueprint. What was nice is they gave me a little space in the essay
to do like a 101 of like, well, how do I begin? And it's like, great, use these tools,
consider collaborative custody. Maybe you want to do self-custody. Don't use KYC exchanges. It
allowed me a little bit of space to point to like, how do you get started? And then of course, we
(21:19):
have, Ahrefs has a webinar we do every quarter that brings you zero to one at least in a couple
of days with BTC Sessions and our friend Anna Chekovich, and they lead that. So they allowed
me to mention that in there, which was pretty cool. That's very cool. I'm actually recording
with sessions straight after this. So this is a perfect segue. But let's start with the money
(21:40):
being a tool that used to be used in a relatively free and fair and open way when things were just
cash to the progression to basically everything now being digital and what the problems are for
sort of people that you're helping around the world. Yeah. And I think Linaldin in her book
traces this extremely well in Broken Money that scientifically, technologically, this was kind
(22:02):
of going to happen 100 times out of 100. The fiat credit control system just advanced faster
than the hard money system. Like hard money, we had gold, and then we just didn't really have an
innovation for a very long time until Bitcoin. Whereas fiat money, with the invention of the
telegraph and the invention of wireless communication and computers and credit cards,
(22:27):
It just had a tsunami of innovation.
So it was always going to sort of outpace hard money in her view.
I hope I'm not misquoting her, but basically that's sort of the idea part of the book is she's looking at the scientific evolution of money.
And she's basically pointing out that like money had been on a almost like inevitable evolution due to technological advancements of becoming more and more a tool of credit and more and more a tool of control.
(22:54):
and then we forked finally with Bitcoin.
And now we have a way of evolving money
in a way that makes it more and more a tool of freedom.
And in the paper, what I describe is how,
look, 50 years ago,
it was very hard to micro track the economy.
If most people are using cash or even check,
(23:16):
it's just hard to like run models
and understand what people are gonna do next
or try to locate people's behavior or preferences.
But today, when everything is done digitally with chips and Bluetooth tracking devices and stores and every payment is linked to your ID, it's trivial for governments to understand what's going on and start to model and control and sensor.
(23:38):
And obviously, AI tooling and big data has made that even easier and more scary.
So in a way, you know, financial repression like we have today just wasn't really possible 40, 50 years ago.
But over the last 20 years, it's become pretty much the first and foremost tactic used by authoritarians to censor and stop their critics.
(24:01):
And it's high time that it's recognized as such in the literature, in the academic collegiate establishment literature, that financial repression is a first tool of autocrats.
And how do we rebel?
How do we resist with Bitcoin?
There's a line that you wrote in this,
which was what you spend says more about you
(24:23):
than what you say.
And I thought that was super interesting.
And I do remember hearing that Amazon
will know that you're pregnant before you do
based on your buying habits.
Yeah, I remember that.
And these are the things that are terrifying
about moving to a,
even if it's not full-blown CBDC,
which I think we are seeing, like you say,
there's over a hundred countries now looking into this.
(24:43):
Like we're moving to a more surveilled,
more tracked system.
And even look, we're concerned about CBDCs, but let's be clear.
Governments with cooperation with private corporations can essentially approximate a CBDC already.
Yeah.
Like bank credits and fintech credits, you know, are freezable at will, are censorable.
(25:03):
And ultimately, I think stable coins will follow that course.
They don't give an escape from this either.
And really what I wanted to do in the paper was hit like the different aspects of Bitcoin, you know, digital cash and its digital gold.
So I opened with, you know, on the one hand, this addresses the issues of people who are being spied on and politically debanked and censored.
And on the other hand, it addresses the issues of people who are being debased, rugged and devalued and have had their currency demonetized or confiscated.
(25:34):
So these are the two ways in which authoritarians use money as a weapon and Bitcoin as a shield against both of them, which is so important.
These other digital currency technologies that are privacy minded, you know, we can debate about which ones are honest and which ones are scams.
But at the end of the day, none of them are hard money.
(25:55):
So they can really only attack the privacy piece.
Now, I think eCash is the best version of them personally.
But again, eCash is just a credit.
It's an IOU.
You need the hard money piece.
So the thing has to be built with Bitcoin.
And if you can build a Bitcoin system where you have the 21 million protecting you against what is usually the biggest crime in, let's say, monetary repression globally, which is the devaluation overnight.
(26:24):
And you and I saw this when we went to Malawi a few years ago, where we arrived a few weeks after the government had done a 44% overnight currency devaluation, which I consider a crime against humanity because nobody got to vote for that.
Nobody got to weigh in on that.
All of a sudden, just 44% of their wealth was gone.
44% of their purchasing power was vanished.
(26:44):
This removes that option from governments.
If you're saving and using Bitcoin, they can't touch you.
That's magical.
I think that's so, so powerful.
Now, at the same time, you can couple that with privacy technologies.
It's not as straightforward as we'd like, but it's easy enough these days.
And it's guessing better.
And I think people sometimes misunderstand permissionlessness versus privacy. Yes, like full anonymous e-cash level privacy is very important. But oftentimes, just the fact that you can use Bitcoin without your ID is a huge upgrade over the current system.
(27:26):
Like, yes, I understand that anyone can look at blockchain data.
Sure.
But if you've never attached your name to it, it's freaking useless.
So it's like, I'm always arguing with Monero and Zcash people about this.
Like you have to give something to the permissionless piece.
It's not just the fact that there's, you know, whether or not it's shielded transactions or
(27:47):
not.
It's like, no, I bought this with cash or whatever.
You've no idea who owns this.
And then I moved it to someone else.
And it's just, if you'd never attach your ID to the blockchain, it's, you know, provably harder to track and understand what's going on.
And basically my point is that people face a lot of issues around the world in the world of democracy promotion, human rights promotion, you know, national movements of different kinds in different places, independent media, environmentalism, journalism.
(28:22):
so many different, again, movements of people trying to change their country or society
or trying to prevent radical change, one or the other.
And money and banking and debanking and deplatforming is becoming like the front line.
And that is finally being recognized in a prestigious journal,
(28:46):
which I'm just super, super happy to have that opportunity.
And the debanking thing, while I know it's happening in a lot of these sort of oppressive regimes, but it's happening in like the UK.
This isn't even like, it's a really, really scary part of like the political world that we live in now.
But can we get really basic?
Because what I loved about this is that it's going to hit an entirely different audience.
(29:08):
In fact, it's not even a narrative.
Like this is just the story of Bitcoin.
This is just truth.
I think narrative almost minimizes it.
And it's a really powerful way of getting people interested in Bitcoin.
And what I think will be cool is I think this is the kind of show that people will want to share with friends and family who might be interested in Bitcoin but skeptical.
And this shows them what it can actually do.
So in the piece, you write about Roya Mahbub's story in Afghanistan.
(29:32):
Yes.
Can you tell that story?
Sure.
Look, it was 2013.
Roya is a businesswoman in Afghanistan.
And she's starting a company that employs a lot of women around the country.
and there is no mobile money in Afghanistan at the time.
(29:52):
Most Western financial products
that we get to use in the United States or whatever,
like Venmo, PayPal, aren't there.
They're not available for Afghans for different reasons.
And if she tries to pay them in cash
or through like the Hawala system,
which is the traditional way of moving money around,
the male relatives of the women take the money
so they don't have control over it.
And they don't really, for different reasons,
(30:12):
have bank accounts.
So she's sitting there and trying to figure out, well, how can I pay them?
And a friend of hers tells her about Bitcoin and it's Q1, Q2, 2013.
Bitcoin is like 30, 40 bucks.
And she's like, why not?
And they figure it out and they start using basic wallets and things are just so different
back then.
But, you know, she goes on this rollercoaster ride where Bitcoin goes from 30 bucks to 100
(30:33):
bucks to 500 bucks to 1200 bucks.
And then through all the Gox stuff, you know, starts to crash and it cascades all the way
down to 200 bucks basically something like that and all throughout this she feels all the emotions
right she's like wow this is incredibly liberating but wow also very risky and she goes through this
all and at the end of it she decides to pivot her business a little bit away from that but
(30:59):
incorporate it into a charity that she has started to educate girls in afghanistan
so one of the first things she does when she educating what ends up being tens of thousands of women when she educating just literacy science math And is this something that had been banned by the Taliban Well as you know any education of older girls is banned
(31:22):
They haven't been to school in, I think, 13, 1400 days
or something like that since the takeover.
But at the time, it was the American occupation
and there was a more secular government in power
and they were okay with this.
And Roya ends up again, like teaching tens of thousands of girls about everything from robotics to using computers to Bitcoin and how to use Bitcoin.
(31:44):
And after the takeover in 2021, you couldn't use the U.S. dollar to get money in.
The whole economy was collapsing.
Everything was cut off.
But you could use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't care.
Bitcoin works, right?
And that's what she does today.
So even though the Taliban officially prevents women in elementary, middle school, et cetera, from going to school and becoming educated, Roya runs underground schools and she pays the teachers in Bitcoin.
(32:12):
And it's amazing.
And it's a really great example for people listening of whenever they hear someone in the FT or the economist or in the broadsheets or on TV say, oh, Bitcoin has no use case.
The dollar and the pound cannot do this.
You cannot technologically use the dollar or pound to fund underground schools in Afghanistan, but you can use Bitcoin.
So just remember that.
(32:32):
That's a very powerful use case of what Bitcoin can do that fiat money cannot.
So I wanted to include that story in here because it might be a surprising one for some people.
I think it'll be a surprising one for a lot of people who haven't been paying close attention to Bitcoin.
And it's not like this is a one-off story.
This stuff is happening all over the world now.
Yeah, and it's also an example of the duality of Bitcoin where that's kind of the digital cash side of it,
(32:54):
where you don't use permission to use it.
Anyone can use it.
It's the same for the billionaire and the refugee.
It doesn't care about your birth or ethnicity
or gender or background,
and that's just such a beautiful thing about Bitcoin.
But also the digital gold part of it played a huge role
in as much as the early adopters of this thing
(33:16):
did very well.
