Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 156 of the Free Cities podcast.
Really? 156? That is amazing. I love doing this.
Anyway, welcome to the show. I'm very happy to have you here today.
Lots of exciting things going on currently in the Free Cities space.
Can you feel it? I can.
I'm so bullish, very bullish on freedom lovers.
I know it's easy to look around you and think that maybe the authoritarians and the control freaks and the sociopaths are closing in quite fast.
Well, in many ways, that yes is true.
But you also know what that means.
It means people like you and people like me start pushing back more.
We start building alternatives to their spiteful structures.
we start spreading our ideas of human freedom a little bit louder and we start incentivizing good
governance by voting with our money and by voting with our feet and we take more time to understand
ourselves and challenge the preconceptions we hold inside our own minds and bodies and yes
we may never be a majority in this world but i don't think that matters freedom lovers will
always find each other and we will always work together. The genie will always be out of the
bottle somewhere in the world and who knows one day it might become the norm around the globe.
Non-aggression, voluntarism, freedom of expression, freedom in markets, maybe who knows. In the meantime
I think you know which team you're on, so do I, so let's continue playing hard as a team,
working for a better future for our families and for ourselves and that is the end of my little
mini rant in today's show i'm speaking to some free city builders i think you'll know patrick
hibbert if you came to the conference in prague two weeks ago he was very much in demand from what
i saw of him i kept trying to have a chat and people kept grabbing him and wanting to talk
fortunately for me I got to sit down with him privately you'll certainly know his company
Veritas Villages if you listen to this podcast regularly they were my first private sector
sponsor for which I'm very grateful of course they are still my primary sponsor and this is
because Veritas Villages have pretty much a perfect product fit with the Free Cities podcast
just in case you don't know who they are they're building bottom-up freedom-oriented communities in
central america places designed for people like you and me to hopefully allow us to plan for the
long term in these tumultuous times they're also actively meeting with governments to try and evolve
the governance possibilities in the communities i'd say they're one of the most active projects
at the intentional community's end of the free city spectrum.
Now, I've watched the company grow since I've known Patrick
and evolve into a company primarily serving libertarians loosely and freedom lovers.
Patrick's also an old Bitcoiner,
and as such, he's been integrating Bitcoin into his business longer than most,
mining on site, using free energy from solar,
having BTC as legal tender in villages,
and allowing purchases of land and property at their sites with Bitcoin.
And that's part of the reason why I sat down with him.
Today's show is a double guest show.
I also have Alex Voss in the room.
Now, Alex is someone you may know from his work at Tipolis,
which is Titus Gables' company building free cities.
He's definitely an OG free city builder, one of the oldest.
also the author of the book Strategies for Liberty, Free Cities and Bitcoin.
Now the two of them are coming together in Patrick's latest endeavour to integrate Bitcoin further into his business.
And this episode is an update on this and all the latest news hot off the presses from their projects in Central America.
To be honest, it does what it says on the tin, really.
But just in case, here is Fountain's AI key topics summary to give you an idea of what is in the show.
Key topics.
Veritas Villages expansions.
A Bitcoin treasury strategy.
New corporate governance.
Sovereignty and independence in Latin America.
Quadratic voting on a Bitcoin side chain.
That's for the homeowners associations.
And the future of Altris as a Bitcoin Citadel company.
Now, Altris is the parent company.
That's Patrick's company that owns the brand of Veritas Villages.
Now, it's worth mentioning the fact that I coined that moniker, Bitcoin Citadel company, to describe Veritas Villages.
That was me, not them.
We were talking about them being a Bitcoin treasury company, which is not correct because they have Bitcoin in a treasury.
And they have a business.
I think Bitcoin treasury companies are companies that just have a business of buying Bitcoin.
My conclusion is that they're actually a Bitcoin Citadel company.
Maybe the first that I've actually observed out there in the wild.
They're actually building freedom-oriented places which incorporate Bitcoin at pretty much every level and by any means possible.
They're always looking for ways to do it.
Anyway, you can listen to them speak yourself, of course, and decide if you agree with me.
There's lots of very up to date info here and some ideas for integrating Bitcoin into your own free city projects.
If you want to know more about them, of course, I have a link.
Veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities.
You can buy places there.
You can buy plots of land.
You can build in their communities and you can do it all with Bitcoin.
as i'm always saying quick reminder before we crack on to the show the free cities conference
next year is yes it's in prospera lfg come on and we are limited in numbers compared to prague
you saw how busy prague was this year so my advice would probably be to try and secure
a ticket for 2026 as soon as you can so as not to be disappointed i know that's difficult to book
things like that this far in advance but you know what you don't want to miss the opportunity to be
able to tell your grandkids that you were one of the pioneers who spent time in a free city before
it was cool i know you do free cities conference.com and actually there's a ticket discount
right now too i'm losing my voice aren't i i can hear it anyway i'm gonna go now thanks to my
wonderful fountain sponsors you know you are you're my ogs thank you for your continued support
and please actually can i ask everyone else who listens on non-value for value platforms
please can you review the show on your platform especially apple podcasts for some reason not
many people make the effort there to review the show even though i can see that there are lots of subs on the platform Anyway greatly appreciated from you all It apparently helps the show become more invisible
and we're trying to push the message out there as best we can.
Right. Let's jump into the show, as podcasters say.
I don't usually say that, do I? Let's jump into the show.
Why don't you grab a margarita this time and pull up your deck chair?
We're off to Central America to live free.
As you sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Patrick Hibbert and Alex Voss.
why don't we start with i've literally got absolutely no objective here except
Veritas Villages and what your what the new all the new stuff that's going on
so maybe we should start there from the latest I mean obviously I know quite a bit about Veritas
Villages because I'm following you're sponsoring us you're you know you're one of our sponsors
which is great but there's also a hell of a lot I don't know and you you made an announcement at
this conference already which i did see maybe you could just quickly briefly from the veritas
village side just briefly run over that but start with what's going on at veritas villages
all right well can you hear me okay i can hear you absolutely fine patrick perfect
well thanks tim for having us on the show it's nice to be back pretty much exactly a year later
i guess it is actually yeah it was a good and to be honest a massive amount has changed yeah yeah
I do actually remember you saying, actually, when we spoke before that there were some things in the pipeline and stuff.
Yeah, there's been lots of things in the pipeline.
We acquired a property in Nicaragua that we had designed it and we're developing it anyway with a joint venture.
But we've decided not to do joint ventures anymore.
Veritas Villages are 100% ours.
So we bought out the partner.
And now it's Veritas Village Playa Pacifica on the beach in Nicaragua.
We're continuing to build homes in Veritas Village Coronado in Panama.
We announced Veritas Village Chiriqui, which is also in Panama, closer to the Costa Rican
border.
A lot of people know where Boquete is.
It's a pretty popular tourist area or expat living area in Panama, so it's close to that.
And then we just acquired a massive property, massive for our standards in Costa Rica in
the Atenas area and it's got the unique claim to fame of being named the best climate in the world
by National Geographic. We actually have three different climate zones inside our property so
it's based on elevation so you can actually kind of choose your climate in that particular one so
it's very cool. Wait a minute, how big do you have to be to have three climates? Well it's a unique
spot so it's 140 some hectares 340 acres or so probably be over 500 residences and it's on an
elevation going you know from top to bottom around 800 to 900 meters in the top and four or five
hundred at the bottom so that just happens to create temperate zones and different types of
zones so literally the temperature you can kind of pick if you like it to be 28 degrees and during
the day and 22 at night you can get maybe in the middle if you want it to be a little cooler you go
the top you want to have a home at the bottom it's going to be more tropical so it's kind of got a
lot of unique features and then uh that you know we're just in the permitting stage they're really
hoping that maybe by august of next year we'll have the permitting all done and the master planning
all done and that will start building homes there too um but that's that's going to be a game changer
for us that just based on the size and and of course we're we're looking in argentina right now
Argentina, Mexico, and Ecuador, and possibly Belize as well.
So we're kind of looking around, and we will be expanding more and more.
The nice thing about the Veritas Village is I think it kind of differentiates itself
from a lot of the freedom-oriented communities,
is that when you have more than one, it's kind of like a points club or whatever.
