fiat and the USD is the foundation of all international trade, right, of all international
transactions. For countries like South Africa, when we were not in the gray list, it was easier to
transact. I could do stuff. Once we got on the gray list, it became harder to transact. And I
once got my bank account frozen, trying to buy rights to a book. Ultimately, that's where I was
okay, I cannot be using fiat for anything that I'm passionate about, because the inconvenience of
having to go to a bank and figure out why your account was frozen, and then continue doing the
things you set out to do with the budget you had, or now the budget you no longer have access to,
is very hard and it's time wasted. And fun fact, my triangle is also a result of that bank account
being frozen. I was like, oh, do I spend time figuring out and getting my account unfrozen,
or do I build something else? Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker,
and this is the Bitcoin podcast. The Bitcoin block height is 830747. And the value of one
Bitcoin is still on Bitcoin. Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk, where I talk with my guest about
Bitcoin and whatever else comes up. Today, that guest is Kodatsu Nako, who developed Machankura,
which allows anyone with a feature phone to use Bitcoin, no internet required. He's also developing
a new solution that will allow anyone to self-custody Bitcoin using only their SIM card.
I highly recommend you follow him and check out his work. You can find all the links in the show
notes. He's building real solutions to real problems that a lot of us in the western world
may not realize exist unless we step outside of our comfortable bubble of financial privilege.
As always, you can watch the video version of this episode on Rumble, YouTube, or X by searching
out Walker America, or listen on Fountain.fm or wherever you get your podcasts by searching for
the Bitcoin podcast. If you listen to the Bitcoin podcast on Fountain, consider giving this show a
boost or creating a clip of something you found interesting. And if you are a Bitcoin only company
interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, hit me up on social media or through
the website BitcoinPodcast.net. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with
Kotatsu Nako. I was looking back and we talked for the first time, I think it was August 2022.
And I posted some of those interviews. At that point, I also had a much smaller account and
wasn't running the podcast or anything. So, you know, I put it out through the channels that I
could, but I was looking forward now that I've kind of built up a little bit more of an audience
and also have this official, you know, fucking podcast thing going to have this be a nice like
touch up again, because at that point, you had launched in a few countries, but you were still
kind of getting much on core rolling, you know, and people were just hearing about it. Now you've
spoken at, you know, a bunch of conferences, we got a chance to meet in person at adopting Bitcoin
in 2023. You've been all over, I've seen, you know, like Alex Gladstein has been writing
and talking a ton about the work that you're doing. And so it's kind of this perfect,
perfect time for us to talk again, and kind of see where, how things have grown since the last
time we spoke. And then also, I know you've got some interesting things in the pipeline too.
So it's, I think it's an opportune time to dig back in to this, this Machankura saga.
Most definitely, most definitely. And if it's all right with you, I'd love to just start out,
we're rolling on the recording, so we'll just go right into it if you're good with it. And
just for anyone that does not know, give kind of an introduction of who are you,
how did you get here today to be building a solution for Bitcoin that does not require
internet in Africa? Effectively, I am called Tatsu Nako. And I grew up in Mamelo de Pitoria,
which is a township in South Africa. And yeah, I grew up as a rapper. I don't know what we talked
about last time in August 2022. I've totally forgot. And yeah, so I grew up as a rapper in my teenage
years. And so what were we doing back then? Yeah, rap wasn't one of those things that is embraced
back in the early 2000s, late 2000s. And yeah, so we were kind of going against the grain. It was
seen as a foreign entity, yadda yadda, blah, blah, blah. And it was also seen as us trying to be
Americans. But then fast forward to the year 2023. It's like one of the biggest genres in the country,
if not the continent, if not the world. And yeah, so I effectively see Bitcoin following
a similar trajectory, right? And short story to the longest story is that when I finished
high school, I had a decision to make do I continue down this path of rap music, or do I
be following more conventional route in university and stuff. So my conclusion, since I've been
involved in the rap scene since like 14 was that no, I've seen where you know, this road goes,
and it's not where I'd want to go. It's for now. So let me go something more conventional and
and I quit rap. And effectively, the following year is when South African rap effectively blew
up like 2012. There's been a lot of acts before then that were big. But in 2012, that's when you
couldn't run away from it, like every show, every TV show, everything had rap in it. And some of the
biggest act were called empty. I think one of the biggest songs called roll up. And as the years
progress, I was like, damn, I could have stayed a little longer and seen this thing through. And so
fast forward again, 2017. I'm now a software developer because I was writing computer science.
And I'm working at the Council for Science and Industrial Research. And Bitcoin comes along.
And everything about Bitcoin resembled a rap in the early days. So if you don't know what rap was
like in South Africa, in the early 2000s, you should just figure out what rap was like in America
in the early 90s, even way before that, maybe even 80s. And I think a lot of people have heard
a few stories since rap 1050 years. And the last year was a 50 year celebration of hip hop or rap
music. And yeah, so I'm like, Oh, actually, Bitcoin is going to follow a similar trajectory. And we
will see way more growth in the Bitcoin side, because it's not a genre of music that is more
tuned to the youth. But it's actually something a technology that is relevant in all transfers of
value that could ever occur. So I'm like in 50 years time, where would Bitcoin be? But more
specifically, where would the early adopters of Bitcoin be? So with rap, I think I was South African
rap, I was an early adopter, I listened to a lot of other early adopters who knew where this was
going. There's an artist called Proverb, professional verbalist, he has an album called
Manuscript, where he's dictating, it's like a manifesto for how big South African hip hop music
is going to be. He considered his album as part of a collection, you know, it's like a collector's
item. And yeah, oh, even here, let me just show you this. Something to parallel with that thought is,
oh, this is a gift I got from Camel, a Bitcoin calendar, you know, hyperbidcoinized Bitcoin
calendar from 2022. I think he had one in 2021 as well. And yeah, so this is also a collector's
item. So I'm just gonna put this away, put this safe so that nobody messes it up and 50 years into
the future, this will be one of those things where we reference like, oh, this is how big
hip hop is or how big Bitcoin is. And people already knew that the world would get hyperbidcoinized,
right? That is what the Bitcoin vision or Bitcoin mission is in a way. And yeah, so I think that is
cool summary for who I am, how I grew up and why I think Bitcoin is a very interesting thing.
I love that parallel. And I think it's for a lot of people in the, let's say, whatever,
the Western world, like, you know, America or other countries that are deemed those Western
nations, you see a lot of people and politicians or just normal people, whatever, who say, oh,
okay, yeah, you know, this technology Bitcoin thing, yeah, maybe that's cool for some computer
nerds. But who really needs that? You know, who really needs Bitcoin? We've got the dollar
and it works just fine. And so why, you know, why are you doing this other thing? That's never
gonna amount to anything. And then, you know, you see, if you step outside of your bubble,
which most people probably never will, you see that, oh, wait, there's a whole world out there
where there are problems that you will never have to deal with as an American or, you know,
a Canadian or, you know, a French person that the rest of the world has to deal with on a
daily basis as it relates to money. Can you just talk a little bit about some of the issues in
Africa that probably a lot of people in the Western world just it's not even on their radar.
And they think, why would why would you need Bitcoin? Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think we're in a very weird
situation where even in developed countries, people start seeing why you would need Bitcoin.