Like one of her sisters at that time
in the 2013, 2014 period,
And when women wanted to buy stuff with Bitcoin and the merchant wouldn't accept it, she would buy the Bitcoin from them, give them cash.
And she saved that.
And over three, four, five years, used it to pay for her education at Cornell University, which is amazing.
(33:38):
There was another woman who worked for Roya named Leila.
And she had to escape Afghanistan and was one of the countless Afghans who fled over through Iran dangerously, through Turkey, on a boat, got to Europe, made it to Germany, lives life there now.
and was able to take her seed phrase with her,
start a new life.
And by the time she got there,
(33:59):
Bitcoin had like quadrupled in value
and she was able to start a new life.
So, you know, refugees throughout history
didn't have that ability.
Like I have some ancestors who fled the Holocaust,
for example.
They just fled with what was on their back,
you know, they had no way.
But people today fleeing from Syria,
you know, whether it was fleeing from Syria
or Venezuela several years ago,
(34:19):
fleeing from Gaza or Yemen or Sudan today,
they can take their value with them.
They can convert value to Bitcoin
and they can take it with them.
And that's amazing.
And we're going to hear a story tomorrow
about that at the Global Bitcoin Summit
about someone whose life was saved by Bitcoin.
And that's going to be a keynote speech.
Someone from the Middle East
(34:40):
who had to flee bombing and war
and was able to do it
and was able to do it because of Bitcoin.
So it's a very powerful thing that people just,
you'd never know when you just sit there and look at price and price charts and
financialization and out-competing inflate just all this the rhetoric you see you don't see the
(35:03):
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Last time
we spoke,
one of the things I said to you is
(37:38):
a quote from Thomas Pacquiao who
said that we're all going to be rich and depressed
because the project failed. And that is the idea
of freedom money dying along the way.
But since then,
I've thought a lot about that. And I actually think
that as long as someone out there
is using Bitcoin as freedom money,
then it's all been worth it.
These stories can't happen without Bitcoin.
(37:59):
And it's pretty incredible.
I don't know if you agree with that.
I think the percentage of people using Bitcoin as freedom money as a whole will almost certainly shrink.
But as long as people still have the ability to transact with Bitcoin in any way they see fit, then this project has been entirely worth it.
Well, there's different levels there, right?
So one level is Bitcoin slowly replacing fiat currency as a global money.
(38:29):
And that might mean store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account.
And that's the thing that prevents the biggest crimes, which are theft by inflation and currency devaluation.
The things that affect the most people, billions of people.
taking that big red button away from authoritarians and government officials where they can just say,
(38:52):
oh, we're going to make your time and labor worth less.
In a Bitcoin world, regardless of whether or not people are using it as freedom money or IOUs of Bitcoin or whatever,
if Bitcoin gets to the point where it is the unit of account, we win there.
That's a massive victory.
Now, it could even be better.
(39:13):
And we have a talk on that.
by Jeremy Rubin here in the next few days.
That's going to be very interesting
because I think it's a massive victory,
but it's a partial victory
because ultimately what we'd like
is for everybody to be able to be self-custodial,
have control of their money
and be able to spend it without paperwork
(39:34):
and in a way that protects privacy.
And I think that's a more challenging vision.
I personally think that Bitcoin is really quite destined to become the unit of account of the
world eventually. I just think everything is moving in that direction. It's relationship with
energy markets, with global trade, with the way the rival world works, with the way that we
(39:58):
gravitate towards a one currency, and with the way that nation states, which aren't going anywhere
really, and empires, which last hundreds, if not thousands of years as they rise and fall,
they don't want to be using someone else's money ultimately to save in. And they don't want to be
subject to those people's rules. So the idea of one neutral currency, I think, is very powerful.
(40:23):
It has a lot of gravity to it. But can the citizens use it with the same degree as freedom
as the rulers is the question. We don't know that. There are going to be trade-offs and sacrifices,
Right. Like can a day laborer in 100 years afford an on-chain Bitcoin transaction?
(40:43):
Not today, meaning the sat value, the Satoshi value of transactions will likely, you know, maybe not increase that much or may even get cheaper in some ways due to like interesting ways we can do collaborative spending and things like that.
(41:04):
But the sat itself is going to increase in value so much against the dollar and fiats that, you know, it very well could be a world where only a small percentage of people on earth can afford to just be on chain alongside corporations and governments.
So the question is, well, what can we do about that?
(41:27):
And there's a lot you can do.
You can do side chains, key sharing things.
I can trade a private key without having to spend anything on the blockchain.
There's a lot of interesting stuff around that.
There's stuff around, for example, cross-input signature aggregation, where you can reduce
the Bitcoin-denominated cost of a transaction by collaboratively working together.
(41:49):
And there's many other ideas in that area.
There are reasonable trade-offs you can make with things coming up that are now starting
to be unrolled like ARK or even Spark, where with a particular trade-off, people can kind
of have self-custody Bitcoin in a way.
I say kind of, I'm qualifying, not fully, but kind of, not as much as Bitcoin on chain
(42:13):
or lightning, of course, but in a way they can have it and they don't have to pay a year's
worth of wages, let's say, maybe in the future.
So I'm very optimistic, actually.
Basically, what I'm saying is I think it's a lock that Bitcoin eventually overthrows fiat as like the global dominant kind of currency and like the way we think about how much things are valued.
(42:36):
But it remains unclear whether it actually is free to money for everybody.
But I think we have a pretty good shot.
And I think it continues to grow.
I mean, if you think about what's available today, just all these different options of ways to use Bitcoin with lightning as a connective tissue between things rolling out like Spark and ARK and eCash and side chains and even just different liquids, liquid platforms and swaps.
(42:59):
And I mean, it's pretty amazing compared to 10 years ago.
Like you can vary like some of these wallets make it so easy to just spend some of your Bitcoin privately in a way that's not really possible to tie back to you.
So I'm bullish on it, but like that's the big challenge. I don't really see a world where government controlled and abused money that's being inflated to infinity retains top dog status in the monetary hierarchy. I just don't see that. I see Bitcoin becoming that.
(43:32):
I guess it's just a question of, can everybody use it equally, which is more or less the case today.
Like when fees are so low, you can essentially, if you're not worried about the speed and you're
receiving a remittance or you're making a payment and it doesn't need to arrive right away,
like a salary or a wage or something, I mean, you can pay like a few cents and you can get it
(43:56):
through. I don't think that's going to be the case in 20 to 50 years. So we have to think big
about that.
So I think it's really easy to often think that Bitcoin doesn't change because it doesn't.
Like the actual underlying Bitcoin protocol does not change very quickly at all.
But like all of those things.
The layers change, dude.
Exactly.
That's what I'm saying.
(44:17):
So like Spark, ARK, eCash, these didn't exist two years ago.
Even just wallet UX.
Yeah.
Like we're moving at like I think a breakneck pace.
It's crazy.
People sometimes maybe miss that.
And regulatory stuff matters a lot.
And the US can lead the way there.
That's why I applaud the work BPI is doing and stuff.
Look, if the US passes a de minimis tax type law where you can use Bitcoin under, I don't know, whatever it is, $1,000 or $2,000 without worrying about taxes, that immediately has major ramifications for every tax authority on the planet.
(44:48):
So I think that our government can set certain standards that can help in our quest to use Bitcoin as money.
I think what Square or rather Block now is working on with the Square readers and that is slowly being activated.
And I think by the end of the year, it sounds like will be an option for sure.
That's very cool.
For 4 million Square readers in the United States and beyond where merchants will be able to accept Bitcoin and they'll get money.
(45:17):
They'll get fiat money.
They'll get dollars that people could spend Bitcoin.
and then they'll have the option
of taking the Bitcoin if they want.
And this is all done through their system
where they have the reader and the cash app
and the BitKey.
It's a really interesting little ecosystem
they have set up.
And I think that's going to be very exciting.
And then you've seen this happening
in an even more kind of permissionless
(45:39):
Wild West kind of setting around the world
where you have apps like Tando and Bitcoin Jungle
and ones being built in Brazil and Ghana and Thailand
where there's different ways for you
to spend your Bitcoin to the merchant. And I think the PayMeInBitcoin thing is really how we're going
to win if we want Bitcoin to become more than just kind of like the monetary standard, but we're still
(46:03):
trapped by a lot of the current constraints. I mean, that is a half victory, but I think the full
victory is PayMeInBitcoin becomes standard. And some of the ways we're getting there now are
really interesting. Like in Thailand, there's this thing where you can pay a mobile Fiat QR code,
code thing. And what's happening is you pay it via an app and you send lightning and someone
(46:27):
manually pays the fiat right there, but they're sitting at their computer waiting because they
make a fee, they take a fee and they just pay it and you walk out of the store. Like
it fast enough that you buy a beer and within 30 seconds it paid and you on your way And what happened there is like on the back end someone got an alert to pay this thing and they pay it using their Thai bot and they get the Bitcoin That awesome
(46:54):
It's fascinating. So there's some like that are kind of hacks. And then there are others
that are more elegant where like Tando in Kenya, like you get into the cab, I talk about
this in the essay, and the cab driver accepts M-Pesa and they whip out the app or the QR
for you to pay them at the end of the ride.
And you use the Tando app and the cab driver gets there
(47:17):
in Pesa and you spend your Bitcoin.
And you didn't have to tell anybody that you went to Kenya.
You didn't have to like call your credit card company.
You just used permissionless Bitcoin and it works.
And there's a lot of places where that's coming alive.
So I think the PayMeInBitcoin thing,
the more service providers we can use that accept Bitcoin,
the more graphic designers, AV technicians, architects,
(47:40):
you know, goods and services providers,
tourism operators, event companies, restaurants.
I mean, you're seeing it happen.
It's slowly but surely.
And it's not gonna happen in the like hardcore evangelical way
that the B cashers tried to do it a long time ago,
where they would sort of force people
to do something they don't understand.
(48:00):
It has to be organic.
Like the merchant has to really like want it, right?
Or else they're just, it's not gonna work.
You can't go door to door being like,
yo, accept Bitcoin, put the sticker here.