You can go to any one of them as a member of the Veritas Village Club,
and you get the you know discounts at the restaurants and you can use the amenities
and all those sorts of things so it it's you know it's not just like oh i lock myself into this and
we actually have clients that are building or buying homes in in more than one so they can say
i'm going to spend this part of the year in this one because i like the climate there during that
time and i'm going to move to this one so you could be in the hills of panama to the beach of
nicaragua and ultimately you know the caribbean as well and and so it gives people options i've
been doing this for two decades and it's tough if you only have one place you're trying to pigeonhole
them into something all the time and it's like well i don't want that and it's like i don't want
to be selling something to somebody that they don't want so so 140 acres that is 140 hectares
sorry 140 hectares yes even more that is um like a well that's a very large area
obviously that's the biggest opportunity you've ever taken on yeah it's the it was i mean it was
the i've been looking at in costa rica for four years for a property i've probably seen over
maybe over 100 properties and then this one came up and it was just checks all the boxes and it
had so much going for it it's in exactly the area we wanted it and it was the large the last large
track to land in the antennas area and uh we were just pretty lucky to get it to be honest so what
was it before then a farm a farm yeah one farm yeah what kind of stuff cattle mostly really so
i was just thinking it was covered in trees well half of it is a coffee plantation too so that's
kind of cool because we're going to have a i mean every one of our communities has a little bit of
a theme so that one's kind of coffee themed where you you know we're going to have veritas village
coffee you know client the residents can give them bags away to their friends and things like
that so you what you're going to keep some of the coffee plantation going yeah um we have to keep a
certain amount of green area anyway so that actually counts so there's certain there's
certain trees you can't cut down the certain species of trees and and we also want to have
a large percentage of green space and hiking and there's beautiful waterfalls and rivers on the
property it's it's spectacular i mean it's it's really beautiful what's the time scale on that one
uh like i said we we acquired it this last summer and um permitting can take a year to 18 months so
So, you know, Costa Rica really considers themselves a very green country, probably more than any other country in the world.
And so the environmental and climate change permitting and all that is a draining process.
We have to write about an 800-900 page application.
So it's a lot of work.
But we've got, you know, all the people that we've talked to are very bullish about us getting maybe next, like, August, September time frame.
so they knew exactly what the plan was right from the start i mean but the beauty of it too
for a change for us is it's actually already registered as an urban area because of tennis
the town which is a really quaint um you know a little latin american town that's you know the
typical ones with a you know cathedral on one side and a park on the other the same design that
they all have but it's very it's very much more authentic it's not been like the costa rican beach
towns that are sort of gringo towns at this point right so the nice thing too it's half an hour to
the beach it's half an hour to the airport in san jose and it still feels extremely isolated
so with that much land though are you alex i'll be coming to you soon mate don't worry
thanks for coming out moral support um with that much land are you thinking about creating quite a
lot of amenities on there yeah exactly we have um a lot of things are already going obviously you know the restaurants and and it has a nice little mini lake pond on it So that will become a tilapia pond where we going to put a dock out into it where you can go fishing and things like that
And the natural amenities are amazing.
Like I said, the waterfalls and we're going to have one of the restaurants right beside the waterfalls.
So, you know, I can picture, you know, people getting married there and stuff like that.
What about things like stuff that you get on a slightly grander scale, like medical facilities and all that kind of stuff?
even in the smaller one than Coronado,
we're going to have a small clinic school.
McKell's expat money school is going to have its first physical school there.
The rest of it has been online.
Really?
Yeah.
The expat money school,
but not for kids,
right?
For grownups.
No,
it's for kids.
Is it?
Yeah.
We're trying to get to kids early.
Teaching them about,
get rid of the woke part and get them back into libertarians.
Right.
That's it.
So,
all right.
Like I say,
Alex,
we'll be coming to you,
but can you give me an overview of each place,
like Coronado, Cherokee, you know, this at Tennis,
and the Playa Pacifica, and what it actually is like there now,
and like how many buildings are there, what's there, this kind of stuff.
Because they're all different environments.
You've got seas, mountains, kind of, you know.
So Playa Pacifica, Veritas Village Playa Pacifica is in Nicaragua.
It's the closest beachfront area to the Managua Airport,
so it's 45 minutes to get there um it's to me it's one of the most beautiful beachfronts in the
world it's just like and and not very many people on the beach so you know it's a beautiful surfing
there's different kinds of surfing there's a reef break there's a sand break so if you're into surfing
it's easy right to the most challenging kind of surf you can have and so uh we're actually a
a neighborhood inside a larger resort and so we we have all the things that we have in a typical
Veritas Village we have a separate orchard and garden for sustainability but the beauty of that
is you also have you know restaurants and hiking trails and a golf course and all that stuff is
part of that that is accessible by everybody that's a Veritas Village resident and so and you know it's
it's a beautiful beachfront so you know for swimming and kayaking there's a river that runs
through it as well and so that's a really pretty beachfront it's a little bit harder to grow things
on the beach to you know to be sustainable so the the gardens are further back but they're still
within within the greater property which is nice and how many places to live are there on there
um on the overall property now there's probably 400 ish homes on you on on ours our community is
just starting up so it's a dozen 15 maybe but over you know it feels like one big community right
and that was that community started before the veritas village idea sort of evolved fully right
yeah exactly we kind of made it into a veritas village by adding you know our first philosophy
the f-i-r-s-t the freedom independence resilience sustainability and transparency
we you know that we're that's the pillars of our focus now so when i look at sustainability and it's
a beachfront and it's like well we have to create orchards and gardens and stables and things like
of livestock and so that we had to push back a bit because it's hard to grow bananas and mangoes
and things right in the sand on the beach so but uh now it's a you know absolutely normal type of
veritas village so that's the beach for one that's but does it one more question sorry does it have a
are you does it have a kind of barrier around the veritas village bit the barrier is really the
river so the river is the border on on both sides it kind of the river comes towards if you're at
the beach and the river comes towards the beach and then splits and it it's actually the overall
property is 2400 acres so it's um like really eight nine hundred hectares and you're planning
on putting how many more places about 60 more homes on on our part of it so in the veritas part
of it so and how much of that is still for can people still invest in now like i said there's a
there's about a dozen or a little bit more than a dozen homes are now we built a few uh model homes
there too so that you can actually buy one today and move in tomorrow if you wanted to all right
okay so yeah and then uh if we move over to uh chirokee chirokee is a bit of a smaller one
the chirokee is the name of the the province of in panama then it's a very very popular expat spot
people go to boquete and caldera and chirokee area um the volcanoes there so they can get higher in
the mountains and you get for me it's the the really high boquete is quite high up in elevation
it rains a little bit too much for me and it's a little too cold i came from vancouver island in
canada i didn't move to the tropics to be rainy and cold so we purposely are in bugaba which is a
town just outside of town on a lower elevation about 300 meters instead of 900 meters we don't
get the rain we're close to the beach you know we're kind of half an hour drive to boquete a
half an hour drive to the beach so it's in the best of both worlds and boquete's got a lot of
little cool shops and things like that just because it's been an expat center forever
and that's a smaller one um total of maybe 30 or 40 homes on it but it had
what there's some things that one's got a beautiful river that runs through it as well
and what i really like about it is we designed um the community orchards and gardens to be like a
like a shop like a grocery store it's got aisles and and we trained all the plants to grow up the
sides and you literally walk down the aisle and you know pick your oranges and your bananas but
that's already there or this is a good chunk of it is already existing we keep planting more but
people always ask me so when is this one going to be done it's like when is a town done like i mean
when's the city done so how many houses are there at chirickey then like i said there's only about
25 now or something like that or less but um you know we have an option to acquire the space beside
it too so depending on how popular that one becomes we'll probably expand it and then there's
the one that in Coronado in Panama that's about an hour drive out of the city one of my favorite
areas there we're again up in the hills there's a Anton Valley which is a very popular destination
in Panama, we're just beside that. So we get the, it's in what they call the dry corridor is kind of
the, the weather comes from the, from the Caribbean side, hits the mountains, drops all its rain,
comes over the mountains and it's drier and you get a lot of rain in Panama. So to find a dry spot
is nice. So, but it's still beautiful. You get enough rain for the, you know, the orchards and
gardens there too. And, and, you know, that one, much like the, the, the Costa Rican one, we have
the tilapia pond we have the stream that goes through it we have music studios we have a
woodworking studio and different types of things stables for horses importing horses and stuff like
that chicken coops for the eggs and that sort of stuff so and how many how many places that one's
around 100 and currently people building yeah we just got the permits a few months ago to to
actually start building that Panama's trying to model itself like Costa Rica
and literally halfway through our permitting they introduced the climate
change department and we had to start our environmental permitting all over
again but we have I would say about 20-25 homes that are going to be starting
well we've got five getting close to finish we were allowed to buy build five
homes as model homes sort of for the for the purpose of showing people what the
community is going to be like and so those are almost done and now we're starting i mean it's
almost sold out so i it's hard to say how many homes we're going to have built by the this time
next year and it's up to the people that buy the plots to to build their own no we built the homes
um we didn't used to but we we we've done we changed a few things we uh the three things i
say that are important for us now is we build the homes because we want people to have a good quality
home when they get there because it's very difficult to hire a Latin American construction
group and not be there and you're going to get like rebar that's too small and you know
just it just going to happen right and we also have our own turnkey We have Veritas RPM RPM stands for rental and property management
We used to have other property managers handle the communities,
but if they do a poor job and they don't clean the houses properly and rentals
and people come there and they're not happy, it reflects poorly on the community.
