Marce: My name is Marce, and I work in marketing and PR for Bitcoin companies. I contribute to open-source projects. I’m sitting here next to the man who actually orange-pilled me over a phone call. So, my first Bitcoin talk with a Bitcoiner was this amazing figure everyone knows, Samson Mao.
Samson: Thank you.
Marce: We’re here to talk about nation-state adoption, and that’s why I heard of Madeira in the first place. To be honest, we’re all about decentralization, freedom from the state, separate the money from the state. Why are you working on nation-state adoption if we’re supposed to be like cypherpunks, anarchists?
Samson: There’s a number of reasons why it’s important to work on nation-state adoption. A lot of people think, “we’ll just buy Bitcoin and then somehow we’ll win.” First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, right? While they fight you and before you win, there’s probably another step in the middle there, and that’s where we fight back or we do something. This is largely what nation-state adoption is. We’re engaging, we’re trying to educate, find alignment of incentives, and get the nation-states on board because before you win, they have to get on board somehow. This is one of the reasons why I believe nation-state adoption is important. The second one is, I believe Bitcoin has more transformative effects outside of just being sound money. It changes people as well, in general. It makes you better people, and governments are made of people. So hopefully, we can get better politicians, better regulators, better everything. I believe that’s also part of how we win. We’re working, engaging, and trying to orange-pill the governments and the politicians and presidents, etc. We’re slowly going to get there, and it’s going to be a challenging path because governments are not quickly moving agile entities. They’re very slow. But I believe that some people do see the benefit of Bitcoin, and we just have to keep pressing on those points and trying to make them see the orange light.
Marce: You said governments are made of people, which means that these people, people, their parents, uncles, aunties, sisters, brothers, friends. Probably someone here knows someone that works at a government. It doesn’t have to be a president, but someone in a government office or someone here probably works at a government office. What is the approach if I go to a government office to start talking to them about how Bitcoin can change their life or how it can improve the actual way this country is making money? What are your main talking points?
Samson: You have to look for the alignment of incentives and see what problems they have or what they want to fix. At the same time, try to educate them on what Bitcoin is. It’s difficult to go in there and say, “Bitcoin is sound money, 21 million, immutable, permissionless,” all that stuff, because that will fall on deaf ears. What we try to do at JAN3 is go with the approach of solving problems. So do you want to reach some ESG goal? Then maybe we can talk about mining and getting rid of flare gas. This is an approach we took in Colombia because I don’t think that they would go on the sound money route at all or legislate Bitcoin to be a legal tender or deregulate in the case of Argentina. We went in with the mining and ESG goal alignment, and that works for them. Other places like Indonesia, we engaged with a previous governor there, and they were interested in basically generating money to do other things. So we talked about how mining could tap into excess energy, stranded energy, all sorts of energy they have. A lot of the developing world, the global South, they actually have a lot of energy but just no way to access that. So that was that discussion point. But generally, it’s about trying to find things that they are interested in and how Bitcoin can help them on what they want to do.
Marce: So each government needs like a specific recipe. You’re like a doctor giving a prescription, and you need to see the problems, sit down, and analyze them in order to be able to orange-pill these leaders. This is beautiful. I’ve seen you do this. It’s been an honor to be able to sit down with Samson, watching him talk to boring politicians, and he makes it fun. It’s very interesting to see this approach because I guess we can all agree that every country needs Bitcoin. Here in the EU, the approach has to be completely different because this is the first time these people are finally feeling what inflation is like. But how do you explain this to the people in Madeira that are just hearing about Bitcoin for the first time? They don’t understand why they will need this if they have sound fiat money. What for you makes the difference? What is that sound fiat money that they create? How do you tell them, your government is actually doing this with your money, and this is how your government is going to improve? For example, here the previous president said, “we’re going to have Bitcoin as the de facto legal tender” – was it something like that?
Samson: He just said we’ll adopt Bitcoin, but they can’t actually adopt Bitcoin as de facto. The other thing is that regulations change. Portugal changed recently. If you hold over a year, then it’s tax-free but before, you could use Bitcoin as you liked, so they were effectively de facto legal tender. Bitcoin can be used as money here, but of course, things change, so we have to keep on fighting the fight.
Marce: How can you explain to these people why their government is doing that? Because I think that’s also super important when you talk to governments. It’s like, how are we going to explain this to our people if Bitcoin is just like money laundering and arms and all the crazy things that Bitcoiners do?