You're seeing in El Salvador, that doesn't work.
You can't brute force it.
But slowly but surely, like through some of these Bitcoin educational hubs, people come, they drop in on a class.
They think it's interesting.
They read a little more.
They pick up a book.
(48:21):
They decide to download the software.
They watch one of BTC Sessions' videos.
And all of a sudden, they're accepting tips in Bitcoin or they're doing some work in Bitcoin.
And it's happening.
And it's very exciting to see.
And I talk about that in this essay that, you know, Bitcoin is free to money because of that aspect of it.
Why do you, what part of the pay me in Bitcoin sort of circular economy thing do you like the most?
(48:43):
Is it the fact that this allows people to, you know, if there's someone there selling Bitcoin for cash, you get non-KYC Bitcoin and then you keep that within a certain community?
Or is it just the sort of the mindset change of instead of people taking their local currencies, they're demanding to be paid in a hard money?
Well, let's look at Thailand. So Thailand's trying to set something up where like you enter Thailand as a tourist and you can actually convert your Bitcoin into what is essentially a CBDC.
(49:07):
upon entry.
And like all merchants will accept it
via fiat government order.
Well, you know what?
If the merchants decide to accept Bitcoin,
we can sidestep that whole control process.
You can enter,
you can just go wherever
and you can be on your merry way,
peer to peer without the government
having rent or control.
I think that's a simple way to think about it.
Like if we want to sidestep
and get away from the increasing
(49:29):
kind of whether it be privately run
or publicly run CBDC stablecoin stuff,
it's pay me in Bitcoin.
And like, I think eventually
people are going to
wisen up. Do you really want to be paid
in stable coins? I know that
a lot of people do today because their currency
sucks compared to the dollar.
But eventually, as Bitcoin continues
(49:49):
to grow in value and the dollar
continues to collapse,
people are going to want Bitcoin, dude.
We've seen this at HRF.
Four or five years ago,
a lot of NGOs and activists did want
stable coins. They actually wanted it.
But now, we haven't
hurt a single group. We do hundreds and hundreds of grants around the world. No one's asking us
(50:10):
for Tether or Circle. They want Bitcoin. And they're in a particular use case, like they're
activists. But still, I think that's kind of an interesting tell. I can understand why you would
want access to stable coins if you live in a country with- Totally. I know. And I talk about it. That is a
very valid use case for, if you want to talk about cryptocurrency beyond Bitcoin. I mean,
(50:31):
stable coins are really the other main use case that's not an obvious scam. But I do think, as I
wrote about recently in an essay in Reason, they do extend state power and they help the US address
its debt concerns and they kind of keep the Ponzi scheme going. So I understand why people use them,
I empathize, but we have to understand they are not freedom money at all. And they are not what
(50:55):
Satoshi was trying to do. And they are not in any way cypherpunk or, you know, I mean, look,
that they, again, they extend fiat network effect globally,
and they kind of keep the system alive
and growing in a new way.
How do we make sure that they don't become
just another arm of the government
and essentially like a CBDC type instrument?
(51:16):
Or is it the fact- Meaning stablecoins?
Yeah. Or is it the fact that because you just
can always opt out into Bitcoin, that's not a real concern?
There are interesting experiments with doing stablecoins
in a way that are not like tied to a reserve
and tied to a banking system
and tied to buying US debt.
But ultimately, anything dollar denominated is pro-dollar.
(51:37):
I don't care how you do it, how you get your stablecoin,
or whether it's on the Lightning Network,
or whether it's a stable channel on Lightning,
or whether it's Tether on Lightning, or whatever.
Some of that stuff may be on a scale better
than Tether on Tron or whatever.
I get it.
But if it's USD denominated, it supports the dollar hegemony fiat system.
(52:03):
That's why it needs to be Bitcoin denominated to create a resistance, to create an alternative.
It's all about the unit of account.
Okay.
Again, thinking about who at least I'm going to send this conversation to.
There's people that I know should be interested in Bitcoin.
They're not quite there.
I want to send them a show that can lay out what Bitcoin actually does.
Why Bitcoin, not crypto?
(52:24):
Well, I mean, think about it this way. There's 20,000 some odd cryptos. They range from obvious jokes like Shiba Inu or Dogecoin to politician coins like Trump coin or Melania coin to NFTs that have gone to zero to obvious scams. So many obvious scams where people have gone to prison for launching them.
(52:48):
they are all, and I write about this,
like their sole existence is to enrich the creators
at the expense of you, the retail person.
Unless you have insider information,
you're going to lose money on these things over time.
And they all go to zero in Bitcoin terms.
There was something interesting the other day about Zcash.
(53:11):
And people are going crazy
because Zcash went up like 45, 50% in dollar terms in a day.
And you look at, but you look at the Zcash Bitcoin chart.
You can't even see it.
You can't even see it.
It's collapsed so badly against Bitcoin over the last decade.
So these are rugs, you know, and be careful.
If you want something that is going to retain purchasing power over a long period of time and has a global network effect and is trusted by all kinds of people in adversarial scenarios.
(53:41):
and has, again, increased in value over time in a consistent manner, it's Bitcoin.
I mean, even Ethereum is nowhere close to its high in Bitcoin terms.
Like, again, don't look at dollar terms.
Look at Bitcoin terms.
At one point, one ETH could get you 0.15 Bitcoin.
(54:03):
Today, it's 0.03 or something like that.
So you have to think about it in Bitcoin terms.
How much Bitcoin can these altcoins get you?
And over time, it goes to zero.
It goes to zero.
They may in a vacuum be going up against the dollar,
because everything's going up against the dollar.
Gold today, as we record, just hit $4,000.
(54:26):
So the dollar is losing its place.
I mean, it's still by far the king of fiats,
of fiats, but it's slowly losing its place as the only way to do store of value, medium
exchange unit of account.
And Bitcoin is slowly rising.
(54:47):
I mean, this should be obvious to anyone who's looking.
I don't think there's ever been a more clear signal than JP Morgan coming out with their
debasement trade about gold and Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Like everyone is waking up to this.
Yeah.
And then eventually people wake up to the fact that Bitcoin does what gold does, but better.
Yeah.
But people aren't there yet.
And, you know, but look, as we're speaking, less than 24 hours ago, Bitcoin was at 126, which is just crazy to think about.
(55:11):
Like, again, that is a real thing that saves people's lives.
Like these Cubans I was interviewing that I talked about in the essay five years ago, Bitcoin was trading around $5,000.
And they were faced with a choice.
Their currency was being changed by the Cuban government, you know, essentially used to trade at like 24 to $1.
(55:32):
and the government would struggle to keep that peg.
And the real market value would usually be lower.
But once they basically stopped protecting that peg,
it hyperinflated.
And in the last five years,
now it's more than 400 pesos per dollar on the black market.
So it's lost more than 95% of its value.
(55:52):
Or like the dozens of Cubans I interviewed,
you could have started stacking sats
and converting into Bitcoin at the time.
And think about that.
Now you're up 25, 30 X, okay?
Versus being down 95%.
That's a life or death scenario for a lot of people.
(56:13):
100%.
And that's just five years.
This is not, we don't have, we're not going back to,
you know, throwing your Bitcoin in a dump
and not finding a 2010 era Bitcoin.
We're talking about five years ago,
talking about pandemic era and we're up 20 to 30 X.
So, you know, this is not something that like you missed the boat on.
(56:34):
It's going to continue to do this and it's going to continue to be really valuable for people.
It's an amazing piece.
I'm going to make sure I link it in the show.
Are the talks that are happening here going to be recorded?
Yeah, yeah.
So basically, this is the third year that the Human Rights Foundation has run the Global Bitcoin Summit.
We do it like off the record and privately because we really want to make sure that the activists who come,
(56:59):
and the human rights activists,
and the folks working in opposition movements
have peace of mind when they're talking about these issues
because they're A, they're-
Sensitive.
Well, they're nervous about talking about money.
They're a little embarrassed
because they don't know a huge amount about Bitcoins.
We want to create a safe space for that.
And we bring in just a totally badass crew
of elite Bitcoin developers, builders, investors, donors,
(57:24):
miners, educators, community builders.
And we spend three days together trading notes
and learning from each other.
And some of the content we'll put up online, yeah.
But really it's just our effort
at just continuing to move that needle forward
of operationalizing what's in the essay.
We are pushing forward Bitcoin as freedom money here.
(57:46):
We're not like pushing it forward
as something that you can make a copy of and trade,
or that you can make a copy of a copy of a copy,
like the Nine Inch Nails song, copy of a,
yeah, it's just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.
We're not interested in, you know,
cascading derivatives.
(58:08):
We are interested in teaching people
about how to be self sovereign
and how that can amplify and strengthen their work,
opposing tyranny around the world
and how it can make them more unstoppable.
That's the name of our webinar that we do
has become unstoppable.
Like we want you to be able to fund the investigation
(58:31):
or the protest or the movement
in a particular place in the world
and not be stopped because of monetary technology.
And now we can do that with Satoshi's invention,
which is quite remarkable.
It is literally magic.
It's amazing.
And that's what I end the piece with is,
you know, Satoshi probably didn't know
what was gonna happen.
They speculated quite a bit,
(58:52):
but I think it's fair to say that it's earned that name.
freedom money for sure by now, regardless of what happens with its price in the future,
regardless of the price. I mean, Bitcoin at 3K versus 10K versus 100K versus 4K versus 80K.
It doesn't really matter. It's all freedom money. It's always been freedom money and it always can
(59:13):
move value from A to B without permission, regardless of your gender or your ethnicity,
or regardless of what your colonial occupier or your dictator or the corporation that exerts
power and your structure in your region thinks. It doesn't matter what they all think. Bitcoin
can make money move regardless of what they think and how they feel. And that's really what makes
(59:36):
Bitcoin free to money. And it continues to be that for people around the world.
I love it, man. This has obviously gone out to a load of people that aren't Bitcoiners.
Yes. Have you had any interesting feedback from it so far?