Right. I think today I saw a tweet by someone. He posted a tweet last year, late last year,
saying his grandmother paid for coffee using a Coinbase card, so it deducted from her Bitcoin
stack. Right. And then the quote said, Coinbase closed her account with no reason whatsoever.
Right. So I think now we are starting to see more and more people in developed countries
actually seeing the reason for why Bitcoin, even why self-custody, even all these other
different things. But with regards to things in South Africa, which is a little different from
the other African countries, because I think we have a little more established financial
infrastructure. But even there, we are not excluded from the ill that is fiat currency.
Right. So in our case, South Africa recently got gray listed because apparently the financial
infrastructure is not doing enough to combat terrorism from the... What was it? The Patriotic
Act in 2001 or whatever. Right. Yeah, the Patriot Act. In America, we love to name our laws to be
the exact opposite of what they really are. Yes. Right. So ultimately, that law, then
subsequent laws after it, seeped into other countries, South Africa being one of them,
where we also do anti-terrorism, blah, blah, blah, KYC, anti-many, whatever, whatever.
But we technically have not heard major terroristic threats. I think the biggest one we've had was
a false flag from the American embassy. Well, I think last year they were saying there was going
to be a big terrorist act and the Americans advised to leave South Africa or to not go to
public gatherings or something. And it was a sham because nothing happened and they just created
a stay over nothing. But that wasn't the biggest. The most latest one was the Nigerian High Commission
telling Nigerians in South Africa to not go out and watch the Afron semifinal because apparently
South Africans weren't going to react in, what's the word, friendly manner if they lost the game
versus Nigeria. Right. Which we did lose, but there's no reports of any harm being done to a
Nigerian in South Africa because of that loss or any other match we've played and we've played
against Nigeria a lot of times. By the way, Burnaboy once said he wouldn't come to South Africa
because of an exchange he had with the South African rap artists over a loss to Nigeria. And
you know, it's banter, but everyone was in high spirits. Even though Burnaboy, I think earlier
in his career, he was a local South African for the most part. If you wanted to see Burnaboy perform,
you could always go to a club across the street and see him perform. That's how much he was in
South Africa. But anyway, he's, he's cool with the country now. He tried to do a show last year
whatever. And yeah, so the Patriot Act and all these laws have seeped into other countries, right.
And other countries are now required to implement them so that they are seen in a good light
with the rest of the financial world because technically Fiat and the USD is the foundation
of all international trade, right, of all international transactions. If you're gonna
send a transaction to another country, it's most likely passing through the IMF or the
World Bank or something. And so for countries like South Africa, when we were not in the
gray list, it was easier to transact. I could do stuff. Once we got on the gray list, it became
harder to transact. And I once got my bank account frozen trying to buy rights to a book,
book well loved by all bitcoins across the world. So hopefully I have an update regarding that
sometime soon. But ultimately, that's where I was like, okay, I cannot be using Fiat for anything
that I'm passionate about, because the inconvenience of having to go to a bank and figure out why
your account was frozen, and then continue doing the things you set out to do with the budget you
had, or now the budget you no longer have access to is very hard. And it's time wasted. Right. Oh,
and fun fact, Machangura is also a result of that bank account being frozen. I was like, oh,
do I spend time figuring out and getting my account unfrozen, or do I build something else?
And yeah, so I built Machangura, and you know, one thing led to another. But even outside the
situation in South Africa, other African countries have it worse, like the CFA, the Colonial Franc,
where every former, okay, former air quotes, they still French colonies sends a portion of every
transaction back to France. And I think of even a portion of their reserves has to be sent to
France as well. I think 15% I don't really know the number. So get somebody who's from these countries
to actually tell you the full story. And as a result, it's much harder for anyone outside of
these countries to do business in these countries, let alone any African country, because I think we
have the weirdest business laws. But because you don't speak French, and you are not within
the systems, their systems, they seem very foreign to everyone else, you gonna have a hard time
doing anything in these countries. So yeah, that's part of the reason why even to this day,
a full year later, more than a year later, I still haven't managed to set up Machangura in a French
speaking African country. I have tried it was a long process that hit a dead end. I was trying to
get it in Senegal. But I'm thinking I'm gonna just, you know, count my losses and try to go in Marlene
now. And yeah, so ultimately, even if you do want to, you know, do some of these things and money
collaborate with businesses, fiat is set up in such a way that it's hard to actually do it. And
we are not even talking about the wars that are being funded, because fiat allows certain governments
to fund endless wars, right? Not all governments have the ability to fund endless wars. At most,
every government has the ability to fund their own structure on its people. And this is like Zimbabwe,
right? Zimbabwe used to be a great country. But due to sanctions as well, they had to make a decision
like, okay, do we continue on the trajectory that we had envisioned for our people? Or do we,
what's the word, reinforce our structures so that we maintain power over the country at the face of
all these sanctions, right? And African leaders, a lot of African leaders have had sad endings, right?
Some of them were dictators, cool, but it seems that dictators live longer than anyone else, right?
Your mama Gaddafi's and the list goes on Thomas Sankara, Petri Slumumba, so on and so forth. So
Zimbabwe reinforced their own structure and as a result, type inflation happened, so on and so
forth. And those structures are still in place. So Zimbabwe is not yet at the point where it could
continue on the trajectory of being great Zimbabwe as ancient times dictate, because sanctions have
caused so much harm to the economy, caused so much harm to how the people and the outlook of the
people within the country that it's much better for them to just leave the country, come to South
Africa for a better living. Even though that better living is something that is way below their
qualification. I'm quite sure that the South African waiter who used to be a Zimbabwean doctor,
who used to be a Zimbabwean lawyer, who came to South Africa and worked as a waiter because
whatever they making of tips is way more than they were making as a doctor or as a lawyer in Zimbabwe.
So yeah, there's many different things. And of course, those type of people usually over a long
term start finding something else to do outside being a waiter is just their first step in the door
and then they do better things and bigger things as well. So yeah, so for me, things like that,
the March harsher consequences of fiat currencies, because you end up with people
seeing other people as mouths to feed and not necessarily as fully functioning human beings
that could be productive for the society that they may find themselves. So yeah, that similar story
to the former UFC champion Francis Ngono going to Europe and becoming the champ in the UFC and
in the UFC and then now he's transitioning to boxing. But even he said he wouldn't want anyone in
his family to go through what he went through to make it into Europe and then to make it as a fighter
because it's one of those things where one bad incident and then you're down the worst path ever.
Right. And even getting to Europe, there's a whole ocean between Africa and Europe and you are not
going to be on a cruise, you're going to be on a rickety boat and so on and so forth. But yeah,
so for me, one of the biggest issues with fiat is that it creates a situation where people are
seen as mouths to feed and not as minds that could be inventing, creating and being productive in
the economy of the society. Well, and I understand being against immigration, but it would be great
if that person could be great where they are born. Right. But today, it's a lottery if you're born in
the wrong country. Sorry, you're going to have to hold that for the rest of your life. Even with
like Bitcoin and the whole coin methodology. It's great. It motivates people, but there's some people
who are just born in the wrong country that would never become whole coiners, regardless of how
talented they are, especially if they choose to stay within the countries they were born. Right.