So we've decided to take that over and manage it ourself in all the Veritas villages.
And then we have a two-year build period.
So we have a whole bunch of more than a dozen home models that people really like.
I'm pretty proud of our architectural group.
And, you know, we have a lot to pick from, but it's a freedom-oriented community.
If you want to design your own home, you can do that.
And so we also, you know, are building them for the quality reason.
But we have a two-year build period because what I've noticed after a couple of decades of doing this,
there's a lot of developments that just get two or three homes done.
and then they stop there and like some developer thought he was a developer and he sold to his
sister and his dentist or something and that's where it stops and you see them littered all over
central america with the with home construction or resorts like that this never happened and then
you can't support them because nobody's paying hoa fees and you can't keep the place looking nice and
it just turns into a ghost town so in order to not have that happen ever for us we have the right to
buy your property back for what you paid for it within two after two years if you haven't started
construction is that right yeah that's it so okay and you are anticipating everyone's just gonna
yeah i mean the people have been we're the people haven't been the bottleneck the climate change
department has been the bottleneck and so you know now that we have that permit it's it's really
starting to rocket i i think there's a couple homes that will be actually done before the end
of this year so people definitely in 2026 we'll have people living there great and there was one
more wasn't it oh costa rica obviously yeah nothing there yet nothing there just in permitting
there like i said costa rica's pretty uh retentive about their permitting so we're on a good track
though it's going faster than i actually expected so that's good alex hi tim hello mate you're here
as well i noticed you there hi um so what now why are you here alex i'm here because uh amongst all
the other things that Autris has been doing.
We should probably, Autris is the parent company of Veritas Village.
Yes.
Autris is your original company.
Exactly.
Right, yeah.
And it's a public company, AUTR, on the stock exchange, and we acquired BitCorp, which was
Alex and Tidus.
Okay, Alex's company, right.
Exactly.
Why?
Well, the reason for the acquisition is really the vision of Patrick aligned with the vision
that Titus and I had in founding BitCorp. It really stems from the concept of the Bitcoin
Treasury Company. It's quite a phenomena that is taking place, I don't know, over the last,
call it six to 12 months. Obviously, a little bit longer too, if you consider the case study of
strategy or micro strategy. This was something we had somewhat glanced over, I would say.
Not that we were against it.
It just didn't really dig in and take the time to really understand it.
But after, you know, really taking some time to look at it based on, you know, some interactions we've had in the general free city space, I thought it does make some sense.
It does make some sense to try to do this.
But not all of the narratives that you hear in the space make sense.
I think there is a lot of financialization.
financialization. There's a lot of sort of Wall Street changing around cash flows, securitizing
things. I'm not so sure I'm a big believer in much of that, but I'm a huge believer in Bitcoin over
the long term. And I am very much convinced that this concept of a corporate entity that can have
leverage, but over a long duration. So it's not like buying an ETF with two times leverage,
where it just goes up twice as much and down twice as much the very next day.
It's leverage over potentially a decade or even multiple decades that really helps the
corporate entity be an efficient vehicle to accumulate Bitcoin faster than an individual
could accumulate Bitcoin while being immune from the cycles of Bitcoin in these roughly
four-year cycles that we've seen.
the the thing about bitcoin treasury companies obviously i'm in them i'm in the bitcoin world a
lot and there's a massive distrust of whenever you mentioned the word bitcoin treasury company
apart from microstrategy and obviously probably meta planet people always give them they they
give microstrategy a pass because it's just like obvious and then they go oh and meta planet and
then everyone else and you do see a lot of them doing really badly and what you know my conclusion
from looking at all this is that a Bitcoin treasury company,
inverted commas, that works is a company that basically has a business
and is stacking Bitcoin in a treasury.
But it's almost like I wouldn't call that a Bitcoin treasury company.
The treasury companies, I think, are the ones that just start a company
to buy Bitcoin like MicroStrategy kind of did.
But I know they had a business as well, which was generating, what,
50 million a year or whatever.
But so are you really, is it really a, I mean, is that just the terminology of it?
Well, if I can jump in for one thing, I just want to clarify that, you know,
Atris is a real company building Veritas Villages, right?
Of course, yeah, that's what I mean.
And we have never actually bought Bitcoin.
We sell our homes in Bitcoin.
So every Bitcoin that we've stacked has been through transactions.
So, but we are huge believers in Bitcoin, just as Alex mentioned.
And so whether you want to call it a Bitcoin treasury or whatever, we keep a certain amount of our treasury in Bitcoin.
And, you know, in the past, we've set limits, you know, 20%, 30%.
Frankly, if we were in only developing in El Salvador and I could pay construction companies with Bitcoin, that's all we would have.
I have zero faith in fiat.
So, you know, that's the reason.
And, you know, fortunately so.
We sold homes when Bitcoin was at $40,000.
Now we're at whatever, $110 today or whatever it is.
You know, it's been good for the company, right?
We had a 500% increase in our Bitcoin holdings over the last year.
Well, also, I think, I mean, I've spoken to a number of real estate people actually on this podcast recently.
And everyone seems to acknowledge now that having a Bitcoin treasury is an essential part of any business.
I mean, if you have any business, even if you generate, even if you kind of get an investment of 20 million or 30 million, you should take a pocket of that and put it in Bitcoin for the long term.
That should be your strategy.
Five years ago when we started doing that, everybody thought we were lunatics though.
Yeah, well, I know.
You were ahead of the game.
That's pretty cool.
But now, like I say, it's especially amongst the real estate people.
It's very common to think that.
But really, what it is, is every business.
Whatever business you're starting, you should have a treasury because it will allow you, as long as you can think long term and you're not going to spend it too quickly.
You know, it's part of your business model going forwards because it will end up helping you to invest and stuff.
But so, yeah, you're not a treasury company, but you're calling it a treasury, right?
We are.
I mean, I think you're exactly right.
Our view is definitely you need an operating company and we simply hold Bitcoin in our treasury.
I would say we are a treasury company to the extent that we are familiar with the tactics and the mechanisms that people can use to create Bitcoin yield, as it's called.
So increase the amount of Bitcoin on a per share basis.
We can and will do some of this over time, but it's simply not the priority right now.
We are too small at Autrys and too focused on developing real estate.
So it is really a vehicle for stacking.
at this point. And so to the extent that that's not a Bitcoin treasury, then sure, we're also not.
But so when everyone talks about MNAV, if you're in a treasury company, he's always gone about MNAV.
This is how I think I understand it. Tell me if I'm wrong. You're the finance guy.
MNAV is the valuation of your company versus the valuation of your Bitcoin holdings.
And if it's one, if the MNAV is one, they're the same. And if it's less than one, it means
you're basically, you're not generating enough income from your company. If it's more than one,
your company is generating good income. Is that loosely speaking how it works?
Well, it's very close. I mean, that is how it should trade. That's right.
My background, even before, you know, one of my first jobs actually, was working for
an asset manager in Chicago called Ariel Investments. And the focus of Ariel Investments,
at least the fund that I was working in, was something called deep value. Deep value is not
just value stocks like Warren Buffett would try to find, but actually often money losing stocks.
Stocks that had a balance sheet of, call it a million dollars, but every year they lose $25,000.
And so then what you're trying, and the market has valued the company quite low as a result.
and the question that you're trying to figure out as an analyst in this sector is not the growth
actually what you're trying to figure out is what is the stock of money versus the
the amount that they lose through bad management every year and if they're slightly less bad at
management over time then actually the stock could increase in price even though they're losing money
this is um this is how the markets are treating um the valuation of these sorts uh of all companies
but in particular this you know i think this analogy helps me understand this m nav concept
you can trade at a one m nav when you are not generating any income but you're also not you
have no expenses nothing so i have 10 shares on the balance sheet and i have 10 bitcoins and i
there we go. You know, we don't, we don't, nothing changes over time. But the MNAV should actually be
higher than one. If I am able to generate enough cash flow through an operating business or through
MetaPlanet is selling options or through financial structuring, you know, mechanisms that strategy
and others are doing to actually create income to increase the amount of Bitcoin that I can
generate for my company while the shares remain the exact same. To the extent I'm losing money,
I should trade at an MNAV of below 1.0. And that's the sort of interesting dichotomy we've seen
when this was really hot six months ago. People were trading at MNAVs of 6, 7, 8. Well, when you
trade at an MNAV of that level or higher, you should definitely be issuing shares into the market
using those proceeds to buy Bitcoin,
and you're able to accumulate more Bitcoin on a per share basis,
which increases the performance of the company.
