So from the Bitcoin world, a lot of people don't know, maybe you guys know, maybe not,
that Bitcoin will have to have a hard...
Hello and welcome back to the Orange Pill Order.
I'm Thomas.
I'm Finn.
And I'm Taylor.
And today we've got an absolute banger of an episode lined up.
We're talking to a guy who literally left Europe, moved to a Caribbean island and is
now mining Bitcoin with leftover electricity from a dam in Paraguay.
You pay for teaching kids about money.
You genuinely could not make this up.
Yeah, when I was researching this guy, I kept thinking, this sounds like a movie plot.
He's from Slovakia.
He was a maths teacher.
He won an entrepreneur award, moved to China, started a fitness company, then discovered Bitcoin.
And it just changed his life.
And the thing that got me is he's not just talking about Bitcoin.
He's actually out there in Honduras, in Paraguay, in Ethiopia, in El Salvador, on the ground,
teaching children and adults about money and financial literacy.
Like, this is real grassroots stuff, guys.
So, without further ado, Dushan Matushka, co-founder of Amity Age, welcome to the Orange
Pill Order.
Big pleasure, guys.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
Of course.
Dushan, thank you for coming on.
and before we jump in where in the world are you right now and what time is it though
so i'm right now in ruatan in honduras and it's 1 p.m here so i think the difference is about six
seven hours between us yeah and yeah so uh we're just going to a lunchtime after the podcast so
it's a nice beautiful day here yeah it looks it looks very nice in the background yeah it really
does so sean let's go right back to the beginning you're from slovakia you are a maths teacher
how does someone go from teaching maths in Bratislava to mining Bitcoin in Paraguay
and running a Bitcoin education center on a Caribbean island?
What happened?
Well, it's a couple of years in between those.
I started to teach math and physics and English when I was about 17.
I started tutoring kids.
Fell in love with that.
I used to be a math guy my whole teenage years.
I won some competitions.
So kind of my father got me into mathematics.
So starting to teach very soon, and I was doing it for a couple of years, really fell in love with it.
When you really can't explain the kids' math, they thought like, oh, I don't have genes for it.
This is not for me.
And suddenly they start to understand the basics, build on it, get self-confidence.
And then the parents pay them more respect.
That was kind of really life-changing for me.
And I decided, like, I want to do this full-time.
I also mentioned I had a construction company in between.
I was building workout parks.
This was kind of my passion when I was about 20, up to 25.
We built a construction company, kind of the biggest in the region,
currently built about 700 workout parks across Europe.
So that was a couple of years till I got back into TAG and into Bitcoin.
So 2015, when I heard the first time about Bitcoin, really said that it's a scam, it's a bonzi scheme.
You know, this is not for me.
I was coming from the math angle, being super skeptical.
And it took me two years till I really sit properly and I did like a deeper research when I said, OK, this really made sense.
And so I kind of left my construction company and gave it to my co-founders.
And I told them, hey, guys, I want to get back to education.
but this time, you know, financial literacy and Bitcoin.
So 2017 was when I really got deeper into it
and since then that was my life mission.
So started to teach Bitcoin in schools,
translated a couple of books into Slovak language,
worked with teachers across schools doing a podcast.
So multiple things in Slovak language
and I became basically a sustainable educator.
So Bitcoin education was my main job for a couple of years.
I was doing webinars, getting clients for one-on-one consultations.
And practically, I was teaching Bitcoin six to eight hours a day.
Slowly, I would say burning out because it was kind of intense.
And I decided to scale it up.
And that's where mining came into the picture in 2021.
So on one of the consultations, I met a guy named Gabriel.
He said in the end, hey, you know, for Bitcoin mining, you need electricity.
right? I'm like, yeah. He said, you need cheap electricity. I'm like, yeah. Yeah, because my
mother-in-law, she owns a power plant and maybe we can ask her if we can start mining there.
I'm like, wow, okay, that sounds interesting. So it was a small biogas power plant. So we were
turning cow into Bitcoin. We were a proper coiners. And this is how we started our journey in 2021
and then scaled to various other countries. So today mining in four or five different countries.
Yeah, that is really awesome. It's a very interesting story. So once you went down that rabbit hole in 2017, what was the moment where you thought like, right, this is something I'm like, just interested in this is something I'm going to dedicate my whole life to?
well i really it kind of slapped me over my face because i spent five years um studying in
university management and economics and during those five years from uh 2012 to 2017 when i
graduated and imagine i i i have a major i have a master's degree in in economics and none of the
lessons we had was about Austrian economics. So I had no idea that something like that exists.
And then the Bitcoin comes into picture and shows you a completely different side, like, oh, there
is this different approach to economics where government doesn't need to print money, when
people, you know, can have private money, and like everything about these libertarian ideas. And I
felt fooled. I felt like, what the heck I was doing five years in school, right? So I realized,
yeah, this felt more like closer to reality,
closer to where my values were at the time
about freedom, about entrepreneurship,
about private property.
And I felt like, okay, now economy suddenly makes sense.
Because during the schools, I was like,
yeah, we're just drawing some lines
and this aggregate demand, aggregate supply.
It felt so disconnected.
But suddenly with Bitcoin, everything felt like,
wow, now it makes complete sense.
I started to love economics suddenly.
And I was like, okay, okay.
I stumbled across something that really is life-changing.
And looking at a history of money and all the trial and error since 1970s
of creating real decentralized digital money,
then Bitcoin coming to the picture, I was like, okay,
this is something that I really need to grab it better and understand it better.
And the deeper I went to the rabbit hole, the more I realized,
like yeah i think this is the best thing i can do with my life just to connect my passion for
teaching with bitcoin that's one of the best tools that we can we have around and just spread
across the world to help 100 million people learn about bitcoin yeah that's very interesting yeah
that is great the goal you've got is so um awesome yeah that achievement once it's hit will be so
monumental to you but and i think that's what we're trying to achieve as well as the kind of
voice of gen z because we don't want well as you said you you spent five years studying economics
just to feel like you've been like cheated out of it basically because yeah three of us we all
study economics literally right now in school and we look at each other like yeah it doesn't really
make sense we question our teachers and they just don't know the answers yeah so you gave yeah i
know the feeling yeah so you gave your first bitcoin workshop in 2018 to about 40 people
what was that people into it or were they looking at you like you were crazy
i was really nervous you know because i felt like i'm still super new in the in the space and um
But at the time, I had a background in teaching.
So I felt like, okay, it's a foundation I can rely on.
Plus, I was teaching a little bit of public speaking as well.
So I kind of put together things that I feel like is going to be a good thing.
But yeah, there was the community that was around at the time.
And in Slovakia, we had a very strong Bitcoin community.
We had one of the first meetups ever in 2010.
There was a Bitcoin meetup in Slovakia.
But Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, was in Slovakia on Bitcoin meetups way before he founded Ethereum.
So the foundation in Slovakia and the first guys that were in the space were really solid.
And they're very good cypherpunk.
So we had a very good foundation there.
But they saw me as like, oh, who's this random guy that wants to teach about Bitcoin?
At the time, I was teaching crypto, right?
So I wasn't a pure Bitcoiner at the time because, you know, 2017, we didn't have lightning around.
So we were paying with Litecoin for our coffees.
We were running a crypto-only cafeteria at the time.
So a place where you can come, but you can pay only with crypto.
So at the time, maybe 80% of payments were in Litecoin, right?
Because Bitcoin, you pay $2 for a coffee.
The fee was $2 as well.
So it didn't make sense.
so yeah I mean teaching at a time felt like you know I knew I want to do it but people were
slightly hesitant but the outcome of the participants were very positive and they
wanted me to do it again and again so that's where I felt like okay I stumbled upon something that
made a lot of sense and what really got me much deeper into rabbit hole and helped me a lot was
I kind of announced free education on my Facebook at the time.
And I told like, hey, guys, every day since like from three to five,
I will be in this cafeteria just studying, doing my stuff.
But if you want to come, we will going to be talking about Bitcoin.
So some days nobody showed up.
Some days one people, two people, one person.
And sometimes I didn't have answers to them when they asked me something.
But I always told them, hey, I'm going to find out the answer, learn it, and I'm going to get back to you.
And this is what really helped me to understand the concepts better and properly get the arguments in place and analogies and everything.
So looking backwards, this was probably one of the best things I did to educate myself and the others and to really get very quickly, very deep in the rabbit hole.