For them to be a whole coiner move to a better country, because in the country you are born in
Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, so on and so forth. You are not going to be able to get paid what you
think you are worth. And there's an open source Bitcoin developer whose name starts with a Z and
as followed by a few random characters who got a crown from spiral and wrote a blog that I love
that. That's one of the best blogs I've ever read in my life, when he was substantiating the amount
for the grant he caught, because people were saying, yo, from the time zones you're active,
it would appear you are based in Asia and Asian software developers usually never make this much
money. Right. Why is it fair for you to get a grant that is American level from the terms of
how much money he got when you are in a cheaper country, right, Philippines, I don't know what's
the cheapest country in Asia, but seems like a lot of the countries within his time zones were
quite cheap to live in. And his reasoning was effectively the person who's living in America
and getting paid great sums of money can live that high standard of living in a afford to buy
the things that are associated with that high standard of living because of the amount he's
paid. And if a person is not living in San Francisco, Norway, Oslo, or wherever else,
they would still need to spend a similar amount of money for that high standard of living.
A good example is myself. As you see, I'm a little sweaty. I don't have air conditioning in my house.
I should get a conditioning in my house and I will get a conditioning in my house. And
yeah. But the cost to get air conditioning in my house, or if I'm getting paid an internationally
high income, right? So this was one of the things in the Bitcoin space where I was like,
that guy is right. There's no reason for me to be paid South African rates if the work I'm doing is,
you know, globally valuable. And even Indian developers, it's for me, that's one of the
funniest things. A lot of companies outsource their labor to Indian developers in India.
But when those very same developers do manage to go to these American companies, they become the
CEOs of these companies. And I think there was a time where every tech company, every one of
the biggest tech companies had an Indian CEO. So I'm like, yo, what if these guys could just
do what they're doing in America back in India, where they are the most comfortable, where they
have a social network, where they have the history, where they have support, right? So yeah, so that
for me is one of the things I'm like, okay, if Bitcoin solves one thing, I hope is this where
it breaks down the borders that have been put around us. And these borders have subsequently
decided our fate for the most part, if we do not break them down ourselves. And yeah, the Bitcoin
having is just a couple months away. And it's going to be here before we know it. So now is a
great time for you to get your Bitcoin off exchanges and into your own custody. A great way
to do that is by going to bitbox.swiss slash Walker, and using the promo code Walker for 5%
off the Bitbox 02 Bitcoin only hardware wallet. It's fully open source, you can go to their GitHub
and verify for yourself. It's easy to use. So whether you're new to Bitcoin, or you're a seasoned
psychopath, this wallet is a great choice. And when you go to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use
the promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off the Bitbox 02 or anything in their store,
but you also help support another fucking Bitcoin podcast. So thank you. I think that that's,
that's such an important point in terms of just, you know, a lot of people again, think entirely
in terms of their bubble. And when you're born in a comfortable bubble, when like, for example,
in America, you do not realize that you are given these privileges from birth that just because
somebody else and you know, none of us choose to be born, right? And we certainly don't choose
where to be born. But where you are born makes a huge difference in terms of your future earning
potential, everything. And when you're dealing with if you're, you know, are born in a country,
which the United States of America, which is the bedrock with the US dollar, as you said,
of the global monetary system, decides that country is, you know, is not on their approved list.
They make it really hard for you to do any sort of any sort of business, you know, outside of that
country or get paid from outside, you know, you can't have US dollars flowing into that.
And, you know, I, there's a couple of points I want to touch on from what you just said,
but can you, maybe I didn't hear it, but what was the book you were trying to buy that caused them
to shut down your bank account? Take a guess. Take a guess. The Bitcoin standard, maybe? Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. So, yeah, that's the book. Wow. So, yeah. So they literally shut down your bank account
for buying a book or trying to buy a book? Yeah, trying to buy rights to a book. I think they said
it was a foreign exchange control finger magic, right? infringement or something. So,
so it ended up not being that, but still, you know, it's one of those things where they can enforce
it first or you're guilty until you prove it innocent with a lot of these laws. And yeah, so
I was like, Oh, cool. That's honestly, that's, that's just insane. I mean, and it's,
that's, that sucks, but it's, there's something poetic about it, at least that it was the Bitcoin
standard you were trying to, you know, buy the, buy the rights to. I mean, just crazy. But, you
know, so there's a few things I want to, I want to touch on from what you just said, because I think
that that idea that you brought up of Bitcoin being a tool by which you can maybe democratize
isn't the right word, but where you can equalize the expected value exchange across different
countries, continents, because you're not viewed as okay, a developer in South Africa or a developer
in the Philippines versus a developer in America. You're just a developer. It doesn't matter where
you are. We're connected, you know, with, with the internet. And if you have Bitcoin where you
don't need to worry about those capital controls moving money from country to country, then those
rates should be the same. You know, it's, it's about the work that you're doing, not where you
happen to be doing the work. And I hope this helps to bring more equalization of that because it,
it just doesn't make much sense, does it that you can, you know, pay somebody
pennies on the dollar for the exact same work, the same quality of work, maybe for better work
in another country, then you would if you hired somebody who is in America, like it's just,
it's kind of insane, honestly. And there's a couple other items I want to go into there,
but I also want to, to talk a little bit about Machankura specifically, because this is another,
I think, so we talked about kind of some of the blind spots for people in the Western world who,
when they look at Africa or other different developing areas, they don't realize the problems
that people have to deal with on a day to day basis. Another one of those, so one of those is,
is unstable currencies and very, very difficult, a lot of difficulty moving money around between
countries or even within the country. But another one is internet access. And you know, in America,
it's, you know, and in many parts of the world, just about everybody has a self smartphone,
I should say, it's, you know, very common people are used to very stable internet and very solid,
you know, smartphones for, you know, they are getting quite expensive now, even though they
should be getting cheaper with technology being deflationary, but that's a different story. But
in, in Africa, not only is there a lot of difficulty with getting a bank account, or in your case,
keeping access to your bank account, if you decide to purchase the wrong thing. So you have that,
but you also have the fact that not smartphones are not as ubiquitous in Africa, not everybody
has a smartphone. A lot of people have feature phones, which are running on GSM networks,
they're not connected to the internet. And, you know, people in America were, were, will probably,
if you're a little bit, you know, older, like myself, you're going to remember using those
phones, it was whatever one was using. But they are still very much popular, very much in use in
Africa, because the GSM networks are much more widespread than our, you know, 4G, or, you know,
now getting towards 5G networks. Can you talk a little bit about Machankora specifically,
how it works with the USSD short codes, and, and what was that, you know, light bulb moment for you
when you said, hold on, we don't need internet to use Bitcoin in Africa.
Oh, okay, cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Oh, yes. I want to talk about that. But I think one thing,
as you were talking, it's stuck out, is that one other side effect of Fiat and how the Fiat system
is implemented is that you are profiled. So if you are receiving a certain amount of money,
the question is, what is a person like you doing receiving that type of money? So if you are born
in a low income class, and the shift from low income to middle income is too quick, like,
something happened in your life, and now you have a middle income or a high income salary,
chances are you might have an issue with the bank, right? And it's worse in different countries.
I think in Uganda or Kenya, they were saying this other lady was receiving cash from her boyfriend
in Belgium, and he sent it through the bank, and the bank held on to that money and asked her why
she was getting that money. She said it was from her girlfriend, my boyfriend, and they said, no,
we don't believe your story, we're gonna hold on to this money. So we don't know what their business
is. And anyway, even let's say it was a scam, technically, we should be innocent until proven
guilty. It shouldn't be a crime just because you don't fit a profile. But yeah, then back to
my changura. Effectively, when I realized that, okay, you could build something without internet.