And is it fair to say, like, it's fair to say that over the period
since the treasury company idea is kind of memed into existence,
people are starting to work out that it's a bad idea,
unless you're microstrategy, to be a pure treasury company,
because Bitcoin is too volatile at the moment.
and you're going to end up getting...
Especially if you're leveraged.
Right, yeah.
Which it kind of is leveraged though, isn't it?
It is, isn't it by this,
because it's leveraged by its nature almost.
Well, you're giving away custody.
Of course, you can self-custody your own Bitcoin,
but you can't self-custody your own shares,
at least as of now.
So you're giving, you know, some,
you have other managers, in this case,
Autrest that is holding the keys to the Bitcoin,
you know that you hold indirectly through it but but so yeah and and the so the like i say the
the realization has been this is my realization just from listening to podcasts is that people
are realizing that it's important to have a business not just become a treasury company but
really like you say which is why i kind of wonder whether it's even a treasury company it's certainly
not until you're actually creating products that you're using which as in financial products
that you're using then that's the treasury bit right so you to begin with you're stacking bitcoin
and having it on your balance sheet and then if a time cut a certain time comes then you start
creating financial products to i mean the idea obviously of the treasury company is to beat the
price of bitcoin right as well that that's the is that i mean am i getting that right is that the
kind of base layer of it the whole point of it is to beat because bitcoin is pretty otherwise you
just buy bitcoin itself right exactly that's what i mean it's a pretty good investment anyway
it's exactly right and that's why the m nav if you're not able to accumulate bitcoin faster
should be at one or actually probably less than one because you're no longer holding the keys to
it and you're giving up you know you have counterparty risk and all of these sorts of things
but the idea really is that i mean i think you're right you're seeing this trend m navs were very
high it was hot it was a bit of a bubble they've come down in my opinion they've crashed down in
many cases too low because they're now trading at mnavs of a third which means effectively i can buy
one bitcoin for one third of the price by buying the stock now it's not a perfectly apples to apples
comparison because i'm not actually buying the bitcoin i'm buying the company that holds the
bitcoin and i'm trusting that a they won't lose the keys that they are not going to spend money
you know wildly and lose a bunch of money uh over the next number of years etc but you know a third
versus you know i can get one bitcoin for for a third of the price that seems to me
to be quite substantial but it matters on a you know individual company basis and as far as
micro strategy goes as a as the best example of a treasury company is this correct as well this is
what i understand about the way their business operates not forget the old actually it's strategy
now, isn't it? Forget their old business. But the Bitcoin side of it is basically they're buying
Bitcoin and they're giving people a 10% yield on a product that they're getting a much bigger yield
on, which is the Bitcoin. And the people that are buying the 10% yield are just people who either
don't know what Bitcoin is, don't care. They just want 10% yield, which is a pretty good yield
anyway. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy are taking that money and buying Bitcoin with it, which
year on year has a much bigger yield than that. Is that how it works?
Effectively, that is. And actually, during periods of time, Bitcoin does not outperform
the 10% yield. And we've seen that MicroStrategy stock or strategy stock has gotten hit quite a bit
in the market at the moment because of this sort of thing, as well as other sentiments, of course.
but absolutely this is true i mean the bet from from michael saylor is that over the long term he
wants the bitcoin he's willing to pay out uh you know in order to get your capital to use that to
invest in bitcoin he's willing to pay you out a certain coupon you know over time in order to have
his exposure to bitcoin and you know of course he's been proven 100 correct in this for you know
four or five years. I think he is generally speaking correct about this over the long term,
but it is somewhat new territory. Hence the idea that, because they've already done it,
and they have the economy of scale now, they have the complete ability to keep doing it. Whereas if
you do it, if you want to start doing it now, you really need an operating business to sort of,
you know be the backbone of the curves yeah exactly if bitcoin dropped in half today it doesn matter to me at all our business is what keeps us going And in fact we would be acquiring Bitcoin in that case It better for us if Bitcoin has
We can buy twice as much.
Yeah.
So apart from people buying property for Bitcoin, is the idea to buy Bitcoin as well?
Well, now with BitCorp, yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
We want to be really not just a Bitcoin treasury company, but a holistic Bitcoin company.
We're creating Bitcoin citadels in the form of Veritas villages. We're holding Bitcoin on the balance sheet
We would like to enter the field of this sort of Bitcoin Treasury company at the right time at the right place and in a strategic manner
We want to mine Bitcoin with the energy
Produced to add Veritas villages. We want the people in the Veritas villages to use it as a medium of exchange
We're potentially thinking of looking at
developing the HOA rules for these villages on a Bitcoin sidechain, you know, through a DAO, that sort of thing.
So yeah, we're really trying to become the holistic Bitcoin Citadel, you know, that Bitcoiners are talking about the place where,
you know, we're doing everything on Bitcoin and with Bitcoin, but also with Bitcoiners.
That's absolutely the idea of joining forces with Autrys and Bitcorp.
Right, that is interesting.
So I guess I actually misspoke before when I said the only Bitcoin we have is from sales.
It's actually a little bit from mining too, because we were, as far as I know, the only
solar powered mining company in Latin America.
So is it true that your, each property has the option?
Yeah.
In fact, I mean, the goal, honestly, when we started testing the mining on solar systems
is that most of the solar systems, well, backing up a little bit, we tried an experiment with
solar farm and everybody getting their power from the farm it would actually be a lot less expensive
for us to do it that way because it's you know at any given time maybe there's 80 of the people
living there 20 or somewhere else where they're not using power but the people didn't like it so
it's like no well john's using more power than i am and so these are independent people privacy
oriented people and they're also you know from a sustainable or resiliency standpoint they want
their own system so if john's goes down mine didn't and so in we have to build these systems
for each home it comes with the homes when you buy them we're very expert knowledgeable in these
systems now we experiment with different ones every week but um you know that because we have
to build for the for the peak usage like new year's eve everybody's partying all night and
using a lot of battery power that was created during you know the storage during the day in the
the panels, we have to overbuild these systems, frankly. And so there's a lot of excess generated
power that on a normal day is not used. So we started offloading that to the Bitcoin miners.
And so anybody can do that with their system. And the goal when I started doing this as an
experiment was there's only really two expenses after you buy your home in a Veritas village
because your food and your water and everything's free. Your expenses are out of our control in one
case, which is property tax, which is very low in Latin America. I mean, it would be less than
$1,000 a year most of the time. But the other one is your HOA fees. In order to keep the communities
beautiful, we have to have a homeowners association. As Alex mentioned, we're doing that on a Dow and
with quadratic voting, which we can talk about too, which I find very interesting.
But if the Bitcoin miner does nothing else but pay for your property tax and your HOA fees,
it's reached my goal of a net whopping zero for cost so do you so do you you don't build the
houses with a miner included right no we don't we've talked about like we kind of have a catalog
of options so we can throw that in there the issue is on some of some of those things they
change so fast like the miner we bought six months ago is outdated now it's slower than everything
that's on the market so it's kind of to me it's like buying a phone or a laptop you got to just
bite the bullet at some point and buy it because you need to use it but we make it up in the cost
of electricity because it is it is zero i mean it's literally zero almost every miner in the world
has got this massive expense of power unless you got lucky enough to get the offshoots of a natural
gas plant or something that you do get free power in our case it's free like i don't really care
what bitcoin's price is as long as i'm mining it for free so i mean a lot of cases they have to
see well i'm losing money because i'm not if bitcoin isn't over a hundred thousand
the mining is actually taking more power than i'm gaining from it in our case i don't really
care what it is because we're always going to make money at it but the houses aren't connected
all up in a grid so if someone's house is producing electricity and what happens when
the batteries fall nothing well exactly there's all that excess power i mean but they're not
connected there's no way they can choose to it's a freedom learning to community they can choose to
you know if 10 neighbors beside each other want to you know do net metering between them they can
we found that they didn't want to so we didn't force it on them but there so for that reason you
know it could be 10 in the morning and your batteries are all fully charged again like
the power of the sun near the equator is massive and like we i was doing this in canada and you
know you'd take 50 panels to produce what i'm getting out of three by the equator so it one of
course the technology changes every week too they're getting better and better but yeah so
literally you know our welcome center is a good example that's where in in the coronado property
that's where we have a you know do our bitcoin mining testing and uh usually by 10 a.m you know
from 6 30 or in the morning 6 6 30 in the morning you're already generating massive amounts of power
by 10 a.m it's you know you don't know what to do with all this power and and it's thousands and
thousands of watts and so it's like what the batteries are full like and we can keep adding
batteries but it's not going to help we don't ever use them we got 60 kilowatt hours in this home
anyway so yeah it's might as well use it have you got a system then that would switch a miner on and
off exactly i can do it remotely from here really yeah i mean that's a side business right there
isn't it just people with miners yeah just talking to the homeowners and say look you know just you
The Bitcoin and the freedom-oriented community Venn diagram overlaps almost 100%.