Wow, that's crazy and honestly inspiring how far you've come.
I mean, you mentioned educating 100 million people by 2030 about Bitcoin and that goal.
That's a massive number. Where did the target come from?
So when I was brainstorming about it, it was during COVID.
So roughly 2020, 2021.
And I was like, I would like to get some number that is like crazy huge
that I need to think completely differently about it.
That will kind of throw me out of the box of thinking.
and as well I wanted to have it connected to Bitcoin.
So I want to educate as many people as there are Satoshis in one Bitcoin.
So that's where the number 100 million came from.
And that kind of pushed me more in the direction that,
okay, I cannot and I don't want to do it alone.
And I don't understand all the nuances of various cultural approaches
in different countries.
You know, Bitcoin is this huge thing and every country,
every individual can take the piece that best fits them. So I didn't want to be like, oh, I'm the guy
who will educate everybody and I have the right approach. I was, no, like there's things that
worked in general in my type of education and I was able to teach others how to do it. So this is
what I decided, like I would really love to help other educators get into the space and teach them
how to educate better because then they can take that, combine it with their knowledge of the culture
of their local communities and become these, I call it,
lighthouses of hope, the orange lighthouses of hope
for their own communities.
So that's where the Bitcoin Educators Academy was born.
That's our flagship project right now.
We did it in 20 countries around the world already.
And so we are traveling a lot.
We are pivoting it to online too.
So not only in person, but online.
So that is kind of the main flagship project
that should get us there.
So if we help 10,000 educators get better at what they do and become full-time and sustainable, then they can, if on average, they will inspire other 10,000 people, we can get to 100 million in this way.
So that's kind of my mental framework around it.
I don't think it's doable till 2030 since the time is running crazily fast.
um but i in the end i kind of expanded it like if i managed to do it no matter when
i will be a happy guy so 2030 is i think very very optimistic timing
yeah definitely i mean it's a it's a it's a great goal and i think uh well eventually we will all of
us together will have a will have educated more than 100 million people fingers crossed fingers
crossed um so now let's talk about amity age you and your friend gabrielle kozak started this
in slovakia and originally you were mining as you said bitcoin using energy from animal waste
could you tell us more about that yeah i mean um as i said gabrielle's uh madre-in-law she owned
this power plant she was the first woman in slovakia that ever built it um and she's just
very inspiring woman. So it was a small power plant, 0.5 megawatts, like nothing big really.
And we practically decided to do it. I did a math at the time around it. And we were kind of lucky
because this was around a time when the hash rate dropped significantly after China ban
by like 50%. And suddenly the math made so much sense, right? It was like,
shit, we will be printing money.
So we ordered a container from Lithuania.
We were a little bit hesitant because it was not coming.
The guys were not replying to us, so we felt we got scammed.
But in the end, it arrived.
And then I told my clients that I already had a time, like, hey, guys, we're going to do
this mining.
If you want to just buy machines, we take care of them.
We'll host them for you.
And suddenly, in like two, three weeks, we filled up the whole container.
It was at the time about like almost $2 million of investment of hardware.
And I was like, it's getting real right now.
Like, oh my God, now we need to take it seriously.
So yeah, we started like that.
And yeah, the waste or the main source of energy at the time was the corn,
like the waste from corn and the waste from cows, right?
The cow dump.
And yeah, that was kind of the fuel for our biogas power plant.
And we were turning it into Bitcoin.
So a proper sh** coinery there.
Well, and then we scaled to another biogas plant.
So we were running about one megawatt, roughly 350 miners on average.
And then the energy prices went up.
In 22, the war in Ukraine came in.
And we were like, okay, we need to do something.
because they called us from the power plant, told us that,
hey guys, any day we can turn you off
because there is this regulation that we as power plants,
we need to give energy to the grid and not to private consumers.
We're like, oh fuck.
We cannot risk that for our clients and ourselves.
So we moved to Czech Republic.
We spent so much money for the new infrastructure
and we stayed maybe five weeks, maybe a month.
And then we shipped everything out to Paraguay.
So yeah, the journey is pretty bumpy.
And, you know, I'm sometimes second guessing.
Like if I knew everything about mining and logistics that I know today,
would I really start that?
But sometimes as an entrepreneur, you need to be naive in some way
because if you knew all the risks and everything that can go wrong,
I don't even know if I started my first company or MTAs or like anything.
But it's a beautiful journey in the end.
yeah definitely and i we've got a quick question from a gen z perspective the name amity age
where does that come from and what does amity actually mean yeah i mean we were brainstorming
quite a lot about how to call our company and we had a couple of uh kind of pillars around it so
first of all we didn't want to sound boring because if you go to a conference every second
company is coin this
block that
and all of these kind of
things around Bitcoin
and block and suddenly it becomes
so like kind of the same thing.
We wanted to have
an approach of almost like Apple.
If you don't know what Apple is doing
and somebody just shows you a logo and a name, you have no
idea to know that they are doing software or
hardware, right? Something that doesn't
resemble Bitcoin on
the first layer at all, right?
You hear AmityAge, you see the face
of the girl you're like what the hell has to do with bitcoin so that was kind of our one of the
ideas and uh the other was that we are thinking hard what really bitcoin means to us and we came
to this conclusion that bitcoin for us represents a tool a solution that can take us to the future
where we can have more cooperation if we have one standard of value because if every country
their own money, it's so difficult.
The same as imagine if every country
has their own measurement of length.
Like to just go from meters in Slovakia
to meters in UK, you know, it's so inefficient.
And the second thing, if governments cannot print money
and we live on Bitcoin standard,
I believe we have more harmony and peace
because they cannot finance these stupid wars
around the world.
And the word amity in translation means
cooperation, fellowship, and friendship, and harmony.
So we see Bitcoin as the tool that can take us to the age of cooperation,
to the age of harmony, to the age of amity.
So we just put these words together and we created Amity Age.
And then we said, okay, but we want somebody who will represent this change
or who will represent this drive.
And Satoshi is gone.
He's not around anymore.
So we created his granddaughter, this kind of young blood that represents us, the new Bitcoiners, the new wave of Bitcoiners.
We'll take this torch and spread it to the world and just go around and speak about this tool.
And in a similar way, as you have these, you know, these young characters like Arya Stark in Game of Thrones, you know, she's the one, the young blood that's kind of revenging the father, you know, changing the world for the better.
or Princess Leia in Star Wars.
So we were thinking about like a girl character
that will kind of, again, be totally different,
something completely off the regular technical Bitcoin narrative.
So we love to play with these contrasts a lot.
And yeah, it kind of fitted perfectly into the picture.
So we came with Amity Nakamoto
and we want to kind of speak more over her language
that Amity teaches you.
Amity is, you know, helping people out.
And we created her in a way that she's kind of playful.
She's still young.
She's still a teenager, but she's bold.
She's not afraid to say, fuck the banks.
Inflation is theft.
So with Gabriel, we're kind of imagining kind of slightly dystopian future.
In the future, if they're going to be in a huge oppression by the government
and people on the streets will be kind of spraying the murals of little Amity
with these stencils, you know, representing like,
that's the rebellion against the establishment.
So the Amity will be representing that.
So it kind of played with this branding and a little bit of the story
and we enjoy that.
Okay, well, so yeah.
I mean, I think it's a great character to have.
Well, we've got her right here on your board.
Nice.
Perfect.
Where did you get the book?
um my mom actually got it for me um yeah so wonderful well that's a yeah great book
um pleasure pleasure perfect uh going back to uh kind of your shift from slovakia to rorotan so
well i mean this really like kind of where your story is getting interesting so you're in slovakia
mining with the biogas and then obviously as you said covid hit and it messed up everything in
europe and then you hear about this island in honduras called roatan so can you talk us through
that and how did you even find out about it it's a huge coincidence again like my life is just
mixture and connection of a lot of coincidences um so this one came in a way that one of our
mining clients, a friend of mine, he bought a land here. He visited, he loved the island,
he bought a land and he sent me pictures of this beautiful place. And he said, man, you need to come
to Ruatown. Like this is heaven here. I'm like, what the hell? Is it Asia, Africa? I had no idea
where is that place. Like never heard of that before. And he's like, no, no, no, it's Honduras.
I mean, like I checked Honduras, one of the most dangerous countries around the world.