Yes. So as a result, I've been invited to speak at numerous groups that do this kind of work.
you know, where they're like, wow, this is really interesting. Will you come in and speak to our
(59:58):
teams, you know, working on in this field? And I'm happy to do it. And look, a lot of them are going
to be a little nervous about it. They may want to start with stable coins. That's fine. You know,
if that's where they want to be, that's okay. But eventually they're going to realize Bitcoin's
better. I mean, stable coins are really tricky. Like, let's not forget, they're not compatible
with each other. You need a broker. So Tether on Tron doesn't like pay, you know, Tether on ETH or
(01:00:23):
whatever. They're not natively like that. It's a much more complicated ball game. And
ultimately, they get frozen and they can go to zero as we saw with Terra Luna. So I think that
ultimately, the ease of Bitcoin being like one global monetary language will win over even the
(01:00:44):
most hardened skeptics, but it's just going to take time. And I think even though this might be
the very first touch point, it might be more interesting stable coins for now, Bitcoin gets
it's hooks in you. Since the first day I learned about Bitcoin, I bet there's not been a single day
since I've not thought about it. And I think that happens to a lot of people.
We are pushing the freedom virus forward and it's spreading and there's no stopping it. So again,
(01:01:04):
we can debate all day about the crisis in Bitcoin du jour, you know, going back through the years,
but it's continues to spread and it continues to work. And it's something that's really inspiring.
I'd feel a lot more depressed about the world if we didn't have this thing out there,
you know, which is capable of helping people in the darkest corners of the planet
(01:01:28):
where no one else wants to help.
It's there.
And that's so cool.
A hundred percent.
Okay.
I'm going to make sure that the links for this are in the show.
I'm going to put some videos in the show.
But where do you want to send anyone if you want to find out more about you and the Human
Rights Foundation?
Yeah, well, check out the essay and check out our work at href.org slash financial freedom
if you want to look at all the initiatives we're running.
and follow me on X at Gladstein.
(01:01:49):
I have my Nostra NPUB there as well.
Follow me on the Unstoppable Social Network.
Unique content over there as always.
And let's stay in touch.
It's always a pleasure and an honor to be on the show, Danny.
So thank you so much.
No, I love it.
Thanks for coming on, man.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
(01:02:17):
Thank you.
This addresses the issues of people who are being spied on and politically debanked and censored.
(00:08):
And it addresses the issues of people who are being debased, rugged, and devalued.
The things that affect the most people, billions of people.
Taking that big red button away from authoritarians and government officials where they can just say,
Oh, we're going to make your time and labor worth less.
(00:28):
How do we rebel?
How do we resist with Bitcoin?
You don't see the bigger picture, which is a global revolution happening with tens, if not hundreds of millions of people where we are taking power back.
That's a life or death scenario for a lot of people.
We are pushing the freedom virus forward and it's spreading and there's no stopping it.
(00:51):
Mr. Gladstein, how are you doing?
I'm great. How are you?
I'm very good.
We're here in Nashville.
I know.
We've got the HRF Global Bitcoin Summit coming up.
Yeah, last time I saw you, we were in Indonesia.
We were in Bali.
So I was in your part of the world.
Roughly.
It's still like a five-hour flight, but it's as close as you get.
Closer than the USA.
That's for sure.
We did a lot of surfing.
Yeah, we did some surfing and saw a lot of local Bitcoin adoption, which we can get into.
(01:18):
I want to know, because I was with you there for a week or so, and then you went off and
did a bit of a tour around Southeast Asia.
What was that like?
Yeah. So one of the things we've been doing at the Human Rights Foundation is taking an alliance of some of our stakeholders, some of the world's leading human rights activists, some of the world's leading Bitcoin developers and builders, and traveling together in a particular part of the world for, let's call it a week or two to just see what global Bitcoin adoption is up to.
(01:54):
and in this particular case,
we were doing Southeast Asia.
So we started in Indonesia.
We got to see the Bitcoin Indonesia conference,
which was really interesting
and kind of more importantly,
saw the center that they have there,
which is this very cool
like three to four story learning center
with an outdoor amphitheater
and really impressive, consistent programming.
(02:15):
It's a really cool space.
And they're doing programming all the time,
both in Indonesian and in English
and other languages.
and they are pumping out Bitcoiners there.
So that was quite something to see.
And from there, we went up to Malaysia
and we had some meetings with people in the government there,
which was really interesting
just to get a sense of kind of where they are on Bitcoin.
(02:37):
And some of us in the group were very interested
in the whole thesis that Harris Irfan and Alan Farrington
are kind of spearheading in terms of Bitcoin
as Islamic money or halal money.
And that's very relevant in Malaysia.
We also met with Malaysian Bitcoin community.
we got to meet the folks building the Frostnaps, which is a Malaysian creation, or at least partly
(02:57):
made in Malaysia. He's an Aussie, isn't he? Lloyd. Yes, but one of his co-founders in Malaysian.
And they're doing some of the work there, some of the manufacturing there. And it was quite
interesting to see that live. We were able to obtain them and start using them. And I think
that's a really clever way to do multisig. So that was neat. From there, we went up to Chiang Mai,
(03:18):
where we got to visit Jimmy Castro's Bitcoin Learning Center,
which was fantastic.
I think it's probably one of the most well-made
and thoughtful Bitcoin hubs, community spaces in the world.
I mean, it's almost the same quality as Bitcoin Park,
but it's in Chiang Mai.
(03:39):
And it's like three floors, and you enter down a street,
and it has a street sign.
It's like, Bitcoin Learning Center, this way.
and there's this really cool street mural
of all kinds of sort of Thai culture
mashed up with Bitcoin.
And you get there and there's a gigantic flag
20 feet high that just has freedom on it.
And you go in and it's got a Bitcoin ATM
that accepts eCash.
It's got giant like white paper poster.
(04:00):
It's got a beautiful podcast studio.
It has an event space, super high end.
And they're really positioned well
because they're right in the middle of China,
Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.
So right in the heart of Southeast Asia.
So, so many people from those countries
come there to learn more.
So that was very impressive.
I was speaking to Jimmy a little bit when we were in Bali.
(04:22):
You were saying they get a lot of people come across from Laos.
And Burma.
So they have classes in both of those languages.
And I think the way they basically do it is because there's a lot of expats there too.
I met a bunch of people who founded Bitcoin companies who live there.
But basically, they'll do classes in Thai.
They'll do classes in English, and they just rotate.
(04:43):
From there, we went down to Bangkok and we visited Bob Space, founded by Piccolo and friends, which is really quite cool.
Because there, they're focusing more on the sort of deep tech and privacy tech and self-sovereignty tech.
We got to see some of the presentations from some of their grantees.
It's basically an incubator.
And we've been supporting that.
So that's been a lot of fun.
(05:07):
And so when you were in, was it Malaysia you spoke to the government?
We spoke to someone who is in the ruling party at a very high level.
Okay.
But is someone who is a friend of ours from a long time ago.
The background is that the leader of Malaysia today used to be a political prisoner.
Oh, I didn't know.
And was put in prison by his predecessor.
(05:27):
And his name is Anwar Ibrahim, and he's now prime minister.
And we helped work on Anwar's case when Anwar was a political prisoner.
And he spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the event we do in Norway.
in 2010. And we helped on his case when he was put in prison after that. And now he got out and now
he's leading the country. So they're trying to figure out their digital asset strategy. And,
(05:50):
you know, CZ is being very aggressive there. But it's good to know that there's some people who
are thinking, you know, very clearly about Bitcoin. But, you know, it's a tough situation
for most of these folks because there's so many competing interests coming to them, right?
Everybody wants a piece, you know?
But it was good to go and provide some straightforward talk on why Bitcoin.
(06:10):
And I imagine there's a lot of people trying to throw money at them to do things that are in their interest.
Oh, CZ, yeah, of course.
But he must get the necessity for freedom money with his background, you would imagine.
I think we're going to get there.
You know, I think it's just a tough road, but I think we get there.
And in any event, to kind of marry that point to Thailand,
(06:32):
And after we visited Bob's base, we did an event at the Thai parliament, which is a spectacular building and very storied history in Thailand of democracy and then no democracy and military coup and democracy again and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
And we were there at the behest of a guy named Thanatorn, who is one of the opposition leaders of the country.
(06:53):
And he actually won his party sort of won an election during COVID time, like 2020, 2021.
and he was one of the leaders of that new government
and he walked into parliament
and was only a formal leader for a few minutes.
And then the sort of military government
and the royals and some other sort of regime forces
(07:13):
kind of dissolved his party.
So they also sort of tried to ban him for life
from running for political office.
And they do this to like anyone
who really threatens the system.
But now he's still working away.
And even though he can't personally be
you know, a contender, his colleagues are,
and they look like they're gonna be very competitive
in the election in February.
And do they have free and fair elections?
(07:34):
No, but the question is,
at what point will they respect the will of the people?
And it's not this sort of North Korea type thing.
Like it is very possible that in February
they win so overwhelmingly
that the old guard has to negotiate.
So it's gonna be very interesting.
But that person, you know,
is very interested in Bitcoin
(07:56):
And that group of people is very interested in Bitcoin.
So we got to do an event in front of media, human rights groups, all sorts of people from across Thai society.
And we talked about Bitcoin and we talked about Noster.
And instead of the usual, well, you know, that you encounter in the United States or in Australia or in the UK, isn't it criminal money?
(08:17):
Or what about the, no, none of that.
Just, I want to know more.
Tell me more.
Can we use it for fundraising?
You know, can we use it to raise money for political parties?
Can we use it to get money to sister countries?
Can protesters use it?
It was fascinating.
They just didn't have any of the financial privilege that blinds, I think, Western politicians and Western civil society people and Western NGOs.
(08:39):
They were much more like, we are hearing what you're saying and we want to know more.
And it was fascinating.
And I think that country is going to be one of the leaders, I think, in the next decade in terms of Bitcoin adoption by just different parts of the country there.
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(11:12):
What kind of form?
Because like,
are they thinking of
a strategic Bitcoin reserve
in a way of like...
No, no, no.
Operationally.
Okay.
Remember, they're not in government.
Now, once they come into government,
we don't know what that looks like.