Everybody in the community is interested in this.
And everybody loves the fact that in Nicaragua, you can go to a restaurant and pay with Bitcoin.
So we're creating these Bitcoin citadels quietly that nobody really knows about.
Talking of the Bitcoin Citadel concept, what's your latest thoughts on sovereignty and independence and that kind of stuff, other than the obvious energy independence and stuff?
Is that something that you think about, talk about, moving towards, talking to anyone in the government about, anything like that?
All the time.
Oh, all the time.
All right.
I mean, that's pretty much how Alex and I met, I guess, to be honest, is talking to governments in Latin America and convincing them to do these things.
without us having to do it.
And you'll see in my presentation this afternoon,
I talk on a few slides on this,
is a lot of entities,
and I would say including typical,
let's come at it from a top-down perspective, right?
We want this governance.
And when you give us this governance,
I'm not saying it's a bad, we need both approaches.
When you come down from the top,
we want this governance.
And the problem in Latin America
is giving away sovereignty on a promise
that something might happen is almost impossible.
And that's what I was running into all the time.
so we've actually turned a page here in the last few months which is really nice finally because
years ago four or five years ago and we sort of started building the veritas villages to start
with we tried the same thing it's because like we want to have our own i don't know police force we
want to we want to have you know government as a service within these walls and they were just like
you're you're a lunatic and but i said look we're going to create all these jobs we're going to bring
in wealthy expats these are luxury homes they're not yurts in the forest right and so
these people are going to bring their companies here, which they are doing now.
We got guys with snowmobile parts that are moving their companies to our area and living in Veritas So it totally unrelated to being in the tropics but because we near the canal too and the cost of labor is a tenth of what it is in other countries or in first world so first world countries
But so now the government's actually calling me and saying, hey, love what you're doing.
You're basically the poster child for the kind of developments we'd like to see.
what would it take to convince you to do more or expand and now i've got their attention to say well
alex come with me let's go talk to them about what what we would really like and and so i think
in a way it's happening faster than i was expecting it to because usually i mean you got to understand
that these governments have been promised a million things from gringos all the time it's
like and and like even when i was saying there's a sprinkling of failed resorts all over the place
So they look at that and they go, yeah, this guy also wanted a bunch of things and look, you know, good.
He made three homes, right?
So the jobs didn't happen and all those things.
So I understand their position and to give away sovereignty for countries like this that have, you know, gone through, you know, they're going the right direction.
They've gone through communism or socialism and they're really eating up capitalism now and that's great.
And they're certainly going from far left to much more centric or a little bit right these days.
You know, you got Noboa in Ecuador, you got Millet as a libertarian in Argentina.
So the countries are, I had a heat map at one point where 20 years ago, how socialist they were and all the countries there that have gone to more capitalists.
And it was very interesting.
But anyway, so it's a process.
But like I said, I'm pleased with the fact that they're actually starting to pay a little bit of attention to us.
And for us to go talk to countries like Ecuador, you know, Nivoa, they want to say, where's an example of what you've done?
So they say, well, come to Panama, come to Nicaragua, we'll show you what the community looks like.
And this is a small model of what could be a free city.
So when you're approaching governments, are you in this, are you, I'm assuming, your strategy is the kind of evolution of the economic zone? Is that where you're at?
Absolutely. And look, I think we are talking about terms that have a lot of overlap, but we are really not focused on sovereignty.
At Tipolis, I really don't think even at Autros, full sovereignty is really what's wanted.
I mean, that includes a lot of headaches that actually we're not interested in taking on.
What this is, is much consistent with the Bitcoin ethos, is actually just decentralization of governance.
It means the ability to make your own rules on a local level.
We understand that there are certain things that must be done on a national level in whichever country we are.
In fact, we would like to benefit from and even pay for things like national defense and international relations and diplomacy, that sort of thing.
Rather, the question is more about what are the rules and regulations that a local people can choose to live by and live under?
And one of the most effective mechanisms for that has really been the evolution of special zones that you've heard probably from everyone on the Tipolis team and many others as well.
And that's really one of the places that's really applicable.
It is in building, right?
Building regs and things like that.
I mean, I'm thinking of Prospero here and Morizan and how obvious it is that you can build better, cheaper places if the regulation is under your own control.
Absolutely.
I mean, we obviously have talked about doing Veritas Villages within Prospero as well.
Have you?
And so that would be nice because it could just, you know, ask Eric, can I have the permit tomorrow?
Yeah.
Right.
So that kind of thing is great.
I mean, the biggest pain in my butt is permitting.
It's the thing that slows us down.
It's the only real bottleneck we have.
We're good at building.
We know what we want.
And we've been very lucky in that clients love what we're doing.
There's a bigger, well, the second biggest thing is inventory.
I mean, I like to make sure we pick the right property before we just go ahead and build a Veritas Village.
But once we find it, the only issue is permitting.
So in a place like Prospera, where I don't have to ask the Honduran government, I just ask Prospera for a permit to go ahead and they'll literally give it to you in a couple of days.
That's a huge win.
Well, that's an important point to hit on.
Okay, the permitting itself is very frustrating and difficult to go through and bureaucratic.
But that's not the biggest issue.
The biggest issue is the time that it takes.
Everyone talks about in real estate, location, location, location.
Okay, that's very important, yes.
But time to execute, time to build is actually an incredibly important aspect to this because you are typically parting with a lot of capital upfront to acquire a large piece of land.
You need to develop it and then pay back any lenders or equity contributors for this.
And the timing, if you're just sitting on, I have to outlay $20 million to buy this property and I'm sitting on it then for four years going through permitting cycles.
This is four years of lost returns where I could have just put $20 million in the bank and gotten, even in today's environment, 4%, or could have put half of it in Bitcoin and doubled my money over the last four years, that sort of thing.
Yeah, time is everything for us.
I mean, if I hadn't been lucky enough to have software companies in the past and be able to fund that time, and we have employees to pay, we have all sorts of office space and everything.
So while we sit there, we're not sitting there, we're working with lawyers.
day but lawyers yeah it's like a enormous amount of expenses and you know people think oh you must
just be so easy you just buy a piece of land and people love it because you're doing this freedom
oriented thing it's like it's there's nothing easy about it software business is way easier
but when you talked when you say like building prospera that doesn't mean prospera the the the
physical location yeah no prospera can kind of like build prospera in any kind of anywhere not
yeah no i mean i'm more talking about the physical location and we've talked to them about you know
creating a verita obviously we're very aligned in a lot of ways in the in the freedom thinking and
and so there's there's we have no plans for it right now but there's nothing that would
you know be an issue i think if we decided okay you know it would be nice to have another
community on the caribbean there's a beautiful place that prospera has there and if we wanted
to go ahead and say a carve out you know whatever 50 acres for us and they want that right
I mean, they're always saying, come on, bring your business here.
I like the Bitcoin district now.
They've got a nomad district.
I can't imagine they wouldn't want it.
Yeah.
No, we have some talks about it.
What's quadratic voting then before we go?
Well, Alex can probably do a much better scientific dive into it.
My two cents on quadratic voting is by example and the practicality of it.
So the biggest issue I've seen in the years that I've been involved in building towns is that the HOA is always the problem.
Because most developers are control freaks.
We're not.
We turn over the HOA to the community right away because I don't need any more headaches in order to be blamed for some decision that was made.
but you either elect or you know appoint an HOA president and their job is impossible they can't
please all the people all the time and you know human nature is to assume that when you didn't
get your way that person's got something in for you or whatever it is so it's a horrible job
anybody that's been an HOA president knows that and you have to have pretty thick skin and all
those things and it creates a lot of anxiety in the community because then everybody's got
something to bitch about right and so what originally the idea was okay we're
gonna use a dow because it's basically a transparent voting and if you lost I
mean you can have you can say it has to have more than 50% on voting so there's
kind of two stages to it let say every seven items that get a reasonable amount of votes to be voted on like say you have two tennis courts we want a third one Well okay there an example
Let's say, okay, well, let's put that to a vote.
And then you can vote on the blockchain with the DAO.
And it's, you know, you can't say, oh, this one guy or this one woman didn't like me, so they decide not.