I'm like, hey, are you safe there? He was like, yeah, yeah, it's totally fine. It's an island,
it's super safe okay we need to come and what really made me come here was that uh the land he
bought was in czech village and i was like what the hell are czechs doing on roatan and me from
slovakia we used to be one nation czechoslovakia 30 years ago i was like how come that they came
here so i needed to investigate it so we came in 2022 actually one week after the war started so So when we came here kind of you know shocking We didn know what to do Half a million Ukrainians came to Slovakia over the border since we were next to them
So we were really thinking to stay longer and maybe even bring our parents until the situation resolved.
So it was kind of a rough times when we came here.
But we fell in love with the island.
We explored the Czech village.
We understood that they came because they built a brewery here.
the biggest beer-drinking nation around the world.
So it has to do with the beer, of course.
And they stayed, they built a pirate ship.
So this story is pretty crazy here of the Czechs.
The same guy who built a brewery flew to London to a national museum,
get the sketches of black peril.
He built a black peril here roaming around Caribbean.
Then it got sung here on Roatan again, so kind of the loop closed.
And then they build the Czech village.
So we were here on the island exploring the whole place and nature,
falling in love with it.
I'm doing sailing for 20 years.
So I just, when I'm around the water, I just love it.
So, and just the two days before I left the island,
there was something called the Prospera Summit happening.
Just found it on Twitter.
And I was super skeptical because they were like,
oh, it's a crypto-friendly city.
And me as a Bitcoiner, when I hear crypto,
I'm like very like, what is that?
Like super skeptical.
And I was like, okay, I'm here.
It's just five miles away.
Let's check it out.
What is that?
So we came in.
I really expected just five people on the beach cheering for freedom.
And they were these buildings already, you know, standing, very beautiful place.
And about 30, 40 people, some of them like entrepreneurs, some of them very Bitcoin OGs from 2010.
There was a guy who was running the first ever talk show that talked about Bitcoin in the world in 2010.
Even it said that Roger Ver was orange billed by this same show that this guy was running.
And he was there on the event.
I'm like, oh my God, this is an interesting place.
So we had the idea, the opportunity to present ideas to develop here on Roatan in Prospera.
I'm like, okay, let's pitch the Bitcoin Center.
For some time, I wanted to have a place that people can come to, have a coffee for Bitcoin, have an ATM, learn about Bitcoin.
It's kind of almost like a Bitcoin school.
And the guy in the first row, he was like, yeah, I love the idea.
What do you need?
I'm like, oh, space maybe to build it.
He was like, okay, let me take you to a building.
If you like it, you can build your Bitcoin center there.
And he took me to the building where we are right now for four years already.
It's the highest viewpoint of the whole island, beautiful place.
and we spent two hours talking about Ayn Rand,
objectivism, Bitcoin.
And he said, yeah, name your rent,
build your Bitcoin center.
I'm like, so this is super hard to say no to it.
So I spoke with my girlfriend.
She's like, okay, let's do it.
Our next chapter is going to be on Rotan.
And here we are.
I'm sitting here after four years
and we spend here about five, six months of a year.
Build the center, Orange Pilling the Island,
got about 60 businesses accepting Bitcoin,
working with multiple schools across the island,
helped some Bitcoiners to relocate here,
bought properties for Bitcoin.
So yeah, slowly painting the island orange
and living in the most friendly Bitcoin jurisdiction in the world.
Wow, honestly, that is a crazy story.
It is, man.
I just don't know how it happened.
It's like just, yeah, the universe somehow likes me, I would say.
As someone from a Gen Z sort of perspective,
Prospera sounds like it was designed by someone who played too much SimCity in a way,
but obviously in a good way, like a private city with its own legal system
where you can pay your taxes in Bitcoin in five minutes.
That's kind of the dream, isn't it?
honestly that's one of the main reasons why i really stayed here if it was only for roata and
its beauty and and you know the nature i don't think i would stay i would maybe visit from now
and then but wouldn't just dedicate my life to it but what really was a tipping point was prospera
um it is a private jurisdiction where bitcoin is a legal tender actually it was a legal tender
before Salvador, but not so many people know it because it wasn't marketed as much. So it was the
first legal tender ever. And currently it's the only jurisdiction in the world with Bitcoin as a
unit of account. So you can run your full accounting of your company fully in Bitcoin. You don't need
to touch and account for fiat anymore. You don't need to do these conversions. Oh, I received one
Bitcoin and what was the exchange rate today? No, bad. Like you don't need to do it. So that was
super interesting to me.
And you can pay all your fees
towards the government in Bitcoin.
So I'm paying with Lightning for my taxes.
I'm paying my residency card in Lightning.
So it's like really crazy
what can be built if city is run as a business.
And I'm a super huge fan,
and I was at the time already,
a big fan of private cities.
it kind of sounds that it cannot work.
Like, how can you have a private city?
But if you think about it, you know, what I love about Prospera,
and I used to tell it a lot, is that it can go bankrupt.
And it sounds very counterintuitive, like, why can you love it?
But it's the same as with businesses.
If businesses can go bankrupt, they think differently.
They think about how much, like, what's the best value I can provide
to get customers to survive?
Because every other government, they can go bankrupt forever
and they bail themselves out by printing more money and getting more into debt, right?
So they don't care about being efficient.
They don't care about being, you know, wise with spending money.
They know that they can bail themselves out.
But when it comes to businesses, well, if you mess up,
maybe one time somebody will bail you out as an investor.
But if you do it for long term, thank you, goodbye.
So when Prosper can go bankrupt, they treat you as a client, as a customer,
as a co-creator of the space.
So suddenly you don't feel as a tech slave.
You feel like you are creating the space with them.
You are being listened to.
You're being heard.
And you can really, like right now, actually,
I helped Prospera to kind of decide
that BTC Pay server will be the main POS of choice.
And we are right now going to integrate
across the whole Prospera BTC Pay server
properly hosted on their servers.
And on top of that,
we'll be building a couple of other plugins.
Prospera, for example, one of the crazy thing
is they have a 3D land register,
which means you don't need to just buy a meter squared.
You can buy a cubic meter of space.
What's the benefit?
If you have a view,
if you have an ocean view of your condo
and you don't want anybody to build up there,
you can buy that space.
And if somebody wants to build,
they cannot because it's your space.
It's your kind of GPS location in the space.
And the crazy part about it is that Prospera allows, like, okay, you can buy this, you know, cubic space, but you can sell it on a secondary market to other Prospera residents using liquid.
So you can have these assets on top of liquid and you can just easily, you know, buy and sell on the secondary market.
All of the buyers needs to be Prospera your residents.
So there is a kind of a wide listing.
And that's why Liquid is a good for it.
We kind of put a pause on this because there are different, more important stuff Prospera needs to work on right now.
But this is kind of the direction where it's going.
So Prospera is not afraid to explore very interesting Bitcoin tech and the usability of it.
And it's like these crazy ideas that you normally don't have anywhere else.
Here, this is like a norm.
and that's where I'm kind of inspired to be around
and just co-create and be part of it
and just bring Bitcoin to one of the most free,
if not the most free jurisdiction in the world.
Yeah, that sounds incredible.
I think we need to move there.
That's actually quite a relief for me personally
because, I mean, it shows there's another side to it
that there is somewhere to escape to,
not just this.
Yeah.
And more and more Bitcoiners coming in.
Actually, these two weeks, we are running a Bitcoin Games here, which is almost like Olympics, but everything on top of Bitcoin.
So we had a Bitcoin poker tournament, purely denominated in sets.
You were logging in through LNURL authentication.
Today, the Bitcoin chess tournament started, which is the largest chess tournament in Latin America.
The prize pool is two Bitcoins.
There are like eight grandmasters that came here.
So it's like the top 15 player in the world of chess today is here on the island playing the Bitcoin chess tournament.
So there is one crazy part that there is a competition within the chess tournament called King of the Hill.
So if you win a tournament, if you win a game, you're basically sitting on a throne and you're receiving 21 sets every second that you're sitting on a throne.
And then somebody can challenge you.