Samson: It’s a lot of repetition. You just have to keep repeating the message that that’s not the case. I believe Christine Lagarde or ECB was community noted on Twitter (or X), and people just said, “fiat money is used for more money laundering.” They’re going to repeat their talking points and we repeat our talking points, and fortunately, we have more time and Bitcoin on our side. Eventually, we should win out. But we do have to keep on repeating and countering the FUD because that’s their livelihood, right? If you’re a central banker, you need to tell people that you’re valuable and you do something other than printing money, which you don’t, and that you provide a valuable service. It’s like their job is to nail nails into walls, and that is what they’re going to do, and they can’t do anything else. So they’re going to tell you that nailing nails into the wall is very important and stabilizes the economy. But at the end of the day, people know, people understand. There is a very strong grassroots movement of Bitcoin adoption in Europe. It’s kind of not as strong elsewhere in the world, but in Europe, the people, the plebs, the ordinary Bitcoiners, they know what’s wrong with the economy, they know what’s wrong with the money. So they’re going to run the nodes, they’re going to stack sats, and eventually they will affect change. And the ways that we affect change are to find ways to engage. In Germany, we are working with Bitcoin in Bundestag. That’s an initiative put on to bring Bitcoiners into the German parliament to educate them on what Bitcoin is and what benefits Bitcoin can bring. These kinds of initiatives are very powerful because it’s a direct way for us to interface with the powers that be.
Anybody can start nation-state adoption on some level. We’re sitting here on an island in the middle of the Atlantic in a stadium because Andre and a lot of people here believed that we could do something with Bitcoin in Madeira. This is a perfect example of what we can do when we decide to mobilize. When we were discussing earlier, we suggested, “why don’t you bring President Albuquerque to Miami, and then we can announce something on stage?” because I had a block of time to make some announcements. He just reached out and asked, and if you dare to ask, then sometimes things will happen. The President went to Miami, we went on stage, we announced Madeira is going to adopt Bitcoin, and then everything is set in motion. So local initiatives, working with the tourism board, working with the business center, and then setting up Bitcoin Atlantis – this all came because Andre and others believed that something could happen in Madeira. This is more important than President Albuquerque going to Miami because this is what’s going to sustain it. I often talk about what is the important part of nation-state adoption, and that is the grassroots part. The top-level part, engaging with governments, is the way that we can make things better, but the foundation is you guys here sitting in the stadium and talking about Bitcoin and telling more people about Bitcoin because this is what grounds it. We see cases where Bitcoin adoption fails because there is no grassroots anchor. Central African Republic, they’ve announced that they’re doing something with Bitcoin. They did their own token, and then they flip-flopped and abolished the thing and put it back in. I believe that’s largely because there was no grassroots initiative there, nothing grounding it. It’s just the government trying to make some money. But this is what keeps the government honest, it’s people, you have to hold them accountable. So without this, there can be no Bitcoin adoption. So it’s really important that we focus on the grassroots and getting real Bitcoin adoption happening.
Marce: This takes me to one point, this real Bitcoin adoption happening. You’re doing a lot with mining, and some people might think, how does this benefit a country or why is mining important for a government? And I really want to tap into that. How do you think mining, when you go to governments and they’re like, “oh yeah, mining, let’s mine, I’m going to make Bitcoin, whatever,” how is this impacting nations in a positive way? Because it’s a whole structure and I personally think that mining is super complex but the whole structure itself brings from jobs to distilling water with heat. So can you please explain to them how mining with government help and convince them that they could be using electricity for this is impacting countries, because that is eye-opening.
