Laura: Good morning. I’m Laura. Five years ago, I had just finished my University. I had two jobs: I was a waiter and a shopping assistant. No need to say I couldn’t save any money by the end of the month. I really wanted to change my life, I started to look for better jobs and a friend of mine, he told me, “Hey, I’m working for this company from Hong Kong, and they need a logo.” I studied product design and communication, so I said, it’s not much, but it’s better than what I have now. So, I do the logo for them. Great company. When I was about to be paid, they were super embarrassed. They called me, and said, I’m so sorry, we never sent money to Italy before. We want to pay you, but it’s going to take three weeks, and it’s going to be super expensive, like 100 euros expensive. Can we pay you with Bitcoin, and we give you 100 euros more because we would rather give them to you than to Banks? I said, whatever. I had never heard of Bitcoin, but can I pay my rent with it? They said, yes, we’re going to send you Bitcoin and teach you everything, it’s going to be faster and easier. Okay, so I just download a free wallet, and I received the money in five minutes. Lightning wasn’t there back then, but my mind just blew. There I was like, this shit is going to change everything. I got obsessed with it. I did the logo and everything that I could do to be hired by them. I’m sorry, I’m going to ruin the story because they were a shitcoin company, but they were very helpful to me at the beginning. A few years later, I moved to Milan. I met my life partner. We started to travel the world in Bitcoin, and that’s where we met, these Legends guys. Francis is among the leaders of the Bitcoin jungle. You’re the co-founder of Bull Bitcoin. He’s allowing people to buy Bitcoin easily with no data. Paco just ran four countries using only Bitcoin. Tom is not just helping people, but he’s giving sats for free to people. So, very honored to be here with you guys. I’m sorry about the introduction that was long, but it was nice. When I was a waiter, I was spending all my money in clothes. When I was a shopping assistant, I was spending everything in clothes. Now I’m a bitcoiner, and I’m spending everything in Bitcoin. So, it’s pretty cool, right? How did Bitcoin change your life? You want to talk about you guys for a minute or two?
Francis: My living on a Bitcoin standard story goes back all the way to 2015. I had all of my personal bank accounts shut down, pretty much on the same day, like in the same week, because I was doing, hypothetically, may have been doing peer-to-peer trading with my bank account. My bank accounts got shut down. So, I decided to use that opportunity to see if I could live without a bank account. In Canada, I founded a bill payment company that allows you to pay your bills with Bitcoin. So, I found that I could actually live fully off of a Bitcoin standard. Of course, there was a conversion to fiat, so none of the people that I was paying the bills, the rent, and all that were accepting Bitcoin. But something happened, which is that I started to conceive of my savings in the unit of account of Bitcoin. That was a big mind switch for me where I really didn’t care about how much fiat denominated Bitcoins I had. It was like, how many Bitcoins do I have? I started focusing on Bitcoin cash flow as opposed to fiat cash flow entirely. And I’ve been living on a Bitcoin standard pretty much ever since, spending wherever I can with Bitcoin. And I’m alive. I’m able to buy food, obviously, I haven’t died of starvation and exposure. So, it’s been working out.
Laura: What about you, Paco?
Paco: How did Bitcoin change my life? Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for supporting the run with Bitcoin journey. I was able to travel freely. I was a hippie for five years. I was hitchhiking the world, and I was using a debit card, and I was paying the fees. Now, I’m still traveling the world, but I’m not paying any fees, and my banks do not know where I’m spending my money. I think so. I was a couch surfer. How many of you know couch surfing Airbnb? It’s like, don’t trust, verify there, too, where you get to stray at a stranger’s house. So, the same concept I saw in Bitcoin, and I got to hang out with Bitcoiners, and pretty much this is the Bitcoin family. I tried three months of living a normie life. I tried to stop talking about Bitcoin, but you can’t resist. I tried to meet Bitcoiners once a month. And I guess, if it was not for Bitcoin, I would not be here sharing the stories of how the Global South is there. I come to Europe. Everything is fun. Everything is nice. We are blessed. We are privileged. But as soon as I go to Global South, Bitcoin isn’t reaching there. But I was happy to share this journey through the vlogs that, yes, Bitcoin is for everyone, and Bitcoin really gives you something called as time that you can spend with your family.