I like tennis and they don't, and so they decided not to put in a third tennis court.
it's the people's choice on a dow now quadratic voting i for me makes it even more fair because
basically as an example let's say you get 100 votes per year so you tim you like tennis you're
going to vote you're going to you're going to you're going to cash in a few of your chips you're
going to say i'm going to take 20 of my votes because that's important to me and then other i
always have the same examples i need to come up with some new ones but you know people don't like
roosters in their community right so they're making noise and and in the early morning and
i'm personally not a morning person so i don't want a rooster waking me up at five in the morning
so but somebody doesn't care they are morning people and they get up before the roosters and
that's fine and they'll say well i'm i may not even vote on this one or i may use one of my
votes all right and and but in the tennis court i'm using 20 or 25 or whatever i'm a 60 you can
do whatever you want you once your bank of votes is gone that's it so you've got to you know is that
on a yearly basis yeah i mean that's just an example refreshed every yeah exactly and you can't
you can't you know bank them till next year and pile up a thousand after 10 years or something but
you'll get a load of people voting on new year's eve then yeah exactly but the interesting i mean
the interesting thing about it is that this quadratic voting is really a solution to the
problem of uh the loud minority usually dictates the rules in almost anything it is a way to
effectively use mathematics in voting to understand how broad versus how deep the support for
something is. And if something has deep support, what I mean by that is not so many people here
want it. There's a proposal to build an opera house in the town. And it turns out that you and
I, Tim, don't like it, but Patrick really likes it. This is not a public good at that point. It's
really a private good. If Patrick wants it, he might vote a lot for it, but because he's going
to put up all of his, you know, merits or whatever votes or whatever for it, they're going to get
discounted down quite a bit versus if we say, well, we would like, you know, a sidewalk to be able to
take us, you know, from the community center to, you know, our neighborhood, all of us like that.
And so we're all willing to put up, you know, five votes for it rather than, you know, zero,
zero and 100 for the opera house. Our voting of five, five and five, because it is broader,
gets relatively elevated in terms of the value for the community.
It's effectively a way to find out what is truly a public good,
not the nonsense that's made up.
Even in academia, I think it's nonsense.
But then in popular parlance,
public good is just like anything that I don't know
how I would personally finance myself.
And as a Citadel, Bitcoin Citadel company,
you reckon that that stuff you can do on Bitcoin now?
because I know a lot a lot of the this is the thing about a lot of the projects I've been to
visit have basically used blockchains for various things like DAOs and decision making and stuff
and no one yet have I discovered who's been using Bitcoin and most of them say it's because they
didn't know how to do it but the Bitcoin blockchain doesn't it's it's um doesn't lend itself to
things like that expansion of like an NFT type of thing which is really in a way what this is
but there's one that I'm looking at very closely right now called Rootstock, which is a Bitcoin sidechain, which, you know, has that base.
You know, if you look at it, it's just got, it's got everything Bitcoin's got, and then it's got the ability to, you know, be used in a voting sense and that sort of thing.
I mean, I guess you could vote with Bitcoin blockchain just by saying you have to put your Bitcoin into this vote.
Sorry.
Yeah, it might, but in 20 years time, people might be spending like $100,000 to make a transaction.
I mean, I guess you could make it just simplistically on sats.
Like it's one sat is one vote, but you can't vote more than X number of sats or something like that.
No, but I agree.
I think the side chain or the layer.
Well, and the rootstock, the reason I like that is I wanted it to be, you know,
like it's kind of like liquid or whatever, the different side chains that are side chains of Bitcoin,
not Ethereum side chains.
Is it designed for decision making then, rootstock?
It's really what it is, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, there you go.
because yeah i've never i've never known what what the what the answer to that was because a lot of
like i say every every especially the intentional communities they all create a like a lot of them
are creating a stable coin or they're doing a dow or whatever and they're all doing them all kinds
of weird and wonderful chains we got enough work to do we don't need to create our own dows and
d apps and but also if you if you're thinking long term you know i mean and if you're into i
suppose it's more it depends how much into self-sovereignty you are because there is only
one place where you where you really get censorship resistance really if you think because all the
other chains are owned by someone there's a boss there's a ceo there's a this and i've not that i've
got less militant about it over the years i must admit when i first came in it was like no you have
to do everything with bitcoin because you're opening yourself up to is the tax vectors here
if you don't do it on Bitcoin and that.
But really, you know, I'm not,
because like a lot of places use NFTs for their plots as well,
which is fine,
because that's a tool and you can use it
and it's absolutely fine.
But if you could do it on Bitcoin,
it would be even better.
It would be a lot better.
But yeah, cool.
Well, look, that is all pretty exciting.
It's like you position yourself as a Bitcoin Citadel company.
But that's new because I know you've always been Bitcoin.
That was kind of the title of our talk yesterday, which was Bitcoin Citadels.
But treasury was a big part of it, I guess.
No, but I mean, I've kind of watched the evolution in a way.
I think it's fair to say, Patrick, you worked.
You're working.
You were kind of working this out out loud in many ways.
Absolutely.
You know, like you were building things and then you realized, hold a minute, I'm a libertarian.
there's a lot of other people out there that actually are looking for this product i can give
it to them you know well we got you know my wife and i were in belize on hamburgers quay
basically an island when covid hit and you know you get island fever at the best of times you
certainly get island fever when you're in lockdown and can't get groceries there and that sort of
thing so that's where you know i give credit to andrea my wife is a lot of it was her saying we
need to build one of these communities that is resilient to this kind of nonsense because she's
a doctor and didn't take her very long to figure out that the rules that they were making for you
know if you sat down in a restaurant you could take your mask off but if you stood up to go to
the bathroom you had to put it on you know i think stadiums were full of people but the gyms were
closed and all those ridiculous rules it's weird it's weird couldn't go to the beach you know
viruses don't really like uv light or salt water but you couldn't go to the beach
you know it's crazy anyway so when we decided this is nuts and we've got authoritarian governments
controlling what we're doing with no logic to it like it would be nice if they were caring but this
is nothing caring about this so then we said well let's actually formally not just build these
communities that are kind of this way it's like these are the pillars of our thought and that's
what they're going to be based on and they're going to be you know no wavering from that because
there will be COVID 2.0. I mean, I say it all the time. I don't actually think the next one's
going to be a virus. I think it's going to be climate change related. It's going to be like
the sun spots are bad this year. You have to stay inside and we have to shut the economy down again.
And I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be something ridiculous again.
So, so in our communities, it'll be like Nicaragua kind of was during COVID, which is you don't have
to wear masks. You don't have to get vaccine vaccinated if you don't want to. If a business
decides that they need to wear a mask to go in them, then that's the business's choice.
But you can decide not to go to that business then.
So, you know, it was voting with their feet, people.
But public goods were, so you can walk down the street, no one's business.
Only when you enter private property, then it's pure.
Then it's the private property's business.
And I'm okay with that.
Like, I mean, we want to be able to make our freedom-oriented rules inside of Veritas Villages.
And if the guy next door wants to be a far leftist community, I don't care.
You decide what you want.
We're not going there.
Do you have a contract like Prospera?
Do you have a, you know, like about what the kind of rules and the rules, because you've got to have some rules.
Yeah, no, we have an HOA rules and regulations.
Very, that was another issue, you know, with the governments.
I don't know why they care, but they do.
You know, I created an HOA document for Veritas Villages, you know, take Panama, for example, and they wouldn't approve it.
it's just like you you need to like even the little things like the the the HOA fee how it's
determined for us it's there's a there's a formula because somebody can have a huge piece of property
within our community and another person wants a small one with a tiny home on it and their
HOA fee just can't be purely size of lot because you still have four people living in either case
and it's how much of the amenities are they using and so there's got to be some sort of formula
the government didn't allow that they basically they basically said no it's got to be pure square
meter this is like it's 10 cents per square meter per month that that's your formula you decide if
it's 10 cents or 12 or 14 but that's the formula i was like why do you care like you know but they
do the nice thing about it though in panama is the day that they stamp your hoa um document you can
change it to whatever you want so i mean at midnight that day is going to be totally different
i was already trying to think of some workarounds there because you could just do that but then you
could add a strange kind of not a tax but you know what i mean some fee that you have to pay on
another like how many people are living in your property and then don't call it that yeah but you
don't even need to know i mean there's always being you know brain straining creative ways to
get around these things but there's this case they gave us the out so it's like all right here's the
you know copy and paste of what you want and then tomorrow you can tomorrow it'll be different
that's the government doing i think their i think their point is and i can only think of one and
that's that they don't want the developer deciding ridiculous hoa regulations they want the people
to which i'm in favor of so i as the developer autrus as the developer has to make the first one
because it's the only entity that can for day one.
And so they have rules for that.
But day two, the people can decide to wipe out every clause in there
and make a totally different one, which is exactly what will happen.
We're already going to have document number two ready.
I mean, it's just another nanny state effort.
You get in many of the developed countries, you get this in a different way.
But in Latin America, you get lots of wage restrictions
and how many holidays you have to have.
And it's the same sort of thing.
we have to protect you to make sure that you, you know, get what is,
what is right and fair.
And if you make a wrong decision that might be better for your life,
it's wrong because we think, uh, you know, we've decided it's not fair.
Yeah. And you have to understand where they came from.
Most of them were socialists 20 years ago. Right.
And so that all these rules were created for the people, you know,
and by, by the nanny. And so they're working their way out of them.