But right now,
they're an opposition movement.
So they need to fund
political parties
and election monitoring
and, you know,
civil movements
all across the country.
(11:32):
They need to fund lawyers.
They need to fund
people who've been debanked.
They need to work
with sister groups
in other countries
that are even more
hardcore dictatorships.
like Cambodia and Burma.
So for them, it's an operational tool.
They're not thinking about it as like a financial asset for their economy.
So you weren't talking to them about the IMF book you wrote
and ways that they can get out of those kind of perpetual debts and things like that?
(11:55):
No, I mean, I think that that's a conversation for once they're in power, right?
So this is about Bitcoin is Freedom Money
for people who are critics of the current government and who are opponents.
Once you're in power, then those are different factors and different considerations.
I mean, I think there's no way you could have segued that better into your latest piece,
(12:16):
Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money.
I needed this piece.
Like we've spoken about this on the podcast before, but with like the growing just constant
talk of sort of the financialization of Bitcoin as being used in different power structures,
it's nice to hear a piece about freedom money again.
Because when I was first getting interested in Bitcoin, that was the narrative.
And it seems to have fallen back a little bit to this, you know, how it's infiltrating
(12:40):
Wall Street or those kinds of conversations.
I mean, up through 2018, 19, it really was.
And then we've had, you know, the sailorization and the Wall Streetization and the BlackRockization
and the ETFization of Bitcoin.
And I listened to the show you did with Pete Rizzo and it was interesting because he was
talking about the different narratives and who holds power in each cycle.
(13:01):
And I think in that case, he's reading it correctly.
There's a current narrative that is very dominant now that Bitcoin is a financial asset alone and that people don't really like to talk about the freedom properties.
And that's so different from the early, the first decade, you know, essentially.
But the original use case for Bitcoin remains the use case.
You know, the first actual documented probably real life use case for Bitcoin outside of people experimenting with it in a small scale was probably WikiLeaks.
(13:29):
Fundraising in Bitcoin when their fiat rails were shuttered.
And that continues to be the use case for Bitcoin in my view.
So for background, I didn't choose the title, which is really quite nice that they chose one that I like.
I think another contender was, why do dictators detest Bitcoin?
Which also would have been good.
(13:49):
But this one, this is a classic.
So happy they chose why Bitcoin is freedom money.
Just for background, the Journal of Democracy is a top 10 global academic journal in political science.
When I was a political science student 20 years ago, it was one of the things we read all the time in our classes.
(14:10):
And we would use these chapters and essays in this journal, which is a quarterly, as core texts in our work.
So this essay is going to be read by a lot of students and a lot of teachers, which I was very excited to see.
It's also a top academic journal.
It is also very establishment.
(14:30):
It's not some sort of radical thing. It's actually something that is funded by the U.S. Congress, not the White House or, let's say, the State Department or something like that.
But essentially when the idea of America as a – and obviously we can differ about the effectiveness or the, let's say, the honesty of it.
(14:52):
But, you know, a lot of American bodies were set up to promote democracy during – especially during the Cold War, right?
And one of them was the National Endowment for Democracy, which has a budget of $200-$300 million a year.
And one of the things that it works on is this project, which is a journal.
And they publish debates and discourse about, you know, the evolution or the regression of democracy.
(15:17):
So it was actually here last year that the editor in Nashville at the Global Bitcoin Summit, I brought him here as a guest, a friend of ours, Sergei Popovich, who's an activist.
to help to bring down the Milosevic regime in Serbia in the 90s peacefully without a shot fired Serge introduced me to this person and this person came here and started to get very interested in Bitcoin and Bitcoin related stuff
(15:44):
And in the time since they published about a year and a half ago, like a small blog type
post for me on their website that was very popular.
And this spring, they invited me to do a full essay in their print edition, which I was
super excited about. It's long. It's like 8,500 words, but it gave me the space to run in terms of
(16:05):
I wanted to go deep into essentially the historic backdrop. How did money move from an instrument
of freedom to a tool of control, which, you know, is I think hinted at a lot in Lin Alden's essay.
Why is there a banking crisis in human rights work today? Case studies. Let's look at Afghanistan.
Let's look at Togo. Let's look at Cuba. Let's look at Hong Kong. Let's look at Belarus. Let's
(16:27):
at some of these other places. I wanted to look at FUD and I wanted to kind of tackle some of the
biggest FUD that I thought academics and students and NGOs would be facing, which largely revolved
around things like volatility, lack of adoption by merchants, the environment piece, and the
criminality piece. So I tackle all of that in the essay. A very important thing that a lot of
(16:50):
academics asked me to put in here is why Bitcoin and not crypto or blockchain. So I have a whole
section on why Bitcoin and not crypto or blockchain. And in fact, if someone says they're
doing something with crypto or blockchain, but can't be specific, huge red flag, huge red flag
right away. In fact, anyone who really uses the word blockchain outside of a highly technical
(17:11):
discourse about Bitcoin, a massive red flag, obviously, if someone has like a, you know,
the word blockchain in their X profile or LinkedIn, just immediately dismiss this person.
I mean, I literally recently brought on an assistant to help me with just running things.
And one of the things that I gave them advice on in terms of like monitoring inbox and stuff is if it says defile blockchain, just-
No, just immediate.
(17:31):
Discard it.
But I had to say that, right?
And then a little bit about the fact that this is not some experiment.
This is a huge global movement where I was relying on some of the data from the recent Cornell study, global Bitcoin adoption, 25,000 respondents in dozens of countries.
And, you know, looking at sales of hardware wallets, which is way past 10 million.
(17:53):
and then looking at downloads of self-custodial phone wallets, tens of millions, and looking at just exchange filings.
And even Coinbase alone has more than 100 million users.
And, you know, obviously a majority of them use Bitcoin.
So we're talking about tens, if not hundreds of millions of people here at one stop or another on their Bitcoin journey.
(18:17):
Yeah. Now, most of them are at the beginning where they don't really quite understand it and they maybe view it as something to trade.
but still they've begun the journey and then the journey goes from there and if you've got more than
10 million people buying you know the top couple uh hardware wallet manufacturers that actually
release numbers I mean the real numbers are bigger than that but you know we're talking about
(18:40):
serious numbers of people around the world who are self self-custodial Bitcoin users in a true
sense. And this thing is revolutionizing human rights work. And I really just wanted to put that
in a very straightforward way with tons of documentation so that it can no longer be
denied. And I'm really grateful to the folks at JOD for helping me put that in there in a
(19:05):
platform and format that can't just be dismissed. Because I love writing for places like Bitcoin
Magazine or whatever. But obviously, if I try to show up to a fight with Bitcoin Magazine article,
I get immediately dismissed
because it's biased
you know is what they would say
now if it's in the Journal of Democracy
print edition
okay
now we're doing something
(19:26):
a little different right
and you can see
like the way you approach the article
is different
because it was in the Journal of Democracy
not in Bitcoin
you gotta know your audience
you kind of started from the ground up
and then built the entire picture
throughout the
yeah I mean the thing I tried to work on
at the beginning
was trying to lay out how
like Bitcoin
like financial repression itself is so widespread and affects so many people way more than political
(19:51):
repression if you think about it like not that many people are professional politicians or human
rights workers but everybody uses money right and yet financial repression is just never talked
about in the human rights industry outside of the work we're doing really to be honest and a few other
people but it's it's getting there but like five to ten years ago nobody talked about it and and yet
(20:13):
it is so important and it never gets the airtime that election rigging or political prisoners or
censorship in the media gets. And it should be right there. I mean, financial repression should
be right there with censorship of the media, sacking of justices, you know, rigging constitutions,
(20:33):
fabricating elections, debanking and financial censorship is right there. I mean, if not
more widespread. So I think people are finally waking up to it. And it's time that hopefully,
any group that's pursuing a liberty-minded cause, a freedom-minded cause to empower the people in
(20:54):
their country, starts using this as a tool. And I hope this can be a nice little helpful
conversation starter, if not a blueprint. What was nice is they gave me a little space in the essay
to do like a 101 of like, well, how do I begin? And it's like, great, use these tools,
consider collaborative custody. Maybe you want to do self-custody. Don't use KYC exchanges. It
allowed me a little bit of space to point to like, how do you get started? And then of course, we
(21:19):
have, Ahrefs has a webinar we do every quarter that brings you zero to one at least in a couple
of days with BTC Sessions and our friend Anna Chekovich, and they lead that. So they allowed
me to mention that in there, which was pretty cool. That's very cool. I'm actually recording
with sessions straight after this. So this is a perfect segue. But let's start with the money
(21:40):
being a tool that used to be used in a relatively free and fair and open way when things were just
cash to the progression to basically everything now being digital and what the problems are for
sort of people that you're helping around the world. Yeah. And I think Linaldin in her book
traces this extremely well in Broken Money that scientifically, technologically, this was kind
(22:02):
of going to happen 100 times out of 100. The fiat credit control system just advanced faster
than the hard money system. Like hard money, we had gold, and then we just didn't really have an
innovation for a very long time until Bitcoin. Whereas fiat money, with the invention of the
telegraph and the invention of wireless communication and computers and credit cards,
(22:27):
It just had a tsunami of innovation.
So it was always going to sort of outpace hard money in her view.
I hope I'm not misquoting her, but basically that's sort of the idea part of the book is she's looking at the scientific evolution of money.
And she's basically pointing out that like money had been on a almost like inevitable evolution due to technological advancements of becoming more and more a tool of credit and more and more a tool of control.
(22:54):
and then we forked finally with Bitcoin.
And now we have a way of evolving money
in a way that makes it more and more a tool of freedom.
And in the paper, what I describe is how,
look, 50 years ago,
it was very hard to micro track the economy.
If most people are using cash or even check,
(23:16):
it's just hard to like run models
and understand what people are gonna do next
or try to locate people's behavior or preferences.
But today, when everything is done digitally with chips and Bluetooth tracking devices and stores and every payment is linked to your ID, it's trivial for governments to understand what's going on and start to model and control and sensor.
(23:38):
And obviously, AI tooling and big data has made that even easier and more scary.