Laura: Amazing. What about you, Tom?
Tom: I have a confession to make. I’m not on a Bitcoin standard yet. I’m the founder of satsback.com, which is a shopping rewards platform. One thing that we realized and something Fran mentioned when you started out, you started seeing Bitcoin as a savings technology, and this is what I think we can all agree on that it is the best savings technology. But most of the world is not able to save money, and telling them to buy Bitcoin is something that doesn’t really reach them because they’re living hand to mouth paycheck to paycheck. So, there’s a big role in Bitcoin rewards to help them start saving in Bitcoin just by living their day-to-day lives and buying their necessities. We’re currently mostly focused on Europe, helping people save in Bitcoin when they shop online but we are thinking about more ways how we can help people globally to stack sats and start saving in Bitcoin because that’s the first step to moving to a Bitcoin standard is actually starting to store value in Bitcoin. As that value goes up, you start realizing it’s just better money. Then you can move to a completely Bitcoin standard.
Laura: What kind of business do you think is more open to live and accept Bitcoin? In the Bitcoin jungle you live on Bitcoin so you see a lot of them.
Francis: Definitely it’s small entrepreneurs that are running their own business. For example, a massage therapist or businesses that don’t have many employees. A lot of the time, the difficulty of accepting Bitcoin payments in a business is like training your employees or making sure that your employees aren’t rug pulling you. If you’re dealing with some kind of accounting system and a cash register, you have to do a lot of extra work. Small entrepreneurs, the construction business is pretty huge. But I’m seeing all sorts of things. In Costa Rica, there’s a lot of it is farmers markets. There’s kind of like this farmers market meme that popped up. I think it started in Costa Rica but there were other farmers markets and now there’s farmers markets all over the world where people are accepting Bitcoin. These are traditional places where you would pay in cash before and maybe get a little cash discount and now you get the little Bitcoin discount. So at the individual level it’s like really small single entrepreneurs but I’m seeing other stuff too. I’m seeing import-export in Bitcoin now. In Canada, we have clients that are using Bitcoin to pay for import. When I first got into Bitcoin, this is what I was hoping it would get to, like trading commodities. My dream is to see people buy petroleum or gigantic crates of timber with Bitcoin and I’m already starting to see that. I have a client in Canada that does pharmaceutical import with Bitcoin and usually it’s also going to be higher-margin businesses. So, you made a really good point which is if you’re accepting Bitcoin payments and you’re running a very tight ship, something like a restaurant, it’s not exactly easy to stack Sats because you have to pay all sorts of people and at the end of the day, you’re making 5% profit margin but if you’re a massage therapist and you’re charging 70 bucks an hour, your margin is pretty much 70 bucks, except for your time and some equipment. So, higher-margin businesses tend to accept Bitcoin more because they can handle the volatility and also since they don’t have a lot of expenses, pretty much everything that they’re getting as income is profits so they’re also thinking about how do I store my profits.
Laura: Another great thing about small merchants is that they talk to each other. So, for example, you guys have to go to Costa Rica. It’s amazing. You see the Bitcoin jungle is just beautiful and what I love about it is not only a lot of businesses accept Bitcoin but then their clients pay in Bitcoin and they go to restaurants, and buy veggies in Bitcoin. So, you really see a circular economy there’s they’re just not accepting Bitcoin then selling them into fiat. That was great. Merchants were making business with each other in Bitcoin. That was amazing to see as a traveller. What do you think is the biggest challenge to live in Bitcoin? The one thing that you could change if you could do better. We need to improve.