And if they win, they sit on the throne and they will be receiving 21 sets every second.
so it's like so much crazy stuff happening here we did a block height run so we are running
not kind of a distance or a time but we are running the the duration of three bitcoin blocks
right we didn't know how long it's going to be how far we're going to run um so kind of these
kind of fun things we are doing here we build a satoshi's grave which is underwater dive site
where there is a bitcoin treasure chest with bunch of stuff that you can dive there a huge bitcoin
logos so i mean having fun and building things like this is a place if you feel like that this
can be a place for for you to come yeah definitely i mean nothing that sounds like paradise really
that whole thing sounded like a pit yeah
um just going well going back again what was it actually like when you like kind of uprooted your
life and moved from Slovakia to a Caribbean island like were your family and friends supportive or
were they thinking you've lost it yeah I mean since I have friends that I have they are very
they're digital nomads so for them it's not something um very different and the whole
Bitcoin community I have around me they totally get it right it's not like of course my parents
were not super happy about it.
They were like, oh, I want you to be, you know,
more with us here.
But my father, he came here multiple times,
spent three months every year on the island with us,
did some sailing.
We have a little catamaran called Satoshi
with a Bitcoin logo on top of the sail.
So he was renting that for Bitcoin
and earning some sets to his Phoenix wallet.
So yeah, I mean, my mom was here to check.
She loved it as well.
So, I mean, we are traveling a lot around the world.
And for them, it kind of became pretty natural.
At the time already, I was a Paraguay resident.
So I had my tax residency in Paraguay, which maybe I'll be switching because Paraguay just
a few days ago came with this crazy dystopian crypto regulation.
So I might be switching to Prospera and Honduras right now.
But it was kind of natural for us.
but we are planning a family with my girlfriend and we might get back to Slovakia for a little bit
again and then we'll see you know where it's going to take us so we learn to live in between
multiple places and the time will tell maybe I will need to have one really solid place where
like that will be my you know my roots there currently at my mental stage right now I see
like we will be going between maybe two, three,
up to four places around the world
where we're going to stay longer.
Probably Slovakia, Roatan, Bali, and Switzerland.
This kind of feels the most closest to us, what we like.
And just be in between,
then do some Bitcoin education around,
but having like a more anchored space
because moving in a close,
like moving very frequently just for short trips
is not something I like.
I did it last year a lot,
but I got really tired out of it.
So the traveling in its essence
is not something that I enjoy doing very frequently.
But just coming here for four months and staying,
that's something I feel like that's my thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, obviously the travel would take a toll on you,
especially if it's kind of constant.
And then staying there as well,
it's not even just feeling like the holidays kind of just...
I mean, the countries you said, the four countries,
they all sound pretty good to be fair.
I wouldn't mind living in any of them.
Yeah.
Yeah, all of them are something different, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, moving to the educational side of things,
I mean, this is kind of what we're interested in most
because I feel like we share it likewise.
I mean, you're literally going into schools
and teaching children about Bitcoin and money.
What does that actually look like?
because how do you really teach a 10-year-old about Bitcoin?
Yeah, so it really depends on what is the target group we have.
And when it comes to kids, it's really basically the differentiating factor is the age.
So we did, the smallest kids we were teaching were about seven, eight-year-olds.
And for them, we were practically just reading through the Bitcoin money book.
I don't know if you know it, by Michael Karras, super easy read, just 15 minutes.
story of Bitville. And just going through it and asking questions, having this kind of discussion,
the kids are super interested, they're raising hands. And I was blown away by how much they knew
about what is inflation, how gold works, and like, all of these things. So that kind of really blew
my mind. So for them, we do more of these kind of readings, talking about what is barter, how,
people are trading things. A very, very basic layer of monetary education. And when it comes
to Bitcoin, again, going on the surface, just showing them the experience, right? But for them,
if somebody doesn't know how really the banking works and everything underneath, if you see a
Lightning transaction, for you as a Bitcoin, you're like, oh, that's amazing. You know,
it just clicked there in a decentralized manner.
But for somebody who doesn't have this background,
they're like, okay, there's this green button.
Okay, that's how it should work.
That's normal.
But you cannot see the difference.
And the UX doesn't change or is not that different
to regular fiat legacy systems, right?
We're also centralized platform.
You know, it goes quickly in a way.
So that's kind of for the smallest kids.
For teenagers, let's say ranging between 13 to 17,
we are mostly running Bitcoin diplomas
which is a 10 week course
developed by
Mipremere Bitcoin
and there we really go again
from the history of money but we go deeper
into what is fractional reserve banking
really how the
inflation is made up, we play a lot of games
with them
we developed some, some of them are
from the Mipremere Bitcoin team
and they really
visualize the whole
idea of what we want to teach there, right? The business in general problem,
the inflation and all of it. All the way to Bitcoin and then, you know, setting up them
with a wallet, giving them their first sets, doing some games of sending sets between themselves.
So yeah. And then when we, you know, when I have more older kids, some of them are technically
deeper so we go into more self-custody um explaining lightning in a deeper way channel
channel liquidity um treasures like really like we can go very deep into into each and every one
of these vectors of date coin it really depends on what we want to teach who's our target group
um so yeah it's it's very individual yeah i love this because honestly most of us in school learned
absolutely nothing about how money actually works yeah yeah no one taught us about inflation
about how central banks work what gives money its value itself and the question is do you think that
that is deliberate like is the system designed to keep people i don't know financially illiterate
yeah i'm i'm i'm 100 sure about it uh because if the knowledge is out there then why are we
not teaching it if it's if it's helping our life so much to learn that if you have a bucket that
is leaking putting more water into it doesn't make any sense right if we don't first fix the leaks
in the bucket why should we grind and hustle in two jobs and still keep filling the same bucket
i mean that's that sounds so stupid to me and that's so basic like why are we not teaching this
the kids. And as I said, you know, I was studying economics management. Nowhere was there any
mention of Austrian economics. Why? I mean, at least like, hey, these guys are here as well.
This is what they thought. This is how they looked at the world and this kind of the competition
they had. Why it wasn't mentioned? Crazy, right? And if you think about it, I keep saying this,
that we, when we grow older, already in the teenage years, but let's say after 20s,
a lot a huge part of our lives resolves or basically is about money either how to make
them and keep them or how to spend them right so we are creating value we are trading our time and
energy for something then we are thinking how to best protect it then we're thinking how to best
spend it what to buy when to buy i mean so money is such a intervening thing within our lives
but if you look back at your education journey like how many hours you really spend to talk
about money not like oh this is a paper bill this is the interest rates this is how you count no
that like really what is money of this as the language of value like nothing maybe i had two
one or two hours about it at like maximum that cannot be a coincidence after all those years
and all those people saying,
hey, you know, we should really do more financial literacy.
So I'm convinced that it is deliberate
and I'm convinced that the system,
however it was designed or whoever influenced it,
is done in such a way that people should know
kind of enough about money to make it and pay taxes,
but not more to basically guess
or to basically point fingers into the central banking.
And do we really need a 2% inflation?
Why 2%?
Why not zero?
Why not minus 2%?
You know, why 2%?
And this whole deflation being this kind of destroyer of the world
is also pretty huge.
Nobody teaches us that there are two types of deflation, right?
One driven by supply and innovation, the other by demand.
Like nobody tells us, oh, there is a good deflation,
there is a bad one.
but let's talk about the good one how we can achieve that so yeah i'm i'm i'm 100 convinced
that it is it is deliberate yeah i mean uh well as we said we do economics and it's just uh
yeah it's it's kind of just always drilled into us that inflation has to be around so do you feel
that kids get it faster than adults because i feel like our generation gen z we kind of
intuitively understand digital money i mean we grew up with robux yeah and b bucks and in-game
currencies as a whole and to be honest bitcoin isn't really that big of a leap for us at least
yeah yeah definitely you're super right um one of the obstacles i'm i'm facing when explaining to
adults is oh but it's too it's it's virtual i cannot touch it so with uh with gen z and with
kids there's there's no argument like that oh i cannot touch it i mean almost any everything
they're interacting with they cannot touch right we cannot touch spotify we cannot touch netflix
cannot touch roblox or anything else so his argument is kind of off the table when it comes
to kids and young generation um so they're much more ready for that and the other benefit is that
they are practically like a new blank page
without all this bunch of around money and economics
that adults learn and need to unlearn first, right?
If you want to write on a whiteboard,
you need to wipe it off first
and only then you can write again.
So when it comes to adults,
there is a lot of unlearning that has to happen
since Bitcoin is not just soft skills or hard skills.
It's practically a change of perception of how money should work.
It's a mental shift.
It's a big thing, right?
And it's much easier to build it from scratch than to destroy the mental model you have,
where brain doesn't like change, right?