The story starts a while ago, I watched this documentary called The Century of the Self,
about Sigmund Freud and advertising and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there was a
section in the doki about the medium is not the message on, wait, wait, wait, the medium is the
message on how different messages are different depending on the medium they are shared in.
So depending on how basically, if it's on TV, you could do something that you couldn't do on
radio. If it's on radio, you could do something that you couldn't do on a newspaper. And even
music, it's one of those things that has changed with the mediums that it was, you know, sent
through. I think when people are still using a track song length or certain length because
of how much could be accommodated in a track vinyl as well, besides an A side, a consequence of the
fact that oh, the vinyl has two sides. So you put the popular songs on A side and the not so popular
songs on the B side. And now MP3s became a thing and streaming is a thing. And technically,
with streaming, we should have seen more songs that are long or longer than four minutes longer
than what radio allowed because radio plays a song and then has to play the next one. But what
happened is incentives came into the play where a person would be paid for the 30 seconds. If a
song is played for 30 seconds, then you can get paid. But if it's everything after that 30 seconds
didn't matter, so artists wanted to get more paid so that they got more paid. And then,
yeah, the shorter the song, the better because the shorter the song means a person has to replay it
to get that feeling that the song played for four minutes. It's a two minutes song that you replay.
It's a one minute song that you replay great times, weird stuff like that. And so the medium
is the message. And if you listen to music, you could tell which era it's from, just from how long
it is, right? You could guess. And so effectively, now what happened with Bitcoin? Yeah, I saw that
and I kind of flipped it the other way. And I said, the medium is not the message or the message
is not the medium. I should probably publish this blog or something. And if you look at Bitcoin,
even the Bitcoin blockchain, you are like, Oh, it's hashed as long as it's verified.
It's valid. It's a valid Bitcoin transaction. Every transaction comes in every 10 minutes.
You could technically broadcast transaction on any other medium. I think Blockstream did the
satellite where they were broadcasting Bitcoin blocks every 10 minutes. And then I was like,
Oh, shit, we don't even need the internet. You could just broadcast it through whatever medium
is available to you. So in my mind, I'm like, Oh, you could publish a newspaper with yesterday's
blocks. And then if a person had a way to induce or consume one of those pages, they could be
caught up with the state of the Bitcoin blockchain as it was yesterday, because newspapers, right?
And so I was like, Okay, what else could you do with it? What other things could you do with it?
And well, in Africa, we have had digital payments for a decade around the same time as Bitcoin has
existed. 2008 and Bessa launched in Kenya. It was a big story. I've worked around it on it a bit
over the years too. And then I was like, Oh, okay, if they could do digital payments over USD, via
and Bessa, technically, you should be able to do the same thing with Bitcoin. And yeah, so I was
like, Okay, cool, you don't need an internet connected device, you just need a device that could
do some other things you need done, and even less capable if it's a custodial service, because it
could then store the funds on behalf of the user and just do most of the stuff in the back end.
And yeah, that's pretty much the story behind, okay, how I saw that, okay, you don't need internet.
And I think probably one of the biggest point is a blockstream satellite.
Well, and I remember when I first heard that, you know, you were doing this and it was,
I think I first heard about it, and it was sometime in the summer of 2022. This came on my radar,
and I was like, Oh, this is just this is brilliant, you know, because it's also something I think where
somebody in the United States probably wasn't going to figure out that this was possible,
because they didn't have the force behind them saying, I need to build an alternate solution
that doesn't, you know, it's, you know, when you have access to a smartphone and, and laptop and,
you know, internet everywhere, you're not thinking about, okay, what do I do if there's no internet,
because you're just okay, I have the internet, why would I need to use anything else Bitcoin
is sent over the internet, that's the only way I'm thinking about it. But because you were coming
from a different place, both mentally and, and you know, physically located in different place,
you thought of something that's really so, so simple and so brilliant, but that I don't think
anyone else was going to come up with, you know, like it had to be you, based on your experiences,
all those things that brought you to where you were. And now you're you're live in how many
different countries, eight or eight or nine countries? I think seven or eight. Yeah, seven.
Yeah. I mean, and it's, it's very interesting what you said about the, the French speaking
countries. And I want to touch on that a little bit later. But just for anyone who is not familiar
with what ussd is, it's unstructured supplementary service data, right? And it's, it's been, you
know, available on GSM cellular networks for, for some time. It's, it's what Mpasa is using as well.
And basically all you, you know, you don't need that for G connection, you are just sending cellular
data. But can you just for anyone who's curious of kind of like the a little bit of the the technical
side, can you talk about how that works with, you know, setting up that that session basically,
with the ussd, where you're kind of initializing the session, and then you're able to basically
make those commands that allow you to use Bitcoin over lightning. Cool. Yeah. So
how do you think about it is like live SMS session, right? So you, the user are going to
communicate with me and my service over this live SMS session, where you're not charged for
each message you're sending, but you're charged for the amount of time that you spend on the session,
right? So I think most telecoms either bill you on 20 second intervals or 60 second intervals.
And so since it's still based on most of the SMS
foundations, the character limits are the same, I think 160 character limit and
141 over two. And so you also have to respond within a set amount of time. So 20 seconds,
if the user doesn't respond 20 seconds, the session dies, if the service doesn't respond in
like five seconds, the session dies or depending on how the integration was carried out. And yeah,
so ultimately, you are incentivized to respond in a quick fashion. And so you have as little inputs
as possible. So this I think relates to the point you making with Riyaz to no one else in other
developed countries would have came up with this, I think they would because we have quite a lot of
talent in the Bitcoin space. We have a Fiat Jeff, we have a Supertest Net and so on and so forth.
Yeah, they are mad geniuses and just build stuff to build stuff. And we've had something like
a service called Quaintext, which was SMS based. But I think where the issue lied was
it didn't explore the markets it could have. So yeah, once you develop it, who are you going to
get to use it and how are you going to get to that person? So with our service, the biggest thing
we were met with was the fact that the whole ecosystem is internet based. Every Bitcoin
company has an internet interface. So how would you bring a user into this great ecosystem? And for
me, the ecosystem is part of the reason why building on Bitcoin is so easy and so good.
You can always get a business that's been operational for five to 10 years to collaborate
with, maybe not partner, but it's open enough that you could do something that works on
Bitrefield, do something that works on Nisteco. And yeah, so then what happens from there?
In my case, I'm like, okay, what more things could we add so that a user now has a wallet,
but then they can participate with the rest of the ecosystem so that they have a reason to open
a wallet, not just to huddle and so on and so forth. Part of the reason is the conversation to get a
person to huddle takes longer than the conversation to get a person to buy a coffee. So yeah, you
can buy a coffee with it. That's like what five seconds and that for me, that is the ideal orange
pillar length. If you're introducing a person to the service, you just tell them what they could do
and you give them the USSD code. And since the UI is so constrained, I have to figure out what to
put there so that a person can find the thing you told them to do. If you told them to create an account,
that's the first thing they'll see. If you told them buy goods or services, that's the other thing
they'll see once they create an account. Who are they buying it from? They don't know about Bitrefield,
right? But they will learn as soon as they make the purchase that oh, this was from Bitrefield.