Paco: I mean, hodling is good. I have spent a lot of Bitcoin around the world. Hodling is the best teacher in the world. Yesterday I was talking to a bunch of bitcoiners who have invested a lot of money in this business entity and the amount of people paid in Bitcoin was just one. Everybody else used the fiat rails. I feel like hodling is the reason we all are here today and spending is a great thing. You need to let the Sats flow. It’s very important because you’re sharing some energy with the person you love. If you love someone you share your time and as of now Bitcoin is time. The time chain as we learned yesterday the biggest hurdle for people in this world is education and that is in education in vernacular languages as of now Costa Rica Bitcoin Jungle great circular economy, one of the best circular economies that I’ve been to. Only if now we had products and services demanded in Bitcoin and sold in Bitcoin as of now we are going on-ramp off-ramp on-ramp off-ramp and it is like a constant battle. Yes, we are practically living on drugs then we are taking we are showing people yes we are using Bitcoin but the person is letting it go for fiat and that will take 20 years easy time but education in vernacular languages that means in your regional languages will get a higher level of Bitcoin adoption and I do not know what they will do with those small UTXO sets they will figure it out as the time comes.
Laura: Tom, Freesats, do you think they’re the most effective way to make people understand Bitcoin let me explain better. We, Ricky, my partner and I, in our travels we find it super easy to give tips in Bitcoin for example much better than just pay in Bitcoin especially if it’s the first time because it’s either Bitcoin or nothing. Bitcoin is better than nothing, but sometimes it’s not better than fiat. Do you think this formula is working? Is it the future?
Tom: Yeah, we’re seeing that for sure. Everyone loves free Bitcoin, but it’s also a low-friction way to get someone to experience what it is. It’s a lot less scary when you tell someone, ‘Here’s a tip, or here’s some free Sats,’ because the price then doesn’t really matter that much. You’re not going to follow the price. When we think about the problem globally, it’s that people don’t have value to store for too long. So telling them that, ‘Hey, accept this payment in Bitcoin,’ they’re scared that because of the volatility, they won’t be able to pay for their bills or their suppliers next month. Basically, we’re also thinking about how we could in the future move our company to a Bitcoin standard and wondering if there’s an incentive missing to accelerate people to spend their Bitcoin because as bitcoiners, like you said, when we see a Bitcoin accepted sign, we will spend it without a second thought. But most normal people that hold Bitcoin hold it for that value appreciation and are reluctant to spend. And if they have a different option to spend, they will do that. Maybe a question to you guys is, do you think this merchant adoption will be more of a merchant driven or more that the user goes to the merchant and says, ‘Hey, I have some Bitcoin I would love to spend it with you,’ or is it the merchant saying, ‘I understand Bitcoin is a better store of value and I would prefer that you pay me in Bitcoin and then maybe give you a discount or an incentive that way?’
Francis: That’s a fantastic question. In the very long term, the merchants are going to be the ones who are driving the adoption. They will refuse to get paid in currencies that they don’t want to be holding and it’s not that they’re going to opt into Bitcoin, they’re going to opt out of the fiat rails that they’re currently using or fiat entirely. Ultimately, people will use Bitcoin because they need to eat and the grocery store guy only accepts Bitcoin payments. That’s the way it’s going to go. You’re right in a way that a lot of the Bitcoin spending happens from bitcoiners who just enjoy the act of Bitcoin spending. A lot of people are banked, right?When I first got into Bitcoin, it was all about the unbanked, but even in the global South, people do have bank accounts. I mean, not everywhere, but like most places, it’s not that hard to get a bank account. But there are definitely use cases where, for example, if you’re an expatriate or an immigrant, in that case, it definitely does make sense for you as a consumer if you’re receiving Bitcoin from abroad makes sense to spend it directly. Also for merchants, I run an exchange and I can see globally the trend that is that there’s a lot of friction that’s being added to the exchanges. It’s becoming harder and harder to buy Bitcoin and withdraw it into your own custody. We always knew that, you know, this KYC regime and travel regime and friction regime was coming in and it’s harder and harder to get frictionless no KYC Sats. The only real way to get no KYC Sats frictionlessly is to accept Bitcoin payments. As people want to invest in Bitcoin first and foremost, they’re going to see that the best way to invest in Bitcoin is accepted as a means of payment. I have an example of this actually. There was a wave of adoption in 2015, massive wave of adoption from a website called Backpage. For Europeans, Backpage is a website where you used to go to find sexual escorts, right? It’s where the escorts would advertise their sex services. That company got completely delisted from PayPal, from Visa, Mastercard, from all the payment rails and they now only accepted Bitcoin. We saw this massive wave of adoption of sex workers that got into Bitcoin specifically because the merchant refused all the other payment options or they weren’t available to him. We’re talking about multiple tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people that got into Bitcoin because one merchant specifically refused or was denied from the other payment rails.