So our brains are designed by evolution in a way that whatever worked for 30, 40 years,
our brain thinks, oh, this is kind of a good life strategy.
gee, I shouldn't change it because 500 or half a million years ago,
if you ate a plant that you didn't eat till that time and it killed you,
then your genes were out of the picture.
So we are basically descendants of people that were hesitant,
skeptical, that didn't like change and the same biology we have today.
So it's much easier to teach something new than to rebuild the mental models
that we already have.
So it's definitely much easier to work with kids.
So many obstacles and objections are off the table for them
because they work with technologies from when they were born practically.
Yeah, definitely.
I think it was well I found it fairly easy to understand the whole if it not physical thing and I think that the same with all of us really
The fact that it is Bitcoin makes it easier for, well, me at least, to understand because it's so set.
Obviously, with V-Bucks, it's sort of the same principle in terms of the bank, in the sense that they can just make more.
There's infinite V-Bucks.
Yeah, that's barely.
But with Bitcoin, it's set.
So it's quite easy for us to understand that differentiation.
And I'm sure for a lot of Gen Z,
and this is the message we're trying to spread,
is that it's actually not that complicated.
And of course, the benefits to making that switch are unbelievable.
Yeah.
I mean, my experience, and what you were saying,
in the sense that older people are harder to educate.
I mean, with my parents specifically,
it's so hard to wipe what they've already learned,
especially coming from a young person.
Yeah, yeah.
There's this whole trust issue and like,
oh, who are you to tell me?
You've been around just for a few years.
I mean, on the other hand, on the flip side,
I had a couple of clients that were kind of very old generation,
let's say 70s.
They're 70-year-olds.
My oldest client is 83-year-olds.
And they are getting it, they were getting it easily.
Why?
because they lived through kind of the golden standard as well right they they understand gold
pretty well they understood like they went through you know second world war like really like
uh maybe second world not anymore that much but uh kind of like the post-war especially in
uh in europe in central europe these kind of invasion of russians um during like 68 like
changes of regimes, and they understood how money can get messed up.
And they also understood the value of gold.
So when they get gold, it's a very fast and easy step towards Bitcoin.
So many times the gold box can become very quickly Bitcoiners.
But yeah, they need to understand and appreciate the physicality slash non-physicality of Bitcoin.
right but um i i had some of these exceptions with uh older people that got it pretty fast
yeah yeah that is that is very interesting it does make sense with the living through the
gold standard issues it's sort of just another great shift yeah yeah it might be media exposure
as well because obviously that older older generation isn't really that subject to social
media and the negative propaganda
surrounding Bitcoin that is being spread.
And I might explain why the middle-aged generation
is more susceptible to it, because
they preach news daily
and they see it on TV.
So, it's interesting.
Exactly.
Very well said.
Yeah, well,
you've mentioned before
that sometimes schools are nervous
about having come in,
and they worry it's going to be like,
well, what the media say is Bitcoin
propaganda so how do you view with that and how do you convince a head teacher to let you
keep bitcoin to their students so it's again very individual um i want to understand i want to get
in the shoes of a teacher that wants to protect the kids from some random narratives from outside
so i always assume that the director or teacher wants to first like is very skeptical like what
what isn't in like for me when i'm coming to teach bitcoin like where is the catch what i have from
it if we do it free of charge which on rotan almost everything we do kind of free of charge
in terms of education for kids they're like like why are you doing it guys and it's for
it's kind of hard for them to understand like because i believe in the mission i believe in
the thing right it's almost like sometimes i feel like a missionary you know spreading
christianity you know why they were doing it because they really believe that this is the
best thing to do with their lives. And it can be sometimes perceived as crazy. So there are a lot
of resemblances between religion and Bitcoin. And I'm kind of joking about it. People are like,
oh, you're almost like a cult. I'm like, well, some things kind of resemble a cult and I will
not be arguing against it. So it's kind of making fun out of it a bit. So every time with these
teachers, we give them an option. Like, look, we can do first education just for you as teachers
and director and maybe parents as well. Call them in if you want. So at least you know what we want
to teach to kids. So it's very fair for them to be afraid. And it would be very unwise for us to be
like, you know, don't trust, basically don't verify trust. Like just trust me, bro. It will be fine.
Right?
So I like for them to verify what we are teaching.
And we started with a few schools here as well in such a way that, look, we don't need to mention Bitcoin.
If you're really afraid because there used to be quite a lot of scams here on the island, Ponzi schemes, crypto, you know, stuff.
So people are afraid.
I totally get it.
And we tell them, hey, we don't even need to mention the word Bitcoin.
For us, it would really even make sense to teach them basics of money, history, what is money and everything.
we don't need to touch Bitcoin.
So then they're like,
that's weird.
These Bitcoiners came in
to teach about Bitcoin
and now they are telling me
they are okay to not even mention
the word Bitcoin.
Like, how come?
Right?
But this kind of throws
the big domino,
the big obstacle in their minds,
the big objection
that, okay, maybe we don't want
to sell them anything.
Maybe we really care about
them understanding money, right?
And of course, always I tell them,
hey, you as a teacher,
you always can be on the class.
It's not like, hey,
go out of the room
and then trust me, bro.
No, it's like they're always involved.
They can ask questions.
They can even, you know, object to what we say.
So it's very open.
It's like an open source education.
Hey, here we go.
Just bring parents, bring a director,
you know, challenge us.
If you don't like it, tell us.
We either change it or we don't do it.
But never happened to us so far.
So when they realize how we teach
and what we teach, they're like,
guys, okay, let's pray to Crossby,
the whole school and so on.
So right now we are actually starting a new cohort with the biggest school on the island.
And they actually want a director.
We ordered him like three years ago.
He owned a different school that we were teaching before.
And now he said like, hey, guys, I want you to bring the huge Bitcoin flag.
We're going to put it there.
So I want this to be the Bitcoin school of Roatan.
So he's like, he's kind of more excited than I would ever imagine.
and he's kind of very, very pushy.
Like, I mean, like, Delvin, slow down, okay?
We're going to do it.
But he's like, no, no, we're going to,
there will be a flag here.
We're going to do some paintings here.
I'm like, okay, okay, step by step, step by step.
So I don't want it to be too crazy
because then even the parents and kids can be like,
this is weird, why they're pushing it so much.
So I want it to be more organic
and not make it seem like,
oh, it's just a PR stunt for something, you know?
Yeah, that's actually pretty small
and how you don't even mention Bitcoin
due to its negative stigma in the media
and things like that.
So once you teach people the history of money and inflation,
do they sort of arrive at Bitcoin themselves
or does it take a bit more than that?
Yeah, they kind of arrive there
or even during the education,
during those classes where we even don't mention Bitcoin,
then they say, hey guys, okay,
I know, like, you can totally teach the kids about Bitcoin.
I understood that you're not a scammer
trying to sell them something.
We see that you care, so go on with the full thing.
So we never had the problem of really in the end of the curriculum to be restricted to teach about Bitcoin, right?
So we just started telling them like, hey, if you really don't want, we will not do it until you tell us you're good with it, right?
So, but yeah, the more we go down into the problem area that, hey, we have a problem,
the more they understand, okay, the fiat money is not the solution.
So we have to have something different, right?
And then, of course, a lot of kids are like,
hey, let's trade it, let's get rich on this.
So that's another thing we want to kind of keep them not too excited about
or telling them there's no promises, no guarantees of gains,
don't treat it as investment, look at it from the perspective of savings
and insurance and all of that.
So it's kind of the initial excitement that a lot of kids get, like, oh, let's make money fast, right?
So after they open up to Bitcoin, this is kind of the immediate thing we need to suppress,
this greed and this perspective of Bitcoin to be like this get-rich-quick-scheme thing, right?
So it's kind of a juggling with multiple, like, it's a lot about psychology.
It's a lot about how you position the thing, how you position Bitcoin in such a way they kind of protect themselves from day one against falling for some scams and so on.
Yeah, I think there is a lot of young people that are just looking for that whole get rich quick.
And they keep that mindset, which is obviously very fiat.
And we obviously educate to not be in.
I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised because as you guys were saying, you know, the prices of housing growing tremendously faster than increasing salaries.
So the whole mindset about get rich quick is the outcome of the fiat structures, right?