They don't know about Nisteco, but they will learn about Nisteco as they go through the user interface.
Right? So yeah, so then you move the bulk of the work from the orange pillar and put it in the
service. And yeah, the service is really just a result of me trying to orange peel people in my
community and being met with the oh, I don't have a smartphone. Oh, I don't have an internet
connected device. Oh, I don't have enough space on my phone, right? Because yeah, these are the
three things you'd have to be met with. If a person doesn't have a smartphone, they have a device like
this, right? It's not an Nokia. I'm trying to get a 30310, please people, if you have a 30310,
reach out to me, I'm going to fly to catch a train, catch a taxi and come get it. And the second one,
I don't have internet. So how the combat that I would hotspot a person. And so I'd have internet
in my phone, and then hotspot them and then they could then download whatever app and do whatever I
say they should do. And third, this I couldn't solve, like I don't have space. The solution is
delete Instagram, delete TikTok. You are not going to win versus Instagram and TikTok, right?
And so ultimately, with any app you're building in some markets, these, these are your biggest
competitors, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp. And I hate TikTok the most because people are saving
videos on their devices for later use, or for remixing purposes, because they want to learn the
dance. So they download the video and learn the dance without internet when they don't have Wi-Fi.
And then at a later time, come back and recreate the dance, but forget to delete the bloody video.
But anyway, it's all good. And so the ussd thing works great because they don't have to install an
app. They just dial the code. The telecom stores a directory of the ussd codes. And then the telecom
knows that Oh, when the person dials this code, this person is trying to access my chancoora. So
it's like DNS, but for ussd codes. And then it passes the request to us, we send a response. And
all the wonderful things I said happen when you do a ussd session, 20 second timeouts and all of that,
then kicking into effect. And yeah, that's basically it.
It's, it's such a, such an elegant solution. Because, you know, again, you're, as soon as
you're trying to tell somebody about Bitcoin, right? A lot of, a lot of people, again, to, to
talk about kind of the West versus much of the rest of the world, people think about it as the,
the store of value, you know, the savings technology being the primary, like that's the primary use
case for them, right? I want to, I want to maintain my purchasing power. And is that important to
people all over the world? Of course. But for much of the world, it's also just about being able to
have an easier way to use a medium of exchange, a medium exchange that's not going to be cut
off by your bank account, or won't be allowed to be, you know, sent from country to country.
And I think that's something that is missed by a lot, you know, even a lot of Bitcoiners who
stay inside their bubble, not realizing that like, yes, yes, number go up is a great meme. Yes.
It is important to have a monetary base that it can't be manipulated by whatever government
or central bank. But that medium of exchange component is so important. And to talk a little
bit more about much and quora, I know when we were talking back in 2022, you were throwing around the
idea of because right now much and quora is a custodial solution, right? Like you guys are
providing the service. It's, you know, it's a custodial solution. And, you know, you were
basically saying, you know, there are some ways that we may be able to actually make this a self
custody solution, or create another solution that is self custody, based on allowing keys to be stored
on SIM cards. And if I'm not mistaken, you have started to pilot actually some of this technology.
Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of that shift? Because that that would be one of the
main, if somebody was to try and criticize much on quora, they would say, well, it's custodial,
you know, you should be giving people the ability to hold their own keys. But you know, you have to
trade some of that self sovereignty for the convenience of a great service like much on quora.
But can you talk a little bit about what your plans are for the self custody side of things?
Oh, you're lucky, man. You asked this question, right? As I have a SIM card and the phone right
over here. So let me try and do a small demo. Right? So let me see if I could reduce the brightness
first. And LCD blacklight. You don't go too bright. And then cool. Yeah. So effectively, every SIM card
has something called a SIM toolkit. This is torture to demo. But yeah, so there's a SIM
toolkit thing here. Let's just call it some toolkit. And then you open that up, right? And then with
what I'm doing, it's a do sim. So, oh, no, it's a sim overlay. So this is this is a bad boy right
here. So that chip goes over your normal SIM card. And then when you open the same toolkit,
you get two menus. So the first menu item is empty and menu that's empty and because this is an
empty and some card. And then the second menu item is freezer. And that is the thing that I'm
building. You're I'll tell you as the rest called freeze after this after this small demo. So you
open freezer and you can maybe you see the about and the about is freezer version 001. I don't know
is is it going to be flipped on your side because but anyway, it's all good. The about it'll be okay.
Okay, cool. So whatever, whatever. So free. So you open it again. And then now you go to the wallet
and then you're presented with a menu like send Bitcoin, receive Bitcoin transaction, balance,
I can read the old quest and settings. Right. So this is how it's going to work. Settings.
What is this relay phone number? Oh, yeah. So I open relay phone number. And I can see the phone
number which is my relay to the rest of the internet. Right. So that's the Machangura phone
number on WhatsApp, by the way. So if you WhatsApp that number, if you're not in the G20
countries, you'll be able to use Machangura. So back to settings. Right. So effectively,
now if you have the SIM card in whichever country you could then set relay phone number.
And let's just assume that you could, you know, type out the number that's relay for your country,
maybe even run your own relay. It's like an electron server. Right. So you don't get the
start directly from the blockchain. You get the start from the electron server. This relay in
this case is an electron server with an SMS interface. So you just type out that number.
And that's how you're going to get stuff. Right. Oh, my bad. Back. Oh, cool. Freezer again. Right.
So what could you do? Open freezer. Of course, the first thing you'll have to do is receive Bitcoin.
Right. So when you're receiving Bitcoin, you could display a secret address or display cast
secret address. So we just going to display a secret address one, two, three, four, five.
Oh, cool. And that's your secret address. So it takes five seconds for the SIM card to do all
that finger magic is that ends up showing your secret address. Or you could just display it
from cash. So I keep a cash on the device. So now you see the secret address from the cash.
And that's a valid secret address that's on this SIM card right now. And you can send
Bitcoins to it. I cannot spend it because I'm not that far. But when you're spending, this is how
it would look like. Satoshi is Bitcoin. And you just pick a unit of accounts, sets are the standard
enter how many sets. And then enter destination. I think that enter the address. So you're just
going to type out, sorry, I say there's no company in base functionality. So you have to type out the
address you're sending to whatever, whatever. So let's just type out something. This I'm not here
yet. This is me just showing you how it's going to work. And yeah, this is just to confirm your
action. And you just say one to confirm. And then it goes through. And then it should show you some
other stuff that it's going through. But then what is going to happen is there's going to be another
section here called requests. So under requests, that's where you get signing requests for your
balance. So every time the relay sends you something, it ends up in the request. So
so now you may see it's all zeros there. So those zeros for now is this phone telling me it hasn't
received a request. So one and this that's where I'm stuck. So once I'm able to send this phone
SMSes and then consume those SMSes on Java card, I could say one just to say as a flag to say,
okay, I received this type of SMS. And I'll add the functionality and so on and so forth. But most
of the functionality is already there in other Java card projects like specter Java card status
Java card Satoshi chip. So what I'm just doing is this cool, not cool, but simple interface that
a person could use that has a SIM card there, and then piggybacking on the GSM connection
for the SIM card a person uses on a day to day to actually send in receive Bitcoin.
And yeah, so any questions from that side? I don't know if I skipped something.