Tom: That’s really interesting. Necessity will be the biggest driver, but then again, education with the merchants as merchants start understanding that this is the best money invented, they will start demanding that people pay them in Bitcoin. By the way, I really recommend you to watch Laura’s recent video from the Philippines, which was kind of eye-opening. There was a conference in the Philippines and it was supposed to be the Bitcoin island and a company did a great job onboarding merchants there. It was generally a success during the conference. But after it ended, some time later, these merchants would stop or forget how to start to continue accepting payments in Bitcoin. And when you went there, it was almost like half of them did not want or didn’t know how to. So that’s something I’m wondering about and a reason why we’re so focused on accelerating adoption as a store of value first is because, if there’s not enough people that have Bitcoin on the island, then naturally there’s not enough people paying in Bitcoin in those places, and these merchants will just forget or stop getting interested.
Laura: Sometimes we blindly think that the global South, the poorest countries, the unbanked, they are the ones that need Bitcoin the most, but they have apps like GCash in the Philippines, WeChat in China that allow them to send money to whoever. You have kids on the beach selling bracelets using a GCash account. Sometimes European people are like, ‘Oh, but we don’t need them.’ I mean, if you’re an Italian merchant and you have a cannabis shop, for example, you are in a huge trouble to have your bank account for the shop. Sex workers, there are a lot of people in all the world that really need Bitcoin. Like me, I could offer a service, but my hometown in Italy really didn’t demand for it. So I looked online and I found a job from the other part of the world and I was paid in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is opening a lot of opportunities for a lot of people that don’t even know that there is a better future for them. Bitcoin at the end is just a payment method, like just a method to receive money, to free yourself, to look for a better job, to travel the world and whatever we guys are doing. And want to underestimate the power of Bitcoin, but in the end, it’s just the tool, like the internet. So it’s how you use it that makes all the difference. Do you guys have any tips for people that want to try to live on a Bitcoin standard? My tip is try to earn Bitcoin first. Sorry, your business gonna be bad because of that. Earn some Bitcoin and buy some more, but like earning Bitcoin is going to help you so much, to value your job so much better, to value your time so much better, to spend much less because you don’t want to spend more than you just earned if it’s sound money. So that’s my tip. What about you, Francis?
Francis: By the way, I can’t wait for Bull Bitcoin to go out of business. So that’s fine if people don’t have fiat anymore and they’re all earning Bitcoin, that means that we’ve all succeeded. So that’s fantastic. I don’t know, like practical tips. The first step is to make the mental switch to Bitcoin as your unit of account, right? And consider your Bitcoin stash like, I have this amount of Sats and this is my wealth. Don’t think about the fiat. The second practical tip is actually in multiple places. I don’t know if this is the case in Europe, but you can get… You can get credit cards that are not linked to a bank account. These are not debit cards; these are actually credit cards. So you can take on fiat debt and you can own negative fiat. People talk about get on zero; I’m like, no, get on less than zero. Obviously, this is financial advice. I’m not a financial adviser. I’m not allowed to say that, but whatever. But if you think about it honestly, 15% per year, but you look at the price of Bitcoin, the year-on-year returns, on a three-year average, your Bitcoin wealth is making more than 15% a year. So it’s not irrational to take on a little bit of credit card debt if you really want to not have a bank account if you want to. Because a lot of people also may want to get on a Bitcoin standard for ethical reasons. Just like people are vegans because they don’t want to kill animals, some people want to not own fiat because they don’t want to fund genocide and corruption. So that’s a practical way to do it. You can build your own solution also. That’s what we did in Costa Rica. We were a bunch of expats, and we wanted to be able to use our Bitcoins. The banking system actually does suck in Costa Rica big time to import money from abroad. So that was a huge problem. So, build your own local community. If there’s a problem that you’re experiencing as a Bitcoiner, then that means that it’s a business opportunity to solve.