And it's difficult because a lot of those departments that are completely
useless have employ a lot of people.
And so when you're, and what is the one thing a politician wants?
He wants to get back into his job next time again, right?
So if you start being like Millet and even Millet, I mean, he cut a bunch of departments
and rehired all those people into the same or into the remaining department.
So it didn't really help the government cost costs that much.
It just shuffled the deck.
But that guy that was speaking yesterday was getting nailed, wasn't he?
About the central bank as well.
Like, well, who is that?
He is just so whoever's listening to this, one of the speakers yesterday, he worked with
Malay and getting him into power.
And he gave a speech at the conference yesterday.
And most someone asked about what happened to that.
You were going to ban the center.
You were going to cancel the central bank.
It's still there.
And he gave an answer.
And then the next question was, so what about this?
I don't like I don't like your answer.
Can you repeat it the way I want to hear it?
Yeah, that was massive.
I was like, yeah, hold a minute.
Can you clarify that bit about the bank, please?
Yeah, tough spot.
The first question from Tidus.
Unsatisfactory answer.
Massimo follows it up.
No, it's true, though.
I mean, come on.
I mean, look, you can't blame him for probably for entering this blob and not being able to move.
It's the same thing Trump faces, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I think everyone does.
I have no issue with anything that is the result of the political constraints that he's in.
And I don't pretend to be an expert in any of that.
But this concept of we're now changing the policies of the central bank so that, A, it's going to be used for the people and will never again be used against the people.
I mean, this is complete nonsense.
Yeah.
We better talk about the future then or short to medium to long up to you.
But you've obviously got a plan.
This is a lot of new.
You know, you're a Bitcoin Citadel company.
I'm going to call you not a Bitcoin Treasury company.
I think you're a Bitcoin Citadel company.
I think it's a better moniker.
Coined here.
Free Cities podcast.
No, but it's true, if you think about it.
I don't know whether there are any Bitcoin Citadel companies, are there, really?
Not that we're at.
No, no, no, I don't think there are.
I mean, we know about them, right?
There's Bitcoiners doing stuff, but actually, I think, and I love this,
and I think I've watched it evolve,
but I think more and more the Bitcoin element is becoming part of the core idea.
I mean, and I'm massively into all Bitcoin companies, you know,
Like Bitcoin, we've got, even the podcast, we've got it on the balance sheet.
You know, it's like, it's the 21st century way to run a business.
You have to have a treasury.
Well yesterday somebody was trying to convince me that Bitcoin is not the future and it going to collapse and all that You know there still a lot of people out there that believe that and even somebody at this conference which is surprising to me because I was talking about in Panama alone
Now, El Salvador has gone 100%, in my opinion, the right direction
and has struggled with it a bit, but now Bukele looks like a hero
given the fact that Bitcoin's up whatever 10 times
from when he started acquiring it.
But even in Panama, I mean, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica,
they were all laughing at El Salvador in the past.
It's like, what? This guy is crazy.
Now, I paid my taxes for my condo property taxes in Panama City with Bitcoin.
They're allowed to do that now.
Can you?
Yeah.
To the government?
You can pay to the government?
Yeah, pay to the government.
The mayor of Panama City is...
What's that?
City government.
City government, yes.
The municipality of the city, basically.
But a couple of years ago, Tower Bank, one of the banks...
Panama's the financial center of pretty much Central America, Latin America.
and there's hundreds probably of banks there.
Tower Bank is the first one that came out and said,
okay, you can have stable coin in your account.
Basically, you can have a USDT account, I believe it was.
And so I could literally,
it suddenly had an on-ramp and off-ramp in a bank in Panama,
which is cool.
And all the other banks ostracized them.
You can do ACH transfers within Panama
and they all took Tower Bank off of their ACH transfers
as punishment for this crypto-friendly bank.
However, Tower Bank quickly got all the customers.
I mean, every expat that was moving there
was opening a Tower Bank account
because suddenly they had this combined thing
that they'd never had before.
And just this last few months,
Caja de Oros is another bank there,
and they just became crypto-friendly.
There's two or three other ones,
so they realized they were just losing business
by not allowing Bitcoin, right?
And now Tower Bank has taken it one step further
passes stable coins you actually get a qr code and you can transfer bitcoin directly into your
u.s dollar account it converts and everything so it it's you know you can buy bitcoin with through
it and so it's pretty cool i i can't believe that the local government are accepting it for
the mayor of panama city is extremely progressive when i use progressive in a good way i'm like not
not the way north americans think of progressive these days it's not woke it's like actually a
forward-thinking guy. He's very Bitcoin friendly and, you know, doing things with, you know,
putting money where his mouth is. Well, the other very interesting kind of relatively new kind of
Bitcoin thing that's happening is using it as collateral, which you can see absolutely
exploding at the moment. And people now talking very normal financier types talking about it as
pristine collateral and stuff like that. And it's very easy to predict that in the future,
this is going to be like one of the most massive elements of being a bitcoin holder which is why
obviously everyone should be stacking a bit whether it's you your company your business whatever you
know i think the banks and sorry that's i mean that's a big strategy for the bitcoin treasury
company over the long term i think we're a little too early i mean we saw strategy got a credit
rating uh and they effectively uh just simply subtracted out the bitcoin capital yeah in terms
It was a bit disappointing. Was it B- or something?
Triple B-, which was just about junk status.
Look, I'm sure they have formalities, and this is why it happened the way that it did.
But from any honest perspective, it's therefore an irrelevant rating,
because it's not analyzing the nature of the company, which is that it has
over 5% of the Bitcoin supply. And I think that in the future, if you're a company,
this is the sort of thing as as bitcoin moves towards uh being accepted as pristine collateral
which i'm not quite sure i would say it is at the moment because it is volatile otherwise it has all
the great qualities i think it's moving towards that as that happens you know if you have a company
that has bitcoin on your balance sheet you can immediately go out and get a loan like you know
snap of your fingers you don't even have to present business plans you don't even have to present uh
You know, credit ratings, any of this sort of stuff.
You just sign a, you know, show on chain.
Here I've got X Bitcoin and therefore I can get 50% of this in a loan or, you know, 25% of this in a loan.
No problem.
Well, and also two companies now are offering or are about to offer personal credit lines against Bitcoin collateral, which is incredible.
I mean, you can see that that's, you know, I was thinking it through the other night about what you could do with that.
So you have a credit line based on, say, 50% loan-to-value with your Bitcoin.
And so you can use it like a credit card.
You just spend a bit.
You don't want to basically, because most of the companies at the moment, they require you to borrow, you know, let's say 50 grand over the year.
You don't want to borrow 50 grand.
You want to borrow maybe 700 pounds to pay a bill or something or $700 or whatever.
It is amazing.
I mean, it's really, it's really so exciting to think that, especially if you've been stacking for a while, which, you know, it's like, it's so fortunate that, you know, we think how lucky everyone was who heard about it within the last sort of like six or five or six or seven years ago, you know, and suddenly, now all these opportunities that they're opening up and same with companies.
And I'm not saying it's too late by any stretch of the imagination.
It's not.
Get some on your balance sheet, especially if you're raising money.
Get it on your balance sheet.
I was talking to somebody about the butterfly effect in my life of Bitcoin.
So back in 2010 or 11, when Bitcoin was actually 50 cents, somebody told me about it.
He said, you're a technical guy.
You're in software.
You should buy a bunch of Bitcoin.
I was like, well, what is this stuff, right?
So I started looking at it and I went, yeah, I'm going to buy 1,000 Bitcoin for $500.
Today that would be $100 million or whatever.
But I was in Canada.
It was almost impossible to open a wallet at that point.
I called my buddy in the States to open a wallet.
I was going to say, look, I'll give you 500.
I'll keep 500 just to get this wallet because it's in the States.
He was away and didn't answer and I just didn't do it.
Oh, shit.
But then I think about Veritas Villages wouldn exist And you know who knows what would have been different Like I wouldn have the incentive to do that So you know I proud of what we doing now so I guess maybe in the long run that was a good thing and I have a little bit of Bitcoin now not a thousand of them unfortunately
Dude, I'm not sure not having a hundred million is a great thing.
But I mean, I appreciate what you say, you wouldn't be, you may not be doing what you do now, but who knows what you'd be doing with a hundred million as well.
I guess the truth is I could have funded a lot of different things along the way.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, though. Like, you know, there is a curse to having to getting a large, vast amounts of money.
You know, I think about this a lot with my children because I have a plan for them and it's a Bitcoin plan.
And who knows actually what it might turn into? You know, your Bitcoin plan now might turn into an absolutely astronomical amount of money.
It depends what the timeline is in the future. And that could be damaging, you know.
So, you know, like locking it up, you know, putting sort of cryptographic stipulations on it and stuff like that.