Samson: A lot of countries do have excess power, they’re just wasting it. For example, Canada. There’s enough energy there to sustain three full Bitcoin networks, and a lot of that is just runoff or sold at two cents per kilowatt-hour to the US. But largely, it’s just runoff. They opened the gates to the hydro dam and let the water run. That could all be Bitcoin, and that can be money that can build roads, hospitals, airports, you name it. The opportunity is simply just convert your excess energy into money, and you can do what you want with that money. You can keep the Bitcoin, which personally I would recommend, but you can also sell it and get other things that you think are valuable. The angle with nation-state adoption and mining is that it’s an easy in. They simply just buy the equipment and take advantage of what they already have. At the end of the day, the energy of a country is free for that country. And I believe there are a lot of countries that are already mining Bitcoin, just not announcing it, like Kingdom Bhutan. They were outed because they were part of, I forgot BlockFi or Celsius, but one of the bankruptcy filings, they were revealed to be mining, and then they just came out and owned it. But there are more probably that are mining because it’s really zero cost to them to use their own energy. Mining is an easy way in, but it’s important for us to advocate for more Bitcoin mining at the nation-state level because that mitigates the attack on Bitcoin in some ways. So we try to educate the governments and explain to them what Bitcoin is. But the best way for them to understand what Bitcoin is, is simply to experience it, transact it, to get some Bitcoin over lightning. Then you see how powerful this thing is. When you understand it, then you are less privy to making bad policy or misunderstanding the nature of Bitcoin. So you understand that Bitcoin is simply information, and you can’t really ban information. Then you’ll be less inclined to do a lot of the bad policymaking in the EU like trying to ban self-hosted or self-custodial wallets, because you understand that you can’t do that. It’s the same with mining. You could see governments cracking down or trying to enforce the miners to KYC their miners or filter transactions or block transactions. But if they’re actually mining, then they should understand through that process that they can try to do things like attack the network through mining, but it probably won’t have any effect. Or you can try to ban mining, and it also won’t have an effect too. Similar to China, they cracked down on mining, and there was a mass exodus. But who was harmed at the end of the day? It was the Chinese miners that were harmed, not the rest of the network. The rest of the network benefited greatly from that, because suddenly difficulty dropped and everyone is making much more money. So if a government is mining, they’ll experience that, and then they’ll learn that lesson implicitly that I should not ban mining, and if someone does do that I will benefit. The best way to learn is really to experience it. This is why trying to push them towards mining is an easy win. But the biggest thing is they just have a lot of excess power. We were in Suriname. There’s a hydro dam there with like 5 megawatts excess that they’re not doing anything with.
Marce: I’m going to make a parenthesis – Suriname is a real country Samson did not make this one up, the Dutch people made this one up. It’s actually a tiny country in South America and they have 300,000-400,000 people.
Samson: That’s just one example. Mining also has the ability to help other communities too. So in case you don’t know where Suriname is, it’s on the North West part of Latin America.
Marce: It’s underneath Venezuela, next to French Guiana.
Samson: They’re largely jungle. If you look at the map you see Suriname and you see Paramaribo it’s along the coastline but inland similar to Guyana it’s all jungle. There are a lot of people living there with low/no electricity. We’ve been engaging with the Amazon conservation team and other groups there to see if we can start some small scale mining initiatives where we can start up a mining operation maybe with turbines and tapping into the hydro power because they have a lot of hydro power in the jungle. Then we could deliver a win-win situation. The village will get electricity, have some share of Bitcoin that’s mined and possibly tap into Bitcoin for commerce. Taking payments in Bitcoin for things that they produce, like in this case, the village we’re discussing with they produce honey. They could take payment and then ship it out but Bitcoin fixes a lot of things. These types of initiatives will change a lot of perception about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining as we spin up more and more of these little projects.
Marce: All this is super cool but the excess heat from Bitcoin mining is mind blowing all the things you can do. You can dry fruit, you can distil water. Heat is something we need. The invention of fire changed humanity and we can just get everything out of mining. In Suriname in general definitely would have a huge impact. What happens in places like the EU where there’s a huge energy crisis? How does mining help this?
Samson: What kind of energy crisis?
Marce: Like in winter no one has electricity and heaters and then you have the prices go super high, but then in summer the prices drop, so needs stability.
Samson: Balancing the grid, levelling out the base load I guess. Mining can help with all of that stuff because you have a constant buyer of the energy. In cases where there is extreme heat or cold, you can contact the mining operations and they can shut down. The electric company will just pay them for that halting of production of Bitcoin and then the grid will balance out. Bitcoin does a lot of interesting things with electrical grids. This has yet to be fully learned but there are a lot of advocates out there trying to educate, mostly in the US I would say but other places we can also educate them on how it works. The benefit of Bitcoin mining is also that you can incentivize new energy production. As we move to the future I believe you’ll see Bitcoin energy companies which is a power company that does mining. So you won’t have this clear separation between a Bitcoin miner on one side and the power plant on the other side. It’ll just become one entity because you can balance out the load. The most interesting thing here is that we can teach governments and politicians about energy again, because they seem to also have forgotten how it works. This is why Germany shut down all their nuclear plants and is burning not coal but wood. They kind of forgot that you need energy, you need a constant base load. The base load for the most part is cole-driven because you can fire it up at a moment’s notice, you can turn it on quickly. All of the blessed ESG technologies like wind and solar you can’t really do that. They’re highly intermittent and they’re actually very costly to maintain and operate. Bitcoin mining potentially can incentivize nuclear production again. There is a nuclear plant actually in Indonesia that’s being built because I think they’ve now labeled nuclear as green. We’re seeing the trend also of nuclear being green now which is good, I’m a big nuclear maxi. But that nuclear plant in Indonesia is also looking towards Bitcoin mining as well because with nuclear you have a massive amount of energy being produced and you need some consumption of that or else it’s just runoff or wasted. There’s a lot of things that Bitcoin can help with, with regards to balancing of the grid.