Laura: Amazing. Your tip, Paco?
Paco: You don’t need to make a 10,000 people community; you need to just have your five people, 10 people. Ty shall ask, Ty shall receive. If you ask your neighbor to accept Bitcoin, you might find a friend. So find your five people, find your 10 people. Five or 50 people. And those are the people who have opted out from the current financial system. As of now, in India, I come from India, I don’t think India needs Bitcoin. We have enough gold; our gold can bail out the whole world. My parents have gold; the lady who works in our house has gold.
Laura: How do you send the gold from India to Miami?
Paco: We’ll send it through Bitcoin. But the point is, you need to have your own 10 people. We were born in such a place to have a community of 10 people, 50 people, 100 people. And here we are doing it in millions of people. You can’t even take care of your own family of 10 people, and you want to get million people on Bitcoin standard. So might as well just start getting your own people around you. That’s enough. That’s more than enough. And that will create a ripple effect. So find the five people, find your 10 people who accept Bitcoin around the world. That is money laundering 2.0.
Francis: A great point to that if you want to debank yourself, you can use your friends and family. You can use their bank accounts. You can ask them to pay your rent for you and pay them back in Bitcoin. That’s my favorite way to orange pill my friends. It’s like, you pay with your credit card, and I’ll pay you back with Bitcoin. Just leverage your friends and family and let them stack. I prefer doing that than, as Paco mentioned, paying someone with Bitcoin and that the merchant is just going to auto-convert to fiat anyway. Another point is also, the value proposition of Bitcoin, it’s not necessarily low fees. Like, the merchants are already paying 3% fees. You’re not going to convince a merchant by telling them you’re going to pay less fees because, the price is going to drop 11% in like a week. So I don’t care if I’m paying 3% if the price drops 11%. So, the value proposition of Bitcoin is censorship resistance and it’s sound money. It’s merchants that are interested in sound money for their treasury, for themselves, and merchants that are interested in censorship resistance. Another really cool aspect of Bitcoin that’s underrated is that there is no sign-up required to open a Bitcoin wallet whereas to open an account as a business, like a PayPal or like a terminal, it’s a lot of work and you need to have your incorporation papers done. And although it’s not like it’s not crazy hard, I don’t know if any of you have incorporated a company recently, I do that all the time and it’s long and it’s expensive and it’s annoying…
Laura: …and they can take it away from you at any time
Francis: Yes, correct.
Tom: Something Francis said actually got me thinking. That being on a Bitcoin standard doesn’t need to be so black and white. We could be closer to the Bitcoin standard and use Bitcoin to store our value and to save but still use the fiat tools for what they are. Living in Europe, we have a pretty well-functioning payment system and we can use these cards, especially if they’re credit cards, in a world that, we can agree is kind of late-stage fiat. We can almost expect a high inflation or hyperinflation environment even in these developed countries. So it does make sense to use these debt instruments like credit cards because in a situation where the local currency would suddenly devalue, it’s good to have Bitcoin and have a little bit of debt, even in fiat, or at least not store more in the local currency than you need to live, maybe a month ahead. So I don’t think it necessarily needs to be like, “I only use Bitcoin, I only pay in Bitcoin,” but definitely store wealth in Bitcoin and then use these tools if you need to pay.