I mean, it's it's incredible to see so so and this is actually, this is a self custody,
like the keys are just being stored, you know, stored locally. There is no, no third party
involved. Obviously, you're you're forwarding the messages externally. But in terms of the keys,
this is actually a self custody solution for feature phones. Yes. And yeah, so as soon as
we are able to do on chain transactions, we will explore everything else. I could tell you why it's
called freezer. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. So effectively, this is called project Super Saiyan.
A huge Dragon Ball Z fan, I grew up watching it. And yeah, you know, one of the most iconic things
is Goku going Super Saiyan versus Frieza. And the fight against Frieza was a long fight, you know,
five days for the planet to blow up, but five minutes for the planet to blow up by the episodes
are playing for like five weeks or something like that. And so yeah, so project Super Saiyan for me
is a project where I'm like, yo, what if everyone could literally send in receive Bitcoin? Right?
And that is what I see it as I see it as Oh, it's the equivalent of going Super Saiyan in Dragon
Ball Z, giving everyone in the world the ability to send and receive Bitcoin. And of course,
self custody is a cherry on the cake. I still believe there's a role to play with being a
custodial service. And that has to do with that five second orange peeling session I was talking
about earlier. But sadly, we're not in an ideal world. I used to be in nine countries down in
seven countries, because we're not in an ideal world, they could, you know, shut down your
USSD code, so on and so forth. So how do you make this work in a censorship resistant fashion,
which is what Bitcoin is all about. And I think Frieza is that right. And I also think that
every wallet in the space has discovered a lot of interesting things that I'm like, I'm going to use
that I'm going to use that I'm going to use that moon wallet, moon wallet, shout out to those guys,
great guys, they have effectively made the best on chain wallet in the space, right? Or one of the
best, maybe not the best, but one of the best. And why I like it is because they don't do
12 word seed phrase. And the reason why I'm saying I like it because they don't do 12 word
seed phrases is because not everyone speaks English. So if you're in a market that's not
English speaking, you cannot use the English, Bip 39, I think, or something like that. Oh,
it's not Bip 39. But anyway, you can not use the English word list, you'd have to use the word
list for your language, right? And Bitcoin is decentralized. So there's no official source
for the word list, right? There's the most used word list. And the consequences that you then
have Electrum, which is one of the most popular desktop Bitcoin wallets, that has its own English
word list, 12 word thing. But a user wouldn't know that Oh, this thing doesn't interoperate with
that other thing, right? So the assumption for users that if I have these 12 words, I could open
a different wallet, and then use Bitcoin there. So Moon wallet, they used something like recovery
code. It resembles old age activation codes. So it's much easier for me to convince a person to
keep an activation code secure, because they've seen activation codes before. And yeah, so Moon,
shout out to them and shout out to their lightning setup. Because the other thing with it is
effectively Moon says, if you can do on chain, you can do lightning through swaps, right? So
freezer is also going to do lightning through swaps. So we're going to do an on chain swap on
behalf of the user to pay lightning invoices, and or lightning addresses, whatever comes us. And
yeah, so that for us is like, thank you, Moon, for actually going down that path and figuring out
what works for you guys in Argentina. And then I'm like, I'm gonna, you know, take some of that
and bring that home. And then there's guys like Phoenix wallet, who are doing a great job as well.
Right. Phoenix wallet for me, the best lightning wallet you could ever use self custodial. And
currently, it has shaken off all the trade offs, you would have made as a lightning wallet service
provider, right, by putting all the fees upfront to the user. Oh, you got a Bitcoin balance, you're
going to have to pay to open the channel, right? And so on and so forth. So it's good and bad at the
same time, because it was seamless before this, right? But the upfront course for me is okay,
right? I feel like somebody could just sell the wallet. So if Phoenix wallet, let's say,
they sold for $5 or $10. And as soon as you buy it, it comes with inbound liquidity, because
you paid, that's what you're paying for, you're paying for the inbound liquidity, then you don't
have to do the whole, the inbound is going to come off your first Bitcoin transaction thing.
And the first Bitcoin transaction may fail, because at that time fees are too high, whatever,
whatever. So you charge a fee for a person to buy or buy a subscription, and that price should have
the current on chain costs and whatever else within it. So that when a person then opens the app,
it does that. And this is just the UX thing, right? You could also do the same thing with
Bitcoin, just say, pay this Bitcoin invoice this much, and then you are then able to
use Phoenix wallet in all its glory. But I think in the past year, Phoenix wallet has moved
just so quick and implement great features like splicing, that they, their UX and the OUI hasn't
caught up with where they are. And I think over the coming year, their UX and their UI is going to
catch up with where they are. And this is something they've done before, because they had EatLia
wallet before Phoenix wallet, and they effectively deprecated EatLia for to keep Phoenix wallet
running. And the UX on EatLia and the UX on Phoenix, totally different. But even them, I'm
like, Oh, that splicing stuff is great. Definitely going to take that and bring it into this. And
why it's great, there's this conversation around UTXOs, the small UTXOs and stuff. But I'm like,
Oh, okay, cool. So a person could just, what's the word, splice in their funds. And then whether
or not they have small UTXOs is not an issue. So that is a genius solution by the guys at Phoenix
wallet, those French guys agreed, had the pleasure of meeting them. And yeah, I wish they continue
down the path that they are on. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on with regard to Phoenix?
So okay. So because what I wanted to maybe talk in a little bit more detail about is just kind of
with Frieza, this is now giving the capability to anyone, not just people who are in the
countries that are where Machankura is live, but this is something that can be used by anyone,
correct. And you know, anyone that has a SIM card, this is going to give them the ability to do
self custody, whether it's on a feature phone or a smartphone. This is kind of a new self custody
layer. And as you mentioned, building on some existing ideas. But this is something that's
really completely the implementation of it for feature phones is what is really completely new,
right? And that ability to okay, I've got a feature phone, I can use Machankura in a custodial way
to do lightning transactions, I can use bit refill, I can get it as tech of vouchers, I can send
lightning, send via lightning. But then Frieza is giving you the ability to have a self custodied
Bitcoin solution so that you can, you know, they say sovereignty is like a spectrum, right?
Like, you know, you're no one's ever going to be fully sovereign, right? You know, you'd have to
too many things would have to happen for that. You'd have to be able to, you know,
make your own steel and and have all of your own freshwater source and many things. But you can get
close to being sovereign and little things like Bitcoin self custody are a big part of that process
being sovereign for it with your money. So how I mean, you mentioned that you still have a good
amount of work to do on it. Do you have kind of an idea of when, you know, you might have people
start trying to demo this out and to push this live? That's question one. And then, is this
something that you're also thinking of kind of pitching to telecoms to say, look, here's this
solution that you can kind of promote as part of your SIM card service that enables people to use
Bitcoin in this self custodial way? Or are you not not looking in that direction too much?
Well, so yes, I think we are looking at getting telecoms to push this out. Ultimately,
with how it works, or how Java card or some toolkit applets work, the telecom can send
the update over the air. So any telecom interested could literally give this functionality to all
its users over the air. Wonderful. People have a Bitcoin wallet and no counterparty risk for the
telecom. And it's also much easier for the telecom to do because it's their infrastructure. So they'd
be the default relay, of course, the person could choose to use a different relay rather than the
default relay. And what else? Oh, yeah. So with where it is now, it's in a very weird place where
I'm like, yo, this could literally work this weekend, or work in two weeks. I think now the
biggest block is the SMS stuff. And that I'm running out of SIM cards, right? I think this is
my pile of dead SIM cards. Some things I just have to put on the SIM card itself and test.