Marce: All of these nations are mining and they’re all holding Bitcoin. We got there. Will they keep taxing us? They’re making their own money. Finally, governments become a profitable business. How do you work that out? They will have money, they will get financing. What do you say when you come to that?
Samson: Bitcoin changes a lot of things. It makes money into information and energy. We’ve been talking about the mining, and that’s the energy component. You need energy to maintain and create Bitcoin. The other part is that money is just simply information now and I don’t believe a lot of governments have prepared themselves for this transformation. Technically, they should have started to understand this because money has largely become borderless. When you’re traveling, you’re supposed to declare how much money you have when you “cross a border”. But you have your money in your bank account. Even though it’s centralized, you can still access it from, let’s say, for example, Madeira – II can go to an ATM and withdraw cash.
Marce: You can but what about the people that are here from, like, Venezuela?
Samson: We’ll get there, but let’s deal with the taxation part first and treatment of money. So you can also spend from your credit card, and that is also moving money across borders. The transition of money being information has already been in progress for some time. But I don’t think a lot of the governments and agencies are mentally equipped to deal with that change, right? Technically, when you cross, you should declare how much credit card limit you have. But of course, Bitcoin blows all of this out of the water. Bitcoin simply exists, and if you have your keys, you can access it. I believe the relationship between the state and the citizen has to change dramatically because if it doesn’t, then you can see a massive overreach. And we have seen this, as an example, going back to Canada. God bless Canada. But they can already freeze your funds like they did by declaring the Emergencies Act. But that was a very one-off exercising of, how should we call it, weakness of a prime minister. It’s not that common. But, just crossing a border and crossing a border with Bitcoin, I think that is more common. Everyone is traveling these days, and we’re always crossing borders. But the legislation has not yet caught up to the new reality of what money is, that it’s just information. Something has to change there, otherwise that could be weaponized to attack political opponents, dissidents, ordinary people that somehow the government deems you to be… it is being used as a weapon.
Marce: It’s being used. We go back to the topic of if you’re from Venezuela, your country is under attack because of the way your country is living. You, as a citizen, you’re the one paying the price.
Samson: They have to start to understand that. This is why nation-state adoption is important. If they understand that, then they have to effectively deregulate money and they have to just treat money as something that can freely flow. I don’t know if that will happen first in Europe or other places, but it’s more likely that it will happen in other places because the incentives in Europe still are to protect the old system, which doesn’t really function anymore. But they’re still going to protect it until it doesn’t work anymore. That could be very soon because it’s all coming apart as we sit here. And Bitcoin, of course, is gaining more and more dominance. So I’m hoping the European Central Bank releases more FUD because their last piece sent us up on a nice bull run. But we have to engage them. I don’t think if we just sit back, they’ll figure it out on their own. It’s going to be us talking to them and trying to make things better. But a part of that making things better is also fixing or optimizing prior legislation. There’s a lot of conflicting legislation, and things don’t really make sense because, again, if you’re a lawmaker, you are paid to make laws. That’s your job. Just like if you’re a central banker, you’re paid to print money. And we don’t have yet the concept of a law optimizer or law remover. So the law just gets more and more convoluted and complex where the weaponization of that law is a real danger. And that is probably the biggest threat to people’s liberties than anything else at this time, the fact that the governments can just arbitrarily select some laws and just throw you in the gulag.
Marce: You just said new laws need to be made, the old system is broken. But you’re advocating for bonds. This is a fiat old system tool and for example, a country like El Salvador, who now has Bitcoin as legal tender, they’re doing the volcano bonds. Why are we using this archaic tool? How can this tool be translated into Bitcoin if we have this technology that’s so innovative? And why would I even want to buy that?