So in a way, you know, financial repression like we have today just wasn't really possible 40, 50 years ago.
But over the last 20 years, it's become pretty much the first and foremost tactic used by authoritarians to censor and stop their critics.
(24:01):
And it's high time that it's recognized as such in the literature, in the academic collegiate establishment literature, that financial repression is a first tool of autocrats.
And how do we rebel?
How do we resist with Bitcoin?
There's a line that you wrote in this,
which was what you spend says more about you
(24:23):
than what you say.
And I thought that was super interesting.
And I do remember hearing that Amazon
will know that you're pregnant before you do
based on your buying habits.
Yeah, I remember that.
And these are the things that are terrifying
about moving to a,
even if it's not full-blown CBDC,
which I think we are seeing, like you say,
there's over a hundred countries now looking into this.
(24:43):
Like we're moving to a more surveilled,
more tracked system.
And even look, we're concerned about CBDCs, but let's be clear.
Governments with cooperation with private corporations can essentially approximate a CBDC already.
Yeah.
Like bank credits and fintech credits, you know, are freezable at will, are censorable.
(25:03):
And ultimately, I think stable coins will follow that course.
They don't give an escape from this either.
And really what I wanted to do in the paper was hit like the different aspects of Bitcoin, you know, digital cash and its digital gold.
So I opened with, you know, on the one hand, this addresses the issues of people who are being spied on and politically debanked and censored.
And on the other hand, it addresses the issues of people who are being debased, rugged and devalued and have had their currency demonetized or confiscated.
(25:34):
So these are the two ways in which authoritarians use money as a weapon and Bitcoin as a shield against both of them, which is so important.
These other digital currency technologies that are privacy minded, you know, we can debate about which ones are honest and which ones are scams.
But at the end of the day, none of them are hard money.
(25:55):
So they can really only attack the privacy piece.
Now, I think eCash is the best version of them personally.
But again, eCash is just a credit.
It's an IOU.
You need the hard money piece.
So the thing has to be built with Bitcoin.
And if you can build a Bitcoin system where you have the 21 million protecting you against what is usually the biggest crime in, let's say, monetary repression globally, which is the devaluation overnight.
(26:24):
And you and I saw this when we went to Malawi a few years ago, where we arrived a few weeks after the government had done a 44% overnight currency devaluation, which I consider a crime against humanity because nobody got to vote for that.
Nobody got to weigh in on that.
All of a sudden, just 44% of their wealth was gone.
44% of their purchasing power was vanished.
(26:44):
This removes that option from governments.
If you're saving and using Bitcoin, they can't touch you.
That's magical.
I think that's so, so powerful.
Now, at the same time, you can couple that with privacy technologies.
It's not as straightforward as we'd like, but it's easy enough these days.
And it's guessing better.
And I think people sometimes misunderstand permissionlessness versus privacy. Yes, like full anonymous e-cash level privacy is very important. But oftentimes, just the fact that you can use Bitcoin without your ID is a huge upgrade over the current system.
(27:26):
Like, yes, I understand that anyone can look at blockchain data.
Sure.
But if you've never attached your name to it, it's freaking useless.
So it's like, I'm always arguing with Monero and Zcash people about this.
Like you have to give something to the permissionless piece.
It's not just the fact that there's, you know, whether or not it's shielded transactions or
(27:47):
not.
It's like, no, I bought this with cash or whatever.
You've no idea who owns this.
And then I moved it to someone else.
And it's just, if you'd never attach your ID to the blockchain, it's, you know, provably harder to track and understand what's going on.
And basically my point is that people face a lot of issues around the world in the world of democracy promotion, human rights promotion, you know, national movements of different kinds in different places, independent media, environmentalism, journalism.
(28:22):
so many different, again, movements of people trying to change their country or society
or trying to prevent radical change, one or the other.
And money and banking and debanking and deplatforming is becoming like the front line.
And that is finally being recognized in a prestigious journal,
(28:46):
which I'm just super, super happy to have that opportunity.
And the debanking thing, while I know it's happening in a lot of these sort of oppressive regimes, but it's happening in like the UK.
This isn't even like, it's a really, really scary part of like the political world that we live in now.
But can we get really basic?
Because what I loved about this is that it's going to hit an entirely different audience.
(29:08):
In fact, it's not even a narrative.
Like this is just the story of Bitcoin.
This is just truth.
I think narrative almost minimizes it.
And it's a really powerful way of getting people interested in Bitcoin.
And what I think will be cool is I think this is the kind of show that people will want to share with friends and family who might be interested in Bitcoin but skeptical.
And this shows them what it can actually do.
So in the piece, you write about Roya Mahbub's story in Afghanistan.
(29:32):
Yes.
Can you tell that story?
Sure.
Look, it was 2013.
Roya is a businesswoman in Afghanistan.
And she's starting a company that employs a lot of women around the country.
and there is no mobile money in Afghanistan at the time.
(29:52):
Most Western financial products
that we get to use in the United States or whatever,
like Venmo, PayPal, aren't there.
They're not available for Afghans for different reasons.
And if she tries to pay them in cash
or through like the Hawala system,
which is the traditional way of moving money around,
the male relatives of the women take the money
so they don't have control over it.
And they don't really, for different reasons,
(30:12):
have bank accounts.
So she's sitting there and trying to figure out, well, how can I pay them?
And a friend of hers tells her about Bitcoin and it's Q1, Q2, 2013.
Bitcoin is like 30, 40 bucks.
And she's like, why not?
And they figure it out and they start using basic wallets and things are just so different
back then.
But, you know, she goes on this rollercoaster ride where Bitcoin goes from 30 bucks to 100
(30:33):
bucks to 500 bucks to 1200 bucks.
And then through all the Gox stuff, you know, starts to crash and it cascades all the way
down to 200 bucks basically something like that and all throughout this she feels all the emotions
right she's like wow this is incredibly liberating but wow also very risky and she goes through this
all and at the end of it she decides to pivot her business a little bit away from that but
(30:59):
incorporate it into a charity that she has started to educate girls in afghanistan
so one of the first things she does when she educating what ends up being tens of thousands of women when she educating just literacy science math And is this something that had been banned by the Taliban Well as you know any education of older girls is banned
(31:22):
They haven't been to school in, I think, 13, 1400 days
or something like that since the takeover.
But at the time, it was the American occupation
and there was a more secular government in power
and they were okay with this.
And Roya ends up again, like teaching tens of thousands of girls about everything from robotics to using computers to Bitcoin and how to use Bitcoin.
(31:44):
And after the takeover in 2021, you couldn't use the U.S. dollar to get money in.
The whole economy was collapsing.
Everything was cut off.
But you could use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't care.
Bitcoin works, right?
And that's what she does today.
So even though the Taliban officially prevents women in elementary, middle school, et cetera, from going to school and becoming educated, Roya runs underground schools and she pays the teachers in Bitcoin.
(32:12):
And it's amazing.
And it's a really great example for people listening of whenever they hear someone in the FT or the economist or in the broadsheets or on TV say, oh, Bitcoin has no use case.
The dollar and the pound cannot do this.
You cannot technologically use the dollar or pound to fund underground schools in Afghanistan, but you can use Bitcoin.
So just remember that.
(32:32):
That's a very powerful use case of what Bitcoin can do that fiat money cannot.
So I wanted to include that story in here because it might be a surprising one for some people.
I think it'll be a surprising one for a lot of people who haven't been paying close attention to Bitcoin.
And it's not like this is a one-off story.
This stuff is happening all over the world now.
Yeah, and it's also an example of the duality of Bitcoin where that's kind of the digital cash side of it,
(32:54):
where you don't use permission to use it.
Anyone can use it.
It's the same for the billionaire and the refugee.
It doesn't care about your birth or ethnicity
or gender or background,
and that's just such a beautiful thing about Bitcoin.
But also the digital gold part of it played a huge role
in as much as the early adopters of this thing
(33:16):
did very well.
Like one of her sisters at that time
in the 2013, 2014 period,
And when women wanted to buy stuff with Bitcoin and the merchant wouldn't accept it, she would buy the Bitcoin from them, give them cash.
And she saved that.
And over three, four, five years, used it to pay for her education at Cornell University, which is amazing.
(33:38):
There was another woman who worked for Roya named Leila.
And she had to escape Afghanistan and was one of the countless Afghans who fled over through Iran dangerously, through Turkey, on a boat, got to Europe, made it to Germany, lives life there now.
and was able to take her seed phrase with her,
start a new life.
And by the time she got there,
(33:59):
Bitcoin had like quadrupled in value
and she was able to start a new life.
So, you know, refugees throughout history
didn't have that ability.
Like I have some ancestors who fled the Holocaust,
for example.
They just fled with what was on their back,
you know, they had no way.
But people today fleeing from Syria,
you know, whether it was fleeing from Syria
or Venezuela several years ago,
(34:19):
fleeing from Gaza or Yemen or Sudan today,
they can take their value with them.
They can convert value to Bitcoin
and they can take it with them.
And that's amazing.
And we're going to hear a story tomorrow
about that at the Global Bitcoin Summit
about someone whose life was saved by Bitcoin.
And that's going to be a keynote speech.
Someone from the Middle East
(34:40):
who had to flee bombing and war
and was able to do it
and was able to do it because of Bitcoin.
So it's a very powerful thing that people just,
you'd never know when you just sit there and look at price and price charts and
financialization and out-competing inflate just all this the rhetoric you see you don't see the
(35:03):
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Last time
we spoke,
one of the things I said to you is
(37:38):
a quote from Thomas Pacquiao who
said that we're all going to be rich and depressed
because the project failed. And that is the idea
of freedom money dying along the way.
But since then,
I've thought a lot about that. And I actually think
that as long as someone out there
is using Bitcoin as freedom money,
then it's all been worth it.
These stories can't happen without Bitcoin.
(37:59):
And it's pretty incredible.
I don't know if you agree with that.
I think the percentage of people using Bitcoin as freedom money as a whole will almost certainly shrink.
But as long as people still have the ability to transact with Bitcoin in any way they see fit, then this project has been entirely worth it.