They're all quite important things to actually think about, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, even now, I mean, I look at Autris and the market cap on Autris is a significant amount.
But I've always been with my three children.
You know, they didn't like it when they were younger.
You know, we did all right with selling a software company and lived in a nice house and everything.
But that's about where it stopped.
They had to get a job to buy their own car.
And while their friends, it was a bit of a nice neighborhood.
So their friends were getting BMWs at 16 years old as their 16th birthday gift.
And my kids were not.
My kids were working at McDonald's so they could buy a Honda Civic or something at 20 years old.
So they weren't happy about that.
But now they are.
And all three of them are capitalist people that are doing really well on their own.
And then, you know, it's the same thing you're saying with your kids.
Even if you have the ability to leave them a lot, I'm not sure that's a good thing without certain rules, at least.
You know, if all of a sudden you get millions of dollars dumped in your lap, it doesn't matter who you are.
It's probably not going to do great things for your life.
Well, the funny thing about Bitcoin is, is over the very long term, anything could happen, literally.
I mean, there is one timeline where it goes to an actual astronomical amount of money for one Bitcoin, doesn't it?
And it's not that unlikely, actually, when you look at it.
So if your kids, that means by the time they're 40 or 50, who knows?
They might have to have a family office just from something you add in a wallet on your phone.
Yeah, I mean, like some 11-year-old has right now.
Well, no, my daughter, my middle daughter, for a while she started, you know, I've always talked to them about Bitcoin.
And about four or five years ago, I really started trying to get them when they got to a certain age.
And she started taking her pocket money, which was two pounds a week.
She started taking it in Bitcoin.
She has amassed more than £2,000 worth of Bitcoin now at aged, well, by age nine, she had amassed more than £2,000 worth of Bitcoin.
She doesn't spend it on anything.
She's the middle child.
She kind of likes, money's the only thing she can really own.
Do you know what I mean?
Everything else she has to share or she gets given things and all this kind of stuff.
She has natural low time preference.
This is great.
Yeah, exactly.
But probably if she doesn't spend, I don't think she will.
I don't know whether she'll spend it.
She doesn't really want anything.
That's the funny thing.
Because now she started a business.
we've got chickens and she sells the eggs to us.
I said, look, I do you a deal.
For Bitcoin?
Yeah, of course.
You know, like, and she doesn't spend her money on anything.
And I say to her, look, don't hold your money.
You know, she likes having a few 20 pound notes and stuff in her safe or whatever.
In 10 years, she can come and work at Veritas Village.
Good.
She'd love that, I'm sure.
Right.
Future.
And what's happening now?
Like, are you raising money?
Are you doing what?
like this obviously the treasury strategy is there for a reason and stuff you know yeah maybe
i'll speak uh to the short term and then uh the longer vision let's hear from patrick um the short
term part of the uh acquisition of bitcorp and and uh you know consistent with all the press releases
that we've put out uh a part of that is a fundraise uh for uh for autris uh we're raising 30 million
The purpose of that is for three separate functions. One is currently Autris is trading on the OTC ID pink slip over the counter stock exchange.
We would like to uplist to an exchange that is somewhat easier to access for the normal people that would like to potentially buy some shares in Autris,
but find it very difficult in the current exchange,
increase the volumes and liquidity and that sort of thing
so that the common person could easily get in or get out as they like.
That's the first step.
The second step is actually to just purchase quite a volume of Bitcoin,
really start growing the balance sheet and have it there
for what is our long-term view will be worth substantially more
over the, you know, call it 10, 20 year time horizon. And then the third aspect of it is to
help Autrist expand its current business. They are able to execute on all the strategies they have
with relatively, you know, lean operations and a relatively tight balance sheet.
But that requires extra discipline. It requires, you know, being very rigorous about
which purchase of land on what timeline, what are the sort of contingencies related to it.
Having a bit more capital available lets the operation expand and potentially into do multiple
new expansion countries at one time is something that would be very nice. So that's sort of the,
I don't know, call it the six to 18 month time horizon, you know, working on these three things.
As far as a longer term goal, I mean, Alex touched on it with his third point.
We have been organically growing.
We take profits from one of the communities and bury it into building infrastructure and buying more land and so on But we obviously I mean it a hugely nice problem to have but we have more demand than we have inventory for most of the time
And the demand is growing.
I wasn't sure, to be honest, after, you know, call it the panic of COVID sort of started slowing down.
And it has actually increased.
I think people are getting another sense again that, you know, there's enough.
Well, I mean, you can look at the UK and, you know, the flight of, I think TIDIS's first opening presentation at the conference was on the millionaires leaving places, right?
And, you know, fortunately, we're one of the places they're looking at to go to.
And, you know, we're pretty much in zero tax dollar regions and locations.
So that's nice for a lot of people that are just getting beat up by their authoritarian governments.
So I would like to expand faster.
And, you know, we'd like to have the property in Argentina, like to have a property in Mexico, Ecuador, and then beyond Latin America as well.
I mean, we focus on Latin America right now.
Some of the main reasons are it's kind of a live and let live area.
You've been, you know, I think you've lived in Salvador for a little while or in Mexico.
so you know what it's like it's a very nobody's going to bother you about anything right so that's
kind of the that's kind of the foundation to have where to build a community like that but there's
other places in you know in in asia and things like that with the same kind of thoughts and and
so that and and other places i was you know not that i want to have a community in kazakhstan but
i was just in kazakhstan and i was pleasantly surprised that it was a as a nice place and
and kyrgyzstan uh bishkek and el mati and it was a little tangent here but in canada at least i
don't know what it was like growing up in the uk or or the u.s but in canada we're all we were
always taught that we were just like the best place on earth right and everything else is lesser
like it not not in an arrogant way of friendly people and things but just like a quiet pride
you know we're the little brother to the north of the u.s but really we're like kind of the u.s but
better that's what that's what they think right and then you're taught things like you know
central asia is just a shithole basically and and then when i i would encourage people to go to all
sorts of places like you know every time i do that i realize you know everything i was told was not
even close to right right i mean when i first went to nicaragua with my children the friends
in canada all panicked and thought you're all going to get kidnapped and it's like it's actually
safer than Canada in a lot of ways. So, um, yeah, so anyway, the expansion for the, of the communities
of Maritas villages, I'd like to do faster. I don't want to do it at a pace where we, you know,
lose the philosophy of what we're, what we're all about, but there is a demand for it. And I feel
like, you know, my purpose, you know, in life right now is to, to create these oases for people.
And it was originally just, it came up with my wife and I talking about it as Oasis for us and our friends and family if there was going to be a next COVID.
But that's expanded a lot since then.
Great.
Sounds great.
Not financial advice, but one might predict that Altra shares are undervalued, potentially.
I'm not really allowed to say where I think it's going, but I'm not going to argue with you on that.
No, I was just thinking it through as you were speaking.
And yeah, there you go.
Right, guys, very much interesting and exciting.
And thanks for coming in.
And good luck with everything, of course.
I'm a big fan.
I've watched the progress over since the first time I met you.
And I just think it's a kick-ass idea.
What I like about it the most is that it's a brilliant idea.
and it arose out of the market demand,
which is, that's how you start a business.
That's how you should start a business.
Yeah, I'm surprised there hasn't been more.
Yeah, me too.
We don't really have a lot of competition.
We have two or three copycats
and even the Dow idea for the HOA,
I noticed other companies doing that now
and I guess that's the best form of, you know.
Are the other companies libertarians?
Some of them, I would say,
but the one that I'm thinking,
I won't mention any names one that's just copies us like every time we put out a press release or do some kind of marketing
It's a mirror and to look into what they do. The thing is that they're they're not libertarian
They're not they don't really believe in the philosophy of the freedom and self-sustainability and and all that sort of stuff and and so
customers see through that pretty quickly. So they
And you know, no, but the community is a massive part of your thing anyway, isn't it?
you've got a community i i don't think that these things would even necessarily work without a
community because um the especially when you're making a network of places which kind of have
benefits that's the whole point of them really you know amongst the amongst other things it's like
that there's a community involved in it and um you can't fake the community and in fact in the
ones that don't have the community it's they're going to be like holiday home places aren't they
that just end up being, I don't know,
they end up being ghost towns a little bit sometimes.
And the best thing about our communities
is having a glass of wine, watching the sunset,
and all the people that you can talk to,
and you're not censored.
You don't have to feel worried about what you're going to say.
I don't want just people to think like me around me,
but I'd rather not hang out with radical leftists,
so rather not.
Great, all right.
Well, thanks, Alex and Patrick.
It's nice to see you again.
And thanks for coming in.
Thanks, Tim.
Always good to be on your podcast and appreciate you being on mine a few months ago, I think.
We'll have to do another version of that, too.
Whenever you're ready, mate.
I'm there.
I enjoy talking to you.
All right.
Thank you.