Samson: Why would they want to buy a volcano bond or Bitcoin bond? In the case of El Salvador, people would buy that instrument because they want El Salvador to succeed. At least the way that I structured it before, there’s still a win for ordinary people that buy the bond because you get your principal back at the end of the period. It’s kind of like deciding to take some “profit” and sell some Bitcoin, and you’ll get it back in fiat. But you also get the upside in fiat too. The original design was 50% of the Bitcoin holdings that they buy are shared back to the investors in the product. It’s not a bad option if you want to support El Salvador. Having El Salvador maintaining Bitcoin to be legal tender actually opens up a lot of opportunities for us at JAN3 to go out and do other things because Bitcoin is a foreign currency now, and there’s a lot of countries out there that have legislation that recognizes foreign currencies. And it’s easy for them to just say, ‘well, Bitcoin is a foreign currency; we can accept it, and we can encourage people to use it.” Suriname is one example. They have passed executive orders that allow them to use dollars and euros, so they can also do the same for Bitcoin. We just have to keep pushing that forward. In Guatemala, they have a law called “Divisas”, which would allow them to use any foreign currency as well. Again, no legislation changes needed. They just have to say Bitcoin is usable because it’s a foreign currency. But back to the original point, we need El Salvador to still be a Bitcoin country with Bitcoin as legal tender for that to happen, so it’s valuable. As bitcoiners, you should want to do something to support El Salvador. If it was buying the Bitcoin bond, then it’s buying a Bitcoin bond. Previously it was tied to citizenship too, but that might have changed. Still, it’s a win-win situation. As a bitcoiner, you can support El Salvador, keep Bitcoin as legal tender, and then you can still get some upside from the Bitcoin, but in fiat terms. The Bitcoin bonds are still going to be an important tool because there’s a lot of countries out there right now that have a lot of debt, and the debt is denominated in dollars. The only way for them to get out of that dollar-denominated debt, is to invest in other things that are harder, like Bitcoin. Then you effectively can get out. Otherwise, you’re just crushed with the interest payments, refinancing, and there’s no way for you to get out of this IMF chokehold. Bitcoin is the only way for these countries to get free, effectively. The forward thinkers will look towards this type of instrument. Or they can just buy Bitcoin too. But the problem is a lot of countries don’t have the reserves to buy Bitcoin. So they can take debt denominated in dollars, but backed with Bitcoin. And it’s sovereign debt too. So if there is any good debt, it’s probably sovereign. That’s probably the best path forward for them. I’m hopeful that we can get something going in Argentina too because they have a lot of debt to crawl out from under.
Marce: Basically, you’re telling me that this tool is improved just by the fact that it’s not tied by the IMF.
Samson: Yeah, but the challenge is, they have to have the guts to stand up to the IMF because the IMF doesn’t want them to get out of debt, right? The IMF is a loan shark, and you don’t want the guy that you’re loaning to to actually be free. You want them to service the debt forever. So that’s why the IMF was attacking El Salvador so vehemently at first. They’ve backed off largely now because the story and the success speaks for itself. You can’t really keep saying they failed when they’re massively successful. But I know that Argentina and Milei had to renegotiate. So once that is done there is a chance there, but we have to give it time and be patient to push things along on the time scale that they’re comfortable with.
Marce: For me, this fireside chat was super important because Samson is, I could say, my mentor, and I’ve called him every time I need to ask anything career-wise. He’s just a person that I want to listen to every time I have doubt on myself. So watching what the job that people at JAN3 are doing, like Samson, Phillip, they’re all going specifically to different locations to make sure that we, as bitcoiners, can keep supporting Bitcoin and it can keep growing. It’s truly inspiring, and I want to explain how he inspired me because I had no idea. He was harsh, he was toxic, he was scary until one day I was like, fuck this dude, I’m not scared of him anymore, and I told him to shut up. But then at that same moment, I immediately understood that he’s actually making sense, and I actually have to listen to what he’s saying. So we need to be like Samson in that sense. Let’s keep being super toxic, even if someone says, like me, for example, gets tired of you and it’s like, “fuck this dude.” It took me like seconds, it was like a split second actually, just I stood up and I’m like, “no,” and then immediately realized that even though I said no, what he had been teaching me all this time had already changed my mind and the way I do things. So, I first want to thank Samson for doing that for me and for doing what you’re doing for the whole world, third world, especially because you’re doing that in Latin America where I’m from, so thank you for that. And I was wondering if you could tell these people how to keep being so toxic.
Samson: I’m not toxic, I’m very cheerful and constructive. I’m just misunderstood. But I think we have to maintain the Bitcoin ethos even as we’re engaging with the governments. It’s not about us going to the governments and sucking up and trying to tell them what they want to hear. We have to tell them the hard truths that no, you can’t control Bitcoin and you can shoot the messenger, but there will be other messengers. We’re just telling you the facts and we’re telling you how it works. We can try to find ways to outline some amicable win-win situation, but there is no way for you to control this thing. It’s just out in the wild and it’s going to consume the world. So the best you can do is learn and figure out what your strategy is to fit into the Bitcoin puzzle, but there’s no changing the puzzle. It’s already built.
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