Well, there's different levels there, right?
So one level is Bitcoin slowly replacing fiat currency as a global money.
(38:29):
And that might mean store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account.
And that's the thing that prevents the biggest crimes, which are theft by inflation and currency devaluation.
The things that affect the most people, billions of people.
taking that big red button away from authoritarians and government officials where they can just say,
(38:52):
oh, we're going to make your time and labor worth less.
In a Bitcoin world, regardless of whether or not people are using it as freedom money or IOUs of Bitcoin or whatever,
if Bitcoin gets to the point where it is the unit of account, we win there.
That's a massive victory.
Now, it could even be better.
(39:13):
And we have a talk on that.
by Jeremy Rubin here in the next few days.
That's going to be very interesting
because I think it's a massive victory,
but it's a partial victory
because ultimately what we'd like
is for everybody to be able to be self-custodial,
have control of their money
and be able to spend it without paperwork
(39:34):
and in a way that protects privacy.
And I think that's a more challenging vision.
I personally think that Bitcoin is really quite destined to become the unit of account of the
world eventually. I just think everything is moving in that direction. It's relationship with
energy markets, with global trade, with the way the rival world works, with the way that we
(39:58):
gravitate towards a one currency, and with the way that nation states, which aren't going anywhere
really, and empires, which last hundreds, if not thousands of years as they rise and fall,
they don't want to be using someone else's money ultimately to save in. And they don't want to be
subject to those people's rules. So the idea of one neutral currency, I think, is very powerful.
(40:23):
It has a lot of gravity to it. But can the citizens use it with the same degree as freedom
as the rulers is the question. We don't know that. There are going to be trade-offs and sacrifices,
Right. Like can a day laborer in 100 years afford an on-chain Bitcoin transaction?
(40:43):
Not today, meaning the sat value, the Satoshi value of transactions will likely, you know, maybe not increase that much or may even get cheaper in some ways due to like interesting ways we can do collaborative spending and things like that.
(41:04):
But the sat itself is going to increase in value so much against the dollar and fiats that, you know, it very well could be a world where only a small percentage of people on earth can afford to just be on chain alongside corporations and governments.
So the question is, well, what can we do about that?
(41:27):
And there's a lot you can do.
You can do side chains, key sharing things.
I can trade a private key without having to spend anything on the blockchain.
There's a lot of interesting stuff around that.
There's stuff around, for example, cross-input signature aggregation, where you can reduce
the Bitcoin-denominated cost of a transaction by collaboratively working together.
(41:49):
And there's many other ideas in that area.
There are reasonable trade-offs you can make with things coming up that are now starting
to be unrolled like ARK or even Spark, where with a particular trade-off, people can kind
of have self-custody Bitcoin in a way.
I say kind of, I'm qualifying, not fully, but kind of, not as much as Bitcoin on chain
(42:13):
or lightning, of course, but in a way they can have it and they don't have to pay a year's
worth of wages, let's say, maybe in the future.
So I'm very optimistic, actually.
Basically, what I'm saying is I think it's a lock that Bitcoin eventually overthrows fiat as like the global dominant kind of currency and like the way we think about how much things are valued.
(42:36):
But it remains unclear whether it actually is free to money for everybody.
But I think we have a pretty good shot.
And I think it continues to grow.
I mean, if you think about what's available today, just all these different options of ways to use Bitcoin with lightning as a connective tissue between things rolling out like Spark and ARK and eCash and side chains and even just different liquids, liquid platforms and swaps.
(42:59):
And I mean, it's pretty amazing compared to 10 years ago.
Like you can vary like some of these wallets make it so easy to just spend some of your Bitcoin privately in a way that's not really possible to tie back to you.
So I'm bullish on it, but like that's the big challenge. I don't really see a world where government controlled and abused money that's being inflated to infinity retains top dog status in the monetary hierarchy. I just don't see that. I see Bitcoin becoming that.
(43:32):
I guess it's just a question of, can everybody use it equally, which is more or less the case today.
Like when fees are so low, you can essentially, if you're not worried about the speed and you're
receiving a remittance or you're making a payment and it doesn't need to arrive right away,
like a salary or a wage or something, I mean, you can pay like a few cents and you can get it
(43:56):
through. I don't think that's going to be the case in 20 to 50 years. So we have to think big
about that.
So I think it's really easy to often think that Bitcoin doesn't change because it doesn't.
Like the actual underlying Bitcoin protocol does not change very quickly at all.
But like all of those things.
The layers change, dude.
Exactly.
That's what I'm saying.
(44:17):
So like Spark, ARK, eCash, these didn't exist two years ago.
Even just wallet UX.
Yeah.
Like we're moving at like I think a breakneck pace.
It's crazy.
People sometimes maybe miss that.
And regulatory stuff matters a lot.
And the US can lead the way there.
That's why I applaud the work BPI is doing and stuff.
Look, if the US passes a de minimis tax type law where you can use Bitcoin under, I don't know, whatever it is, $1,000 or $2,000 without worrying about taxes, that immediately has major ramifications for every tax authority on the planet.
(44:48):
So I think that our government can set certain standards that can help in our quest to use Bitcoin as money.
I think what Square or rather Block now is working on with the Square readers and that is slowly being activated.
And I think by the end of the year, it sounds like will be an option for sure.
That's very cool.
For 4 million Square readers in the United States and beyond where merchants will be able to accept Bitcoin and they'll get money.
(45:17):
They'll get fiat money.
They'll get dollars that people could spend Bitcoin.
and then they'll have the option
of taking the Bitcoin if they want.
And this is all done through their system
where they have the reader and the cash app
and the BitKey.
It's a really interesting little ecosystem
they have set up.
And I think that's going to be very exciting.
And then you've seen this happening
in an even more kind of permissionless
(45:39):
Wild West kind of setting around the world
where you have apps like Tando and Bitcoin Jungle
and ones being built in Brazil and Ghana and Thailand
where there's different ways for you
to spend your Bitcoin to the merchant. And I think the PayMeInBitcoin thing is really how we're going
to win if we want Bitcoin to become more than just kind of like the monetary standard, but we're still
(46:03):
trapped by a lot of the current constraints. I mean, that is a half victory, but I think the full
victory is PayMeInBitcoin becomes standard. And some of the ways we're getting there now are
really interesting. Like in Thailand, there's this thing where you can pay a mobile Fiat QR code,
code thing. And what's happening is you pay it via an app and you send lightning and someone
(46:27):
manually pays the fiat right there, but they're sitting at their computer waiting because they
make a fee, they take a fee and they just pay it and you walk out of the store. Like
it fast enough that you buy a beer and within 30 seconds it paid and you on your way And what happened there is like on the back end someone got an alert to pay this thing and they pay it using their Thai bot and they get the Bitcoin That awesome
(46:54):
It's fascinating. So there's some like that are kind of hacks. And then there are others
that are more elegant where like Tando in Kenya, like you get into the cab, I talk about
this in the essay, and the cab driver accepts M-Pesa and they whip out the app or the QR
for you to pay them at the end of the ride.
And you use the Tando app and the cab driver gets there
(47:17):
in Pesa and you spend your Bitcoin.
And you didn't have to tell anybody that you went to Kenya.
You didn't have to like call your credit card company.
You just used permissionless Bitcoin and it works.
And there's a lot of places where that's coming alive.
So I think the PayMeInBitcoin thing,
the more service providers we can use that accept Bitcoin,
the more graphic designers, AV technicians, architects,
(47:40):
you know, goods and services providers,
tourism operators, event companies, restaurants.
I mean, you're seeing it happen.
It's slowly but surely.
And it's not gonna happen in the like hardcore evangelical way
that the B cashers tried to do it a long time ago,
where they would sort of force people
to do something they don't understand.
(48:00):
It has to be organic.
Like the merchant has to really like want it, right?
Or else they're just, it's not gonna work.
You can't go door to door being like,
yo, accept Bitcoin, put the sticker here.
You're seeing in El Salvador, that doesn't work.
You can't brute force it.
But slowly but surely, like through some of these Bitcoin educational hubs, people come, they drop in on a class.
They think it's interesting.
They read a little more.
They pick up a book.
(48:21):
They decide to download the software.
They watch one of BTC Sessions' videos.
And all of a sudden, they're accepting tips in Bitcoin or they're doing some work in Bitcoin.
And it's happening.
And it's very exciting to see.
And I talk about that in this essay that, you know, Bitcoin is free to money because of that aspect of it.
Why do you, what part of the pay me in Bitcoin sort of circular economy thing do you like the most?
(48:43):
Is it the fact that this allows people to, you know, if there's someone there selling Bitcoin for cash, you get non-KYC Bitcoin and then you keep that within a certain community?
Or is it just the sort of the mindset change of instead of people taking their local currencies, they're demanding to be paid in a hard money?
Well, let's look at Thailand. So Thailand's trying to set something up where like you enter Thailand as a tourist and you can actually convert your Bitcoin into what is essentially a CBDC.
(49:07):
upon entry.
And like all merchants will accept it
via fiat government order.
Well, you know what?
If the merchants decide to accept Bitcoin,
we can sidestep that whole control process.
You can enter,
you can just go wherever
and you can be on your merry way,
peer to peer without the government
having rent or control.
I think that's a simple way to think about it.
Like if we want to sidestep
and get away from the increasing
(49:29):
kind of whether it be privately run
or publicly run CBDC stablecoin stuff,
it's pay me in Bitcoin.
And like, I think eventually
people are going to
wisen up. Do you really want to be paid
in stable coins? I know that
a lot of people do today because their currency
sucks compared to the dollar.
But eventually, as Bitcoin continues
(49:49):
to grow in value and the dollar
continues to collapse,
people are going to want Bitcoin, dude.
We've seen this at HRF.
Four or five years ago,
a lot of NGOs and activists did want
stable coins. They actually wanted it.