If we knew that our money are protecting value and the things are not skyrocketing like crazy, we wouldn't have such a need to get rich quick.
but currently especially for the young generation you see the train is kind of getting faster and
you're running behind it and you need two jobs you're you need to hustle so i'm not surprised
that people want to get rich quick because once you earn money you immediately think oh i need to
be investor i need to figure out where i'm going to put this money to really keep up with the tempo
of prices and that's super sad because you should be focusing on how to create value maybe you want
to be an artist or musician, but suddenly you cannot do music because you need to invest
hours into becoming a trader.
That's so messed up.
So that's kind of all of these hidden costs of money as Seth Bunny written the book about
it.
We don't even realize how many problems around the world are connected to money without us
seeing the direct connection immediately.
Yeah, I think that's actually explored in that really good video.
what's the problem yeah yeah it explores uh how just the currency kind of the currency being
devalued it kind of just ruins everything and not just as you said not just financially but like
emotionally and physically for the people yeah yeah agree it's insane how it's taught in a
positive manner as well i mean you get taught the things like quantitative easing and inflation
have to happen to keep an economy stable it's just the whole system is set up the wrong way
yeah that's what we sort of set out to wipe in the sense that what we're being taught and
the message that is being pushed through the media isn't the truth and isn't normal
yeah so we just kind of want to get the truth out there and just help help people help the
younger generations and anyone out there really to um find themselves and find a real currency
yeah i mean yeah go on no you go on you go on no no just wanted to like pre-affirm that that uh
like we can solve a lot of problems by fixing money right and this saying you know fix the
money fix the world um we even we even kind of rebranded it a little bit our our banner said
fix your money fix your world because kind of fix the money fix the world feels very heavy on some
people like oh my god i have such responsibility now but we're teaching hey fix your own money and
you can fix your own world and whatever you live in that suddenly feels more tangible more towards
that individual and feels more, oh, I can do that.
I can fix my own thing where I'm living in.
So I kind of like that even better and it doesn't feel so heavy
and so kind of huge to tackle, right?
So definitely agree with that.
And speaking the truth, we need to speak,
this is kind of what we teach at Bitcoin Educators Academy,
how to structure your pitch or your presentation
or your teaching in such a way that
people understand the why behind it.
Because many times we are so excited about
anything that we want to teach about
or we're going to share
that we just jump into the whole features of it.
Like, oh, Bitcoin is decentralized,
it's permissionless, it's global, it's digital.
And people are like, okay, but I don't care.
I don't have a problem that Bitcoin is solving, right?
So we need to really show the problem
and the consequences of staying where we are right now.
Like what really can happen if we don't do anything
and just be where we are right now
and make it tangible for that person.
Like really make it like,
if we continue this space for you,
this is how the life's going to be.
You will need to find another job
or you will spend hours just hustling
and trying to figure out how to earn more,
how to save less,
like eating more crappier food
because you need to keep some money
for increasing rent and so on.
And then to tell them about a vision,
like imagine the world where
you can really focus your energy
on what you love the most.
You can really spend time with your family
and spend time with your hobbies
and just every day you don't need
to be grinding eight hours or 10 hours a day.
So if you paint this picture properly of where we are, what are the consequences and where we can get, what are the benefits of getting there for the person that you're speaking to.
Within this framework, you don't even need to mention Bitcoin at all.
It's actually not advised to mention Bitcoin till that moment.
And only if a person really wants to move from the current status to the vision, that's where you draw the ladder to get them from one pillar to another.
and that the leather is practically Bitcoin
or anything you want to talk about.
And that's where you get into the features of the solution, right?
Mainly we start when we are excited,
we talk about solution without painting the problem
and talking about the vision.
So we should first do the problem or vision or vice versa.
You can actually, you can flip them around.
But the solution should be as the last thing.
That's the last thing should bring Bitcoin.
And then you tackle the obstacles and you say,
oh, you might be thinking Bitcoin and another Ponzi scheme.
Well, I thought the same thing a few years ago
because it really resembles that
there's some anonymous person created it.
What if they show up like I was there?
So you kind of go with the person
over their mental objections
and handle them preemptively
before they even mention that.
And you have the highest,
or at least I find out
that I have the highest success rate
while doing it this way
without jumping straight to Bitcoin.
Like, oh, you will definitely get it.
I'll just jump in.
And people are like,
eh, no, it's not for me right now.
And you don't understand why you're doing such an effort
and you're like, why are people not getting it?
Well, the structure of your
pitch is
wrong. You have a good building blocks,
but the Lego blocks are not in the right
order. So that's
something we are teaching to educators.
Yeah, that's
very important, actually.
I mean, I've found myself
when I'm trying to teach my friends
or kind of educate somebody else that I do just go straight into oh bitcoin bitcoin it's really
good it saves everything but again I forget that they actually don't know the issue in the first
place exactly exactly I was doing it for multiple years so I feel you there yeah okay um let's get
on to the mining side of things so you're mining bitcoin in Paraguay using surplus hydroelectric
power. So for anyone who doesn't know, Paraguay generates 100% of its electricity from hydropower
and actually exports loads of it. And there's a huge amount that just goes unused. So how did you
figure out that you could use that waste of energy to mine Bitcoin? Well, there is a slight update to
that. We don't mine anymore in Paraguay. We moved all the machines out and we sold about 600 miners
there. So this was some time ago. But yeah, I mean, when we were going from Slovakia and Czech
Republic to Paraguay, I was already a Paraguay tax resident. So I has my residency there.
And it made total sense. You know, the price was cheap. The surplus or the supply was so much
bigger. You know, Paraguay is the largest electricity exporter in the world still about
It's more than 40% of what they produce, they export to Brazil.
So it makes total economic sense to do it in Paraguay.
And there were a lot of miners.
But then what happened over time is the government got greedy.
They increased the tariffs twice.
And with the increased difficulty levels, it suddenly became unprofitable.
Plus, they confiscated some miners.
They were really hunting down the illegal miners, which is fair.
I mean, if you're stealing electricity, that's kind of not a good thing to do.
So I'm okay with that.
But there seemed to be a playbook with Paraguay that was recently, just a week ago, announced that the Ande, which is the local power producing and distribution company, they want to mine on their own.
They somehow partnered up with some large mining company.
And so they want to be their own power producers and using Bitcoin.
And they were going to do it with confiscated miners.
So this is crazy.
Like they confiscated miners from other people.
Okay, well, they were mining, let's say, without paying.
And then now they're going to use the miners to mine Bitcoin for the country.
So, well, kind of a weird situation to be at.
So, yeah, I mean, the economy basically pushed us to sell the miners.
Our return was pretty good on them.
I mean, they paid back in less than a year.
so we get a very good buying price.
Our OPEX operation expenses were pretty low
so we were running three full containers of hydro there.
We were running a couple of maybe 400 or 500 air-cooled miners.
So it wasn't completely bad
but the whole logistics of moving
and especially also for some of our clients
that moved to Paraguay
and then basically in two years going out of it
it felt like we're moving again
but since we wanted to do the best for the clients
I'm not going to tell them like hey sorry guys
the mission Paraguay failed so
come and take your miners
and do whatever you want with them
so we were like figuring out for a couple
of months how to move them to Ethiopia
we sold few then we flipped them
with Ethiopian miners so the whole
logistics behind all the
operations are insane
and it costs you a lot of money
so yeah I mean Paraguay
was a harsh lesson it was the best choice
we had at the time.
But kind of this tells you
that anything changes
anywhere around the world.
The same for Ethiopia.
Right now it's harsher
than it's been
before we came there.
Let's see how long
that chapter will go.
I mean, I learned in Bitcoin
that there's no guarantees
and not even a price.
I mean, the only guarantee
is really like the rules.
21 million, I would say.
Even that can, you know,
socially change
if somebody decides to,
if people will have
different consensus,
which I don't think
is ever going to happen.
But when it comes to mining,
well, legislation changes,
governments get more greedy.
That's kind of the status that you need to work with.
So it's pretty harsh.
Yeah.
That is actually...
Insane.
Yeah.
I would not expect...
Just confiscating mining.
It's taken me a bit by surprise, to be honest.
And sending it to other countries as well.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Oh, I could tell you stories.
I mean, it's much deeper than that, right?
So, for example, one of our partners,
DeAnde, confiscated his miners and transformers.
It was kind of an operation targeted against him illegally.
So then he was suing DeAnde,
which is the largest governmental energy organization.