Laura: Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system but some people look at it just like an investment, just like digital gold. Me and Ricky, my partner, are huge on Bitcoin spend and replace. What’s your take on this? What do you get angry when you see that people say you have to spend your Bitcoin? What’s your take? Let’s make some hodlers mad,
Francis: If you’re not spending Bitcoin, you’re short Bitcoin because it means that you have fiat. Okay? Don’t grandstand on me saying, “I don’t want to spend my Bitcoin because I’m a maxi and I’m a hodler.” Spending Bitcoin is the same thing as spending fiat because you’re spending Bitcoin opportunity costs when you’re spending fiat, you could have used that fiat to buy a Bitcoin. So, that argument is completely nonsensical. Obviously, if you’re worried about your Bitcoin stash going down when you spend Bitcoin, then you just have a cash flow problem. So get a better job, get a raise and make more money. If you’re worried about spending too much money and too many bitcoins. Bitcoin is a fantastic means of payment, even on-chain. I run a Bitcoin Payment Processing Company and you know how many onchain payments have failed ever in the last nine years? Zero. They always succeed. Now we’re seeing a little bit more RBF cancellations, which is annoying. But, still the payments always confirm and sometimes one in every 10,000 will drop from the mempool because you were too low. But it’s a phenomenal means of payment.
Another underrated aspect of Bitcoin is that it’s not chargebackable. You know how many people lose money from chargeback fraud? It’s insane. Chargeback fraud is kind of a boring topic to talk about but that is one of the biggest risks to a merchant if someone stole a credit card, use it at your store, the victim of the theft or the fraud complains to Visa, they take the money back. Lightning payments are absolutely phenomenal as a merchant when they succeed, it’s not as reliable as on-chain. I’d say probably 80-90% of lightning payments succeed but it is a very very good payment method. So I do get triggered when people say that Bitcoin is not for payments, it’s for savings. I beg to disagree because I’ve been using it for payments and I’ve received hundreds of thousands of bitcoin, maybe a million or more bitcoin payments so far and it’s been working really fine. All of them succeed, none of them are ever charged back.
Laura: It’s like having a beautiful Ferrari in the garage and never using it because you don’t want to ruin it. Yeah, me and Ricky sometimes we just send each other some sats just to be like, oh, super fast and we still get excited after two years that we’ve been doing it. We also have sex sometimes, but we have fun doing that. What’s your take Paco?
Paco: There are two parties willing to give, willing to receive. I saw 15 circular economies around the world. Everybody there was willing to receive but there was no one willing to give. The greatest thing in the Bitcoin education that I’ve learned is time preference. If you can hodl you will get the rewards because your seeds will grow into plants, into trees, into fruits and that’s why those bitcoiners are the ones who supported my journey. Finally, after hodling for 10 years they let go of their sats. So, we need two parties that’s why most of the circular economies are generally running as an NGO effort because there’s just one way, there’s no other way. So, if you have a lot of sats, please let them go. If you don’t have a lot of sats, get some sats, share it with your friends, share it with your loved ones, share it with your enemies, share it with your own people, do not share it with anyone else. Don’t trust, verify is always there, but you’re human, you’re a social animal, so believe in your friends and your family.
Laura: Tom, your 15 seconds. Hold or spend and replace?
Tom: Another thing that will accelerate people to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange is that necessity aspect. If your store will decline your purchase for a steak because you’ve used up your CO2 score, which is currently happening, banks are working on putting a score on your purchases, then you will have no other way but to pay in Bitcoin and that person that’s selling you the steak will have no other way but accept Bitcoin if you want to buy that thing.
Another thing that might get people to stop using cards that will have that inbuilt surveillance tracking credit score will be to use Bitcoin. If we have no other choice, we just will.
Conference: Bitcoin Atlantis
Panel Title: Living in a fiat world on a Bitcoin standard
Panelists: Paco de la India, Francis Poulliot, Tom Chojnacki and Laura
Original video: Click here
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