But now, we haven't
hurt a single group. We do hundreds and hundreds of grants around the world. No one's asking us
(50:10):
for Tether or Circle. They want Bitcoin. And they're in a particular use case, like they're
activists. But still, I think that's kind of an interesting tell. I can understand why you would
want access to stable coins if you live in a country with- Totally. I know. And I talk about it. That is a
very valid use case for, if you want to talk about cryptocurrency beyond Bitcoin. I mean,
(50:31):
stable coins are really the other main use case that's not an obvious scam. But I do think, as I
wrote about recently in an essay in Reason, they do extend state power and they help the US address
its debt concerns and they kind of keep the Ponzi scheme going. So I understand why people use them,
I empathize, but we have to understand they are not freedom money at all. And they are not what
(50:55):
Satoshi was trying to do. And they are not in any way cypherpunk or, you know, I mean, look,
that they, again, they extend fiat network effect globally,
and they kind of keep the system alive
and growing in a new way.
How do we make sure that they don't become
just another arm of the government
and essentially like a CBDC type instrument?
(51:16):
Or is it the fact- Meaning stablecoins?
Yeah. Or is it the fact that because you just
can always opt out into Bitcoin, that's not a real concern?
There are interesting experiments with doing stablecoins
in a way that are not like tied to a reserve
and tied to a banking system
and tied to buying US debt.
But ultimately, anything dollar denominated is pro-dollar.
(51:37):
I don't care how you do it, how you get your stablecoin,
or whether it's on the Lightning Network,
or whether it's a stable channel on Lightning,
or whether it's Tether on Lightning, or whatever.
Some of that stuff may be on a scale better
than Tether on Tron or whatever.
I get it.
But if it's USD denominated, it supports the dollar hegemony fiat system.
(52:03):
That's why it needs to be Bitcoin denominated to create a resistance, to create an alternative.
It's all about the unit of account.
Okay.
Again, thinking about who at least I'm going to send this conversation to.
There's people that I know should be interested in Bitcoin.
They're not quite there.
I want to send them a show that can lay out what Bitcoin actually does.
Why Bitcoin, not crypto?
(52:24):
Well, I mean, think about it this way. There's 20,000 some odd cryptos. They range from obvious jokes like Shiba Inu or Dogecoin to politician coins like Trump coin or Melania coin to NFTs that have gone to zero to obvious scams. So many obvious scams where people have gone to prison for launching them.
(52:48):
they are all, and I write about this,
like their sole existence is to enrich the creators
at the expense of you, the retail person.
Unless you have insider information,
you're going to lose money on these things over time.
And they all go to zero in Bitcoin terms.
There was something interesting the other day about Zcash.
(53:11):
And people are going crazy
because Zcash went up like 45, 50% in dollar terms in a day.
And you look at, but you look at the Zcash Bitcoin chart.
You can't even see it.
You can't even see it.
It's collapsed so badly against Bitcoin over the last decade.
So these are rugs, you know, and be careful.
If you want something that is going to retain purchasing power over a long period of time and has a global network effect and is trusted by all kinds of people in adversarial scenarios.
(53:41):
and has, again, increased in value over time in a consistent manner, it's Bitcoin.
I mean, even Ethereum is nowhere close to its high in Bitcoin terms.
Like, again, don't look at dollar terms.
Look at Bitcoin terms.
At one point, one ETH could get you 0.15 Bitcoin.
(54:03):
Today, it's 0.03 or something like that.
So you have to think about it in Bitcoin terms.
How much Bitcoin can these altcoins get you?
And over time, it goes to zero.
It goes to zero.
They may in a vacuum be going up against the dollar,
because everything's going up against the dollar.
Gold today, as we record, just hit $4,000.
(54:26):
So the dollar is losing its place.
I mean, it's still by far the king of fiats,
of fiats, but it's slowly losing its place as the only way to do store of value, medium
exchange unit of account.
And Bitcoin is slowly rising.
(54:47):
I mean, this should be obvious to anyone who's looking.
I don't think there's ever been a more clear signal than JP Morgan coming out with their
debasement trade about gold and Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Like everyone is waking up to this.
Yeah.
And then eventually people wake up to the fact that Bitcoin does what gold does, but better.
Yeah.
But people aren't there yet.
And, you know, but look, as we're speaking, less than 24 hours ago, Bitcoin was at 126, which is just crazy to think about.
(55:11):
Like, again, that is a real thing that saves people's lives.
Like these Cubans I was interviewing that I talked about in the essay five years ago, Bitcoin was trading around $5,000.
And they were faced with a choice.
Their currency was being changed by the Cuban government, you know, essentially used to trade at like 24 to $1.
(55:32):
and the government would struggle to keep that peg.
And the real market value would usually be lower.
But once they basically stopped protecting that peg,
it hyperinflated.
And in the last five years,
now it's more than 400 pesos per dollar on the black market.
So it's lost more than 95% of its value.
(55:52):
Or like the dozens of Cubans I interviewed,
you could have started stacking sats
and converting into Bitcoin at the time.
And think about that.
Now you're up 25, 30 X, okay?
Versus being down 95%.
That's a life or death scenario for a lot of people.
(56:13):
100%.
And that's just five years.
This is not, we don't have, we're not going back to,
you know, throwing your Bitcoin in a dump
and not finding a 2010 era Bitcoin.
We're talking about five years ago,
talking about pandemic era and we're up 20 to 30 X.
So, you know, this is not something that like you missed the boat on.
(56:34):
It's going to continue to do this and it's going to continue to be really valuable for people.
It's an amazing piece.
I'm going to make sure I link it in the show.
Are the talks that are happening here going to be recorded?
Yeah, yeah.
So basically, this is the third year that the Human Rights Foundation has run the Global Bitcoin Summit.
We do it like off the record and privately because we really want to make sure that the activists who come,
(56:59):
and the human rights activists,
and the folks working in opposition movements
have peace of mind when they're talking about these issues
because they're A, they're-
Sensitive.
Well, they're nervous about talking about money.
They're a little embarrassed
because they don't know a huge amount about Bitcoins.
We want to create a safe space for that.
And we bring in just a totally badass crew
of elite Bitcoin developers, builders, investors, donors,
(57:24):
miners, educators, community builders.
And we spend three days together trading notes
and learning from each other.
And some of the content we'll put up online, yeah.
But really it's just our effort
at just continuing to move that needle forward
of operationalizing what's in the essay.
We are pushing forward Bitcoin as freedom money here.
(57:46):
We're not like pushing it forward
as something that you can make a copy of and trade,
or that you can make a copy of a copy of a copy,
like the Nine Inch Nails song, copy of a,
yeah, it's just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.
We're not interested in, you know,
cascading derivatives.
(58:08):
We are interested in teaching people
about how to be self sovereign
and how that can amplify and strengthen their work,
opposing tyranny around the world
and how it can make them more unstoppable.
That's the name of our webinar that we do
has become unstoppable.
Like we want you to be able to fund the investigation
(58:31):
or the protest or the movement
in a particular place in the world
and not be stopped because of monetary technology.
And now we can do that with Satoshi's invention,
which is quite remarkable.
It is literally magic.
It's amazing.
And that's what I end the piece with is,
you know, Satoshi probably didn't know
what was gonna happen.
They speculated quite a bit,
(58:52):
but I think it's fair to say that it's earned that name.
freedom money for sure by now, regardless of what happens with its price in the future,
regardless of the price. I mean, Bitcoin at 3K versus 10K versus 100K versus 4K versus 80K.
It doesn't really matter. It's all freedom money. It's always been freedom money and it always can
(59:13):
move value from A to B without permission, regardless of your gender or your ethnicity,
or regardless of what your colonial occupier or your dictator or the corporation that exerts
power and your structure in your region thinks. It doesn't matter what they all think. Bitcoin
can make money move regardless of what they think and how they feel. And that's really what makes
(59:36):
Bitcoin free to money. And it continues to be that for people around the world.
I love it, man. This has obviously gone out to a load of people that aren't Bitcoiners.
Yes. Have you had any interesting feedback from it so far?
Yes. So as a result, I've been invited to speak at numerous groups that do this kind of work.
you know, where they're like, wow, this is really interesting. Will you come in and speak to our
(59:58):
teams, you know, working on in this field? And I'm happy to do it. And look, a lot of them are going
to be a little nervous about it. They may want to start with stable coins. That's fine. You know,
if that's where they want to be, that's okay. But eventually they're going to realize Bitcoin's
better. I mean, stable coins are really tricky. Like, let's not forget, they're not compatible
with each other. You need a broker. So Tether on Tron doesn't like pay, you know, Tether on ETH or
(01:00:23):
whatever. They're not natively like that. It's a much more complicated ball game. And
ultimately, they get frozen and they can go to zero as we saw with Terra Luna. So I think that
ultimately, the ease of Bitcoin being like one global monetary language will win over even the
(01:00:44):
most hardened skeptics, but it's just going to take time. And I think even though this might be
the very first touch point, it might be more interesting stable coins for now, Bitcoin gets
it's hooks in you. Since the first day I learned about Bitcoin, I bet there's not been a single day
since I've not thought about it. And I think that happens to a lot of people.
We are pushing the freedom virus forward and it's spreading and there's no stopping it. So again,
(01:01:04):
we can debate all day about the crisis in Bitcoin du jour, you know, going back through the years,
but it's continues to spread and it continues to work. And it's something that's really inspiring.
I'd feel a lot more depressed about the world if we didn't have this thing out there,
you know, which is capable of helping people in the darkest corners of the planet
(01:01:28):
where no one else wants to help.
It's there.
And that's so cool.
A hundred percent.
Okay.
I'm going to make sure that the links for this are in the show.
I'm going to put some videos in the show.
But where do you want to send anyone if you want to find out more about you and the Human
Rights Foundation?
Yeah, well, check out the essay and check out our work at href.org slash financial freedom
if you want to look at all the initiatives we're running.
and follow me on X at Gladstein.
(01:01:49):
I have my Nostra NPUB there as well.
Follow me on the Unstoppable Social Network.
Unique content over there as always.
And let's stay in touch.
It's always a pleasure and an honor to be on the show, Danny.
So thank you so much.
No, I love it.
Thanks for coming on, man.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
(01:02:17):
Thank you.
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