He kind of won the lawsuit,
so they needed to pay damages to him.
So, crazy.
I mean, you still need to operate with the thing in mind that you are still in countries where they are highly corrupted.
You don't have control over things.
The rule of law is not that strong.
So you need to take all of this into account when deciding if you're going to set up your operation there or not.
So it's risky.
It's very risky.
You need to know people and you need to estimate the risk properly.
but even if you know people
then you can get screwed
so it's really
it's a huge volatility of
changes, of changing everything
so if you have
even one of our mining providers
they still owe us about $30,000
they just decided not to
pay us for deposits of electricity
so we are probably going
to a lawsuit with them as well
in Paraguay
they just stopped replying
he even said like our lawyer spoke with with their lawyer or with them they said yes we know
we should return it but whatever i mean so that's kind of part of the business sometimes and
um even with these lessons you should keep on going yeah always have to keep on going
but that is that is serious it kind of reminds me of trunch here as well i mean we had an episode
with him and he completely refuses to work with the big mining companies and the big energy companies.
Who was that? Tarantula. Oh Tarantula. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah Makes sense I mean yeah Well sticking with uh miners thing could you tell us about the miners for kids project because i saw it on your twitter and actually it blew my
mind i mean you've got whole like uh miners that mine bitcoin directly into the wallet of kids and
roatans yeah it was a very nice project we actually want to restart it soon so the whole
idea was that we wanted to connect our miners in Paraguay into community on Roatan in a very
direct way. So people would crowdfund the electricity. And if that month of electricity
is covered, whatever the miner mines in that month goes to the kids. So you can think about
it almost as donation. And for every dollar that people donated, roughly, it was about $1.6 that
the kids received, right? Because the energy went to the miner, the miner basically mined more than
the energy. So our donation was the machine instead of mining to us, it was mining to the
wallets of the kids. So this was kind of, you know, increasing the ratio of donation, right?
And then we just didn't airdrop it to the kids, there was this proof of learn involved in it,
which meant that they were using Wiser app, which is kind of Duolingo for Bitcoin.
and every month based on their results
and their experiences they get in the app,
the sets were distributed.
So the ones that were learning about Bitcoin the most
got the most sets.
And I think the girl that was really grinding it,
she was doing lessons like crazy.
I think she received in total,
if I'm not mistaken, over a couple of months,
about $1,000.
Crazy.
So for a kid, I don't know if she was like 14.
So she received like, I think it was close to $1,000 at the time in Bitcoin.
And we did it for a couple of months.
So then I put a pause on it.
I wanted to reevaluate the structure of payouts and stuff like that.
So we might restart it again with a different approach.
But yeah, I mean, it was nice because then really the kids were incentivized to learn
And maybe in the next phase, in like the 2.0,
we would like to connect it also with some community works
or something doing for the school.
So, I mean, we are thinking about how to structure the project.
But yeah, I mean, I really loved that.
And then with the top kids, there were dozens of kids in the program.
And with the top, I think, five or six, we met.
We kind of had a lunch together and they were like soaking on Bitcoin.
So we want to work with them, you know, more on the island.
yeah it's a great way to go about it i mean it's kind of reworking the traditional education system
in the sense you don't really get paid with a meaningless grade it's the most valuable currency
yeah i mean he's literally giving children in central america direct access to the hardest
money on earth as a reward for learning when when we were kids we got gold stars and stickers and
as you said that 14 year old literally got a thousand pounds yeah
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
So right now we are starting a different project as well.
This is kind of to increase the adoption on the island.
It's called the Bitcoin Reviews Raffle.
So people will be uploading reviews of places that accept Bitcoin
from Google reviews or from TripAdvisor.
So this kind of helps the businesses with their main business as well
if they get better reviews.
And then people upload it to a website.
then every two weeks, precisely every 2016 block,
so every block that there is a difficulty adjustment,
there is a raffle going on.
And we do it in a way that that block, specific block,
we take the hash of it, which you cannot predict,
we do a module of function on it,
so it's basically a random number generator.
And let's say if there were 20 reviews in that two-week raffle,
it just do a random number from 1 to 20,
picks a raffle and that person receives 50% of the whole pool of sets that were in the raffle.
And the next is for the next two weeks, right?
So this way we want to try to incentivize people to go, spend Bitcoin, take pictures,
put the reviews out so they can win some sets.
And merchants will be more incentivized to accept Bitcoin because they will receive these
people coming because they want to compete, right?
So it's an idea and hypothesis we have in mind.
We want to test it out.
We've I-coded the page, so it should go live next week.
That's really cool.
Yeah, well, we'll definitely try and use that as much as we can.
That sounds really cool.
Well, so you've also expanded mining into Ethiopia.
What is the situation there?
Is there like surplus energy?
Yeah, yeah.
Ethiopia as well, they have a huge amount of energy as well, hydro.
So they finished the largest power plant in Africa called the Renaissance Dam.
And this adds about six gigawatts of power to the grid.
But their transmission lines are not the best.
And the energy is kind of allocated very close to the substations.
And nobody is using it that much.
So there's a huge surplus, low demand, and basically with the same structure as we did in Paraguay, we set up our facilities.
So we have two.
One is in the south of Ethiopia.
The other is about 10 minutes from Capital City.
And again, we have a couple of thousands of miners there operating.
But right now there are issues to get machines into the country, our problems with pre-import licenses.
So again, you can go through, you can have every clearance, every document you need, and you still somehow are stuck in the customs.
So some of our miners are stuck there since September.
So imagine, today is March.
Some of our miners didn't get through the customs in September.
Crazy.
So, but yeah, I mean, this is the whole thing that with these countries, you know, some things you really cannot predict.
Even if you follow everything, there's still some missing piece that they don't tell you.
That's part of the thing, right?
So we are right now building sites in Norway, two sites there.
So hopefully that should give us more legal stability.
And the price is pretty cheap too as well.
Plus we have a cooperation in Zambia with the university and doing some mining there.
we have about 150 miners
running there right now
and hopefully be scaling
so yeah, I mean you still need to be
on the tiptoes, you know, searching for new options
exploring, going to risk
enjoying the ride
loving to suffer
so that's part of the thing
Wow, you've really expanded
worldwide, I mean
commenting on, well
leading on to your wider world view
you touched on earlier
that if governments cannot print money,
they can't finance stupid wars and conflicts.
As part of the Gen Z generation,
all we've been brought up with
is watching conflict after conflict.
And we're telling there's no money for schools or healthcare.
There's always money for war.
I mean, what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, it's messed up, as you're saying.
The root cause is broken money.
And the outcome we see,
the symptoms are precisely that.
I mean, if you think about it,
or if you look at the history,
let's say to Roman times,
when they didn't have a paper money,
they had silver coins.
What they were doing to increase
the money supply was coin clipping.
So basically shaving the coins
and with the shavings,
reminting new coins.
Or of course what they did,
They decreased the level of silver while, you know, melting the coins again, adding tin, nickel, other metals, and remitting them again with a lower silver value.
Because people didn't want to pay more taxes to go and expand and go to the wars.
So the emperors decided, oh, I mean, we can print more money ourselves, right?
The secondary thing was that the money was, you know, less valuable.
But this was going on for centuries, right?
And until we really take the power from the hands of the government and until we really stop respecting their currency, we will be having this over and over again.
Governments will not give up that power on their own.
That's no go.
There is no single government that will really do it.
Populists will get elected for promises of having free education, free health care.
There is no free lunch.
as Milton Friedman was saying, so somebody will pay for it.
And it's either be directly with taxes or indirectly with inflation.
There's no other way around.
So we need to realize that.
And the only way how we can do it is really take government over time
as this kind of a puppet theater that it is and just don't respect them.
I don't watch news anymore.
I'm very disconnected from the politics of Slovakia.
so whenever I hear some oh they stole again I'm like I feel it's like a theater I feel really like
going with this popcorn like this meme with Michael Jackson eating this popcorn in the cinema
I feel like that you know and suddenly I feel this this this distance between what what they are doing
and I'm doing my best to make sure it has the least amount of impact on me personally
and one of my defense mechanism is definitely having Bitcoin as my primary money uh being
flexible in when I live, where I live, being healthy, not being dependent on the healthcare
system, decentralizing my residency, my accounts, having multiple residencies.
So basically working on multiple fronts to give me optionality.