So what I'm going to do is I think I'm going to talk with the TASA guys. This is a company.
I don't think they put their name on it, but this is their product. SIM overly, I forgot what the M
E stands for, but vault. And yeah, so I'm going to talk with them again, try to get another set of
cards. But yeah, it's one of those things I'm like, wow, it's so close, it could literally happen
this weekend. Once I solve whatever issue I'm having now. So yeah. And
so yeah, expect a demo video out of nowhere on the Machangura account on Twitter. I'm just waiting
to figure out which song to use. And yeah. But I think I have one good song in mind that a lot
of people are not going to like. But anyway, it is what it is. And yeah,
I'm looking forward to the demo video and I appreciate you giving us kind of a little sneak
peek demo here today. I'll probably cut if it's cool with you, you know, cut that part out and
I can share that one as just a, Hey, you know, here's a preliminary demo and you know, kind of what
this idea is because I think that this is really, really powerful. And I would encourage people who
are in the still maybe, you know, they're into Bitcoin, but you're still living in a little bit
of a bubble, perhaps to check this out and to think about the implications of something like this.
And as you said, you know, whether you're working directly with the telecoms or not, the telecoms
can provide a smoother path to getting this out to people if they're also promoting it, that's great.
But either way, this is something that anyone would be able to run and be able to use Bitcoin
in a self sovereign way. And to do it without needing to ask for permission, and to do it on
any sort of device. So it's, it's not limiting whatsoever. You don't have to be able to download
an app. You can just run this on your SIM card. And I think that that's so powerful. And, you know,
I'm, I'm really excited to see this go live because I think that it's these kind of stories
and these kind of projects that people like yourself just say, you know what,
fuck it, I'm just going to build this because I want to see this. And I know that people will,
will want to use this. And you don't ask for permission and you just do it. And this is what
the stuff that is sneaking in in the background that the people who are just paying attention to
the Bitcoin ETFs in the USA or, you know, number go up there, they're not seeing this. And certainly,
you know, governments aren't paying attention to this kind of thing. They're not realizing that
while they're looking over here, there's a whole group of developers like yourself who are just
building stuff that once it's out there in the open, it's, it's out there for anyone and it can't
be stopped. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about Bitcoin. It's, you know, again,
you're not asking for permission. It's not the Fiat world where you need to, where you're guilty
until proven innocent. You're just putting it out there and then it's out there forever for
anyone to use. And so it's, it's really cool to see this develop. And it's cool as well to see kind
of that this was to, you know, in 2022, this was something that you were just kind of like talking
about like, oh, this would be cool. If we, you know, if we could do this, there's, there's probably a
way to do this. And now you're literally just building it like it's, I don't know, it's, it's
beautiful to watch that journey. Thank you. Thank you, man. And yeah, I think that's one of the
greatest things. So I want to be, I want to, sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, just continue talking. You want to be
Oh, yeah, I was going to say, I want to be conscious of your time here. If you have a couple more
minutes, though, we, I'd love to just talk a little bit more. Kind of, you were talking earlier, you
know, more general sense about the, the fiat world, the fiat mentality, again, the, you know, you had
your bank account shut down for just trying to, to buy a book. Like these are things that sound
like they might be ridiculous to someone who's never had it happen to them. But it can happen to you.
It's just a matter of time, depending on where you live in this world and what you're trying to do.
Cause at a certain point, someone who's in charge of your money, which is there's always someone
in charge of your money when it's fiat, someone can just say, I don't like what you're doing. I
don't like what you're buying. I don't like what, yeah, exactly. It's not your money. I don't like
what you're saying on the internet. So I'm going to shut you down. And I mean, maybe just to
going through that experience for you and now deciding to say, you know what, because of this,
I'm going to just, I'm going to build freedom tack on Bitcoin. What is kind of, you know, your
message both to, to maybe other developers who are saying, you know, wow, you know, I'm inspired
by this. I want to try to, to work on things like this too, or to people who still don't yet see
the problem with their fiat system that they use, because it hasn't been a problem for them yet.
They haven't felt the pain yet, but at a certain point they will. Everyone's going to feel that pain,
you know? So, yeah, no, I feel like it's one of those things that the movie, the matrix got so right.
Everyone kind of feels that normal. That's something wrong with this society. If the thing we call a
society, right, there's really something wrong with it. And things shouldn't be like, you see,
even as you mentioned in that, smartphones should be cheaper because technology is deflationary,
but nope, they're not, they're getting more expensive. And the thing that we call a society,
but nope, they're not, they're getting more expensive. And the baseline smartphones don't get
sold anymore. I have a conspiracy theory that due to the fact that other companies, by shares, and
other companies, and sit on boards of other companies, the companies that should be doing well
in the entry level products, drop the ball a lot. This is your opos, your samsangs and whatever else.
And when they drop the ball, they let the ball roll instead of saying, oh, I'm going to pick it up and
fix that issue so that we keep these customers, you know? And no, the other thing is the system,
the fiat systems, if they, it sees that, oh, these guys are basically, you know,
doing what they shouldn't be doing, which is falling in line, they over correct, right? And this is
what happened with Hawaii, or the phone manufacturer, right? As it was becoming the world's bestselling
phone, set smartphone, because it was catering very well to the low income earners and the high
income earners, because they understood people want a good camera on their phones, and they just
put the best cameras they could find on those phones. I don't know about everything else, but yeah,
if the camera is good, a person, the average person is happy. And they over corrected with the
sanctions. And now they don't even have a play store or a standard play store. And they, Hawaii,
or I can't pronounce their name, have had to figure out how to continue doing business, right?
In this type of environment. And I've said this on some other podcast. I really feel sorry for
the Chinese entrepreneurs, right? Because when they do something well, they never get the credit
for being the entrepreneur that went out and doing that thing. Right? If Hawaii is at T.E.,
even Jack Ma, if they're too big, they get the association that it's the Chinese government,
even TikTok with Biden. So America said, Oh, you cannot run that against national security, but
TikTok is still in America because they put in American approved CEO and so on and so forth.