And this over time will give you more confidence on that you don't need to rely on government
and you suddenly start to treat them as this unnecessary force.
and the more of us will do that,
the less important the governments will be.
So they'll just pretend that,
oh, you need to respect me.
And people will be like, no, I don't.
I live on my own somewhere else
in the virtual world anyway.
So I think it's the only way.
We need to really move to Bitcoin
as much as possible
and defund them in this way, right?
If they cannot take our money from us
and forcefully, coercively tax us,
that's that is i think the only way how we can really starve the beast it sounds harsh uh we
could have this conversation yeah what about the elderly what about that i mean that's different
conversations to have but i think if we don't do it um this endless money printing and spending on
wars will not stop that said but i think that's that's how i see the world yeah that's definitely
I think we just need to kind of cut our losses as it is and just kind of move forward and think more about the future rather than the present.
I mean, what would you say to a 16 year old right now who's heard about Bitcoin, but thinks it's too complicated, too risky or that they've missed the boat?
well uh people in 2012 thought they missed the boat already i thought in 2017 i missed the boat
already so this will keep on going for for centuries probably um yeah i mean the best
thing is to learn about it just really have an experience just use five dollars ten dollars of
your worth just to explore that experience it get the wallet um and spend i say everybody spend like
two three hours to learn about it like listen to a podcast get like watch watch the video what's the
problem it's a great start it really explains we have a problem um and just be open you know i was
very skeptical because initially bitcoin was presented to me by a guy who was kind of a shady
guy a little bit. He was doing these various multi-level marketing things. So I was like,
oh my God, again. So if it was presented to me in 2015 by somebody else, maybe I would go for it.
But in the end, I needed to do my own research. So just don't trust, verify, do your own research,
watch, let's say, what's the problem video, and then decide on your own. If you spend three hours,
you should get a rough idea if that's something for you or not. And don't feel pressure,
because sometimes it might not be at the right context
where you are, where you live right now, the right moment.
I'm not saying Bitcoin is for everybody wherever they are.
Maybe they need to fix first their health, their mental issues,
maybe with their family thing.
So it might not be the biggest priority wherever you are
at whatever stage of your life.
But just have it in the drawer
because I think it's more important than you realize
and just pull it out whenever you feel like
there is a time to really look deeper into money so just don't give up on on that and uh keep on
studying yeah i mean that's key for us we say it week in week out don't take what we're saying for
granted just have that proof of work concept you do your own research and the answers will reveal
themselves yeah don't trust verify don't trust verify actually yeah very true yeah so um one last
thing on the bigger picture so you tweeted about a honduran presidential candidate wearing an amity
age bitcoin cap is there a chance that honduras could follow el salvador's lead with bitcoin
adoption in the whole country and so what's the political situation there so that candidate
was second in the presidential election that happened in november it was very close they were
like 0.5% difference.
Like if you check the Honduran election,
it actually took them two weeks
to determine the final results
because they were so close
that every recount,
these first and second
were changing positions.
But even the current president
is very much in favor of Bitcoin.
He's actually,
I should meet him honestly,
thanks to the director
of the school on Roatan.
They are friends.
So if he's going to be on Roatan, then he told me, hey, let's do a little meeting.
They are interested to learn about Bitcoin.
They want to get back the support to prosper as well, which the previous socialist government was very against it because, you know, socialists don't like capitalists.
so yeah i think this period when when we look into politics which i'm not a huge fan of or
i'm totally not a fan of politics uh might be very positive for um for bitcoin but i don't want
to depend on it even in salvador bitcoin is not a legal tender anymore
they withdraw from it so a lot of people might not know that but yeah um i mean a bunch of
Bitcoiners left Salvador because of it.
We were there the morning when they announced
that legal tensor is basically killed.
And because of the IMF deal, they canceled it.
Right. So Salvador is still going well,
but not that well as people expected.
I'm not a huge fan of top-down approach.
I would love to do the education bottom-up
and make sure that people really get it.
And not because, oh, the president told me to accept it,
Well, because I see the benefits of accepting Bitcoin.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, that is a shame what happened in Salvador.
It's a beautiful country.
Guys, I already should be one minute on the meeting.
We are running like two hours already.
So the guys are waiting for me.
I would need to either like last five minutes.
I need to tell them, but we should really cut it short.
we'll uh cut to the uh yeah right so just um so we asked all of our guests on the orange
portal to this question and the audience love it because we always get incredible answers
dushan can you share something with our audience that is either little known or completely unknown
it can be about your work about life anything something that would surprise the people something
that most people just don't know?
Okay, so there are two things.
I will take one from Bitcoin world
and one from random outside.
So from the Bitcoin world,
a lot of people don't know,
maybe you guys know, maybe not,
that Bitcoin will have to have a hard fork.
There's no way around for us to,
for Bitcoin to survive without the hard fork.
And its latest need to be by 21.06.
it's because of like an integer overflow bug
and if we don't do the hard fork by the time
and change just a code a little bit
how the Bitcoin calculates time
it will just kind of fall apart
so nothing to do with nodes or core
it's a very easy fix
but it has to do with the Unix time counting
and 32 bits integer length
so very crazy thing
that people normally don't know.
So check out the 2106 hard fork pack.
You can learn about that.
And did you know it or not?
I actually didn't.
No, I did not.
Okay.
And the second one is kind of funny.
I plan to write an article that donkey is the new honey badger,
which is crazy.
So me and my girlfriend Diana, we kind of fall in love with donkeys as animals.
And people perceive them as very stupid animals.
But if you go down the rabbit hole of donkeys,
then you realize they're one of the most,
one of the animals with the most self-preserving awareness of the environment.
So if they decide not to do something,
it's because they analyze a lot of things around us and they realize,
oh, it's not worth for me to risk it.
Another thing is that donkeys,
when there are people who cut the trees down
with horses in the woods,
they take donkeys with them
because donkeys are calming down the horses.
The horses go crazy.
When trees are falling down,
the donkeys are there as a psychologist
to keep calm the horses.
The other thing is donkeys have amazing memory.
You go with the donkey up the hills
and then you give them like,
here's the bag and you go back when we return and the donkey goes on their own and they just
know exactly the road. So they have amazing memory. They protect the sheeps better than
dogs many times because they can sense with their ears the bears and the threats.
So the donkeys are like super crazy in this sense. The most expensive cheese in the world
is made out of donkey milk.
And the donkey milk is the closest to human milk
out of any milks, out of any animals.
So if kids has an allergy to a mother's milk,
the best replacement is a donkey milk.
So there are so many crazy facts about donkeys.
And I love that kind of the analogy to Bitcoin
where the honey badger is kind of like this forceful animal
that just eats everything, attacks everything,
is very aggressive.
And I see donkeys more as these kind of more peaceful,
space-aware animals where they access the reality.
They're not forceful.
They're very good animals for people to hang around,
like very social.
And I see them more as the kind of an image of an educator
that I like to bring to the world.
I like people who pay attention a lot.
They listen a lot.
They are calm and they don't need to shout around.
they don't need to be aggressive to make a point so yeah for me the donkey is the new
hennie badger yeah i like that a lot maybe maybe we'll uh have to tell ralphie to uh make uh make
a donkey artwork yeah yeah very very crazy weird fact about about the the animal um kingdom yeah
I like it.
Dushan, this has been absolutely incredible.
Thank you so much for taking the time
to come on the Orange Pro Order.
Honestly, what you're doing with AmityAge
is really inspiring.
Mining Bitcoin with wasted energy
to teach kids about money.
I mean, that's the kind of story
that gets people excited about Bitcoin.
For real.
And I think what resonates most for us as Gen Z
is that you're not just talking about changing things.
You're actually doing it.
You moved across the world.
you're in the trenches teaching kids that is our definition of proper action before we go
dushan where can people find you and amity age where should people go if they want to learn get
involved or even visit the education center in the road time yeah if you want to visit the center
just come to raw town you will find us if you put amity age um academy raw town you'll find us on
Google Maps and just stop by during the week. If you want to, you know, stay in touch, we are on
social media. I'm mostly or I kind of disconnected quite a lot. But I'm still somewhat active on
Twitter and LinkedIn. But we have profiles in Instagram, in Twitter, in LinkedIn as well. So
people can write to us uh follow what we do and uh yeah any anything you know just write us there
and happy to get in touch perfect and to everyone watching and listening if you enjoyed this episode
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Perfect, guys.