And the actual TikTok CEO cannot get that glory for doing what he did with TikTok. Right? And
then they cannot even be proud of what they did in China because they will get Jack Ma. Right? So
if you don't know what getting Jack Ma is, is Jack Ma saying, what's his company, Ant or Alibaba,
whatever else did so well without the Chinese government and the Chinese government stood up
and made him disappear for a few months just to reeducate him on the topic of the role that the
Chinese government plays in his success. So yeah, but yeah, then with regards to freedom tech and
building on Bitcoin, I think the beauty of it is being permissionless. Right? I think even as
in my experience with Machangura now, I had a lot of times I've had to recalibrate because it's so
easy to forget that you don't have to ask for permission. And there's an expectation from
everyone that you should ask for permission, that you should be regulated because that is the
easier thing to do. And being permissionless, censorship resistant and decentralized is weird
in the sense that if anyone should be able to do what you're doing, so that you don't have the
target on your back alone. Right? So I think Ray spoke about this in a talk he gave at Adopting
Bitcoin Cape Town, that if we all stood up, then you know, it's much easier to do the right thing
and go against the grain. But yeah, freedom tech for me is just one of the weirdest things. And I
think what I'd like to see in this space is more and more people understanding that everything you
build can be fully decentralized. We have Nostra now, Nostra is great. But we are not seeing enough
being built on top of Nostra. And if we're going to have a future, we are going to need Nostra
and Nostra apps to be dope, dopest, you know, everything they ever was and everything they
ever will be. At the current moment, every time I'm on Nostra, I'm like, that's so sad, there's
nothing new to see on Nostra. And then I go back on Twitter. And by see, I don't mean notes. My feed
has a lot of notes. But in terms of the UX and the UI, I'm like, ah, they could have, you know,
pushed the boundary in some way shape or form. And yeah, but the good news is, I think at some
point, those developers from developing nations, we were talking about earlier, are gonna find
Nostra, and they are going to build the weirdest things that they could possibly build, because
Nostra allows them to build them. And then we're going to see what's happening. But sadly, most of
them don't believe that they are in a position to actually build it out. So yeah, we need more of the
first matrix to happen in the space, like we need a Morpheus, we need a Trinity, we need the whole
gown to just go out and unplug people from the matrix. And I think one of the things I've
reiterated a lot of the times, especially in the first year of Machangura, is that people should
quit their fiat jobs and build on Bitcoin. CBDCs even are not an issue if the best talent is not
working on a CBDC. So if then they fund companies to build on the CBDCs and attract the best
talent, then of course CBDCs become a threat. But as long as a fiat job is not working on a CBDC,
as long as Roy Frumpris is not working on a CBDC, we don't have anything to worry about,
we have the best talent. And then the culture will catch up, the culture will then know, oh,
those guys are doing a lot of interesting things that we should actually be paying attention to.
I love that. It's a, it is something that makes me feel better and very hopeful that as you said,
the right now the smartest people, the most creative people are building in and around and on
Bitcoin. They're the people that are, you know, because that's what they're attracted to, right?
The people who are building on or will build on CBDC infrastructure, whether it's, you know,
for a specific government or through the Bank of International Settlements or whatever, or it's,
you know, the guys at, you know, JP Morgan building out, you know, their private blockchain solutions,
those are the people that are in it for the wrong reasons. Maybe the reason, you know, is just they,
JP Morgan's paying them a lot of money to work on that. Okay, whatever. But the people who are,
that I see, like yourself, like, like Fiat Jaff, you know, the list goes on and on, who are building
on Bitcoin or building on NoCert, these are the people that actually really care and really give
a shit about the building the future that they want to see. They're not willing to let somebody
else determine what the future is going to look like. They're saying, I don't like the way things
are going. I want the future to look different. And so, you know, if not, if not me, then who?
And you know, the beauty is you don't have to ask for permission. Once you get to that point where
you say, yeah, I am going to do this. Well, it's permissionless. Nobody can stop you and you can
just build and that's that is such a strong and powerful thing that we have going in the, you
know, general, let's say open source, open protocol space is that people don't have to ask for
permission. So if they are attracted to building a different future than the one that would otherwise
exist, they can do it. And no one can stop them. You know, that's, that's, that's something that
gives me a lot of hope. Yes. And I think to add to that, the other thing is to not think
they should be a transit, transitory period. Yes, of course, there will be a period where we
are transitioning from Bitcoin and whatever else, man, from fiat and Bitcoin, and from fiat
to Bitcoin, but you could do it. We could make it happen overnight, right? Like Al Thavid or
Al Thavid already showed us that, yo, Bitcoin can become legal tender overnight, right? And
micro strategy showed us that, yo, public companies can be on the Bitcoin standard overnight as
well. But what is sad for me is as great as Al Thavid was doing, as great as micro strategy
is doing, as great as maybe I am doing, right? We are not seeing new entrants just, you know,
copying what they are seeing, like, oh, those guys are doing something that works. Let's do that.
Right. And people or the general public are so swayed by the new and the hip that they then see
a failed playbook, a failed playbook in this case is Ordinals, BRC 20, blah, blah, blah,
blah. These are all things that have already failed. Right. And then they just take the failed
thing and put it on Bitcoin and sell that and then people are building on that. And I'm like,
but guys, this playbook, I will, we, we, if you've been here for five years, you've already seen a
play out and it failed. NFTs, if at least failed two years ago. So, and they are still a current
failure. So you don't have to go back that far to see where this is all leading up to. Why is that
so attractive to the minds of if we're not, but I understand it's fiat, right? It's something
a senior, I think one of the papers say Fadin wrote was on senior age and why senior age is one
of the most attractive things in the space. Why drive chains fail? Why drive chains don't solve
the issue that they say they solve is because if it's all on Bitcoin, your new blockchain
cannot have its own token. So if you're building it, you cannot do the senior age ordinances,
they do the senior age in the weirdest way, because they issue something for 10,000 sets. And
say the sets are worth a million sets. And hey, the blockchain doesn't agree with that assessment.
But as long as they can convince somebody else to do it, somebody else follows along.
Somebody else follows along. And yeah, so for me, I'm like, yeah, no, this is weird. And this is,
it would have been better if we would be seeing people build on Bitcoin in a nice way. But we
just not. And yeah, so that's why I'm like, okay, we need that first version of the matrix to come in.
I think that's a really, a really interesting point just about some of this behavior,
whether it be ordinals, BRC 20, you know, drive chains, being a quest for senior age, right,
being somewhat of rent seeking behavior, you know, where you're, you're looking to extract value,
rather than create value. And, you know, I'm of the opinion that, okay, you want to do that,
fine, do whatever you want. I don't care, I'm not going to stop you from doing it,
you're free to do it. You know, but at by the same token,
let's at least be honest about what it is that, you know, you're doing there. The idea of, you
know, let's quote, make make Bitcoin fun again. It's like, okay, that's a clever little marketing
scheme. And if you have people who are willing to pay however many sats for your, your NFT,
good for you, that's, that's, that's fine. It probably isn't going to work out so well for
those people who bought it. It's going to work out well for the people who issued it, they're
going to stack up a lot of sats. The people who bought it, maybe not so much. But okay, you know,
maybe some of those people need to learn the hard way that this is, this is, as you said,
something that has, has been tried and will probably be tried again, but will probably continue to,
to fail in that way. But I am glad that there are people like yourself who are building out the
things that really matter on top of Bitcoin and trying to solve real, genuine problems
with real solutions that work not just for people in America, but for people around the world. And
so I want to thank you for that. And again, your, your time is scarce. I know that any time you're
spending here is time you're spending not with, with your family or with, you know, building out
amazing freedom tech. So I want to wrap things up a little bit, but just to send people for the
website, it's 8333.mobi. I'll include the links. I'll include the link to Machan Khor and yourself
on Twitter. I'll include your Noster as well. Is there anything else people should check out or
the website is a good place to start? Yeah, I know the website is a great place to start. And yeah,
thank you very much for having me. And thank you for coming on. I really enjoyed this. I'll get this
episode out ASAP because I think there's a lot of stuff in here that people need to hear. And also
the stuff that you're building is just really, really very cool. So thank you for sharing your
scarce time with me. I appreciate it very much. And looking forward to seeing you again in person,
hopefully, hopefully at a conference sometime this year. Most definitely, most definitely. Yeah.
Hope you have a wonderful time with the family. And yeah, we'll meet. I hope to meet everyone in the
family when we do meet. So have a great day.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only
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Until next time, stay free.