It seems to me. That would be the green New Deal. Yeah. And you actually have infrastructure, you know, so it's good after the fact.

It is Starlink. You just, just, you know, there's internet access in America. So.

Yeah, it's exciting. That's exciting. I just saw podcasts on what Bitcoin did speaking to a couple of Africans as well, because I think that team traveled over there. So similarly, I was inspired by some of those conversations. So it's good to see the work that is going there and companies like Gridless, who are kind of leading the charge. So go check out the, you know, Gridless team and what they're doing if you want to learn more. I want to pivot the conversation a little bit because I saw an interesting tweet you had, which is around Hong Kong and like basically centriciparanda patreon accounts, which it's just, I would love to just get your take about what's going on there because there are, there's also this dichotomy between the regulatory approach between the Hong Kong government and the United States when it comes to the broader crypto industry. We're actually seeing a lot of hostility in the United States from the Elizabeth Warren to the world with this industry, but Hong Kong's kind of taking a different approach, kind of being very open. And I'm wondering what your take is around that. And then as well as you see this censorship around patreon accounts, how do you kind of grapple with those two things that they're being open with crypto legislation and regulation, but at the same time they're centering like patreon, like it's hard for me to kind of understand that. Well, I

mean, they're okay with crypto because they can control crypto to some extent. This is the same thing you see in the Middle East and Dubai. At the end of the day, they're not going to be okay with self custody Bitcoin usage. And if you think they are, you're fooling yourself. So today you've got a bunch of Bitcoiners hanging out, Dubai, this highly authoritarian government that has crazy amounts of surveillance and control. Same thing in Singapore, same thing in Hong Kong. And for now, yeah, you can get by and it's okay. But what's going to happen is they're going to start to crack down on privacy technology. They're going to start to crack down on self custody. In a way that is much more rapid than the United States. They don't have, they don't have a court system in the Emirates or Hong Kong that can stand up for people and push back like we do in the United States. You're going to have checks and balances in the United States that prevent an overnight sort of crackdown on privacy tech or coin joins or non KYC Bitcoin use. We're going to have people standing up for us at the state level, at the federal level, this court potentially, I'm not saying we don't have anything to worry about. We have a lot to worry about. But we at least have a mechanism here to push back. These people in the authoritarian societies don't at all. So it's just about the whim of the ruler. I mean, one day, oh, yeah, come do your Satoshi round table in Dubai. And the next day it's like, oh, well, self-custaining Bitcoin above this amount is illegal and you're going to go to prison and get tortured or whatever. That's the fire you're playing with, with thinking that this is going to be some sort of, you know, some sort of like paradise for Bitcoiners. In Hong Kong, yeah, they want to be pro crypto, whatever that means, but they're not going to want any sort of support for civil society or opposition. So in the case of Hong Kong, they're using these centralized payment apps to scan and freeze and arrest people who are supporting the opposition. The coin's very important in Hong Kong. I mean, you don't see a lot of stories about it because the people who are using it are not going to go tell the New York Times. Like it's an underground thing, but it's absolutely something people use to send in and out, value in and out. They use the Bitcoin ATMs, which in many places in cases, you know, don't require KYC up to a certain amount. They use cash trades. There's still still ways to support activism in the Hong Kong outside of like Patreon or whatever. It just requires being crafty and knowing more about Bitcoin and, you know, or stable coins or something like that. But at the end of the day, like even stable coins, you know, again, they can be controlled. I mean, you just saw Tether this past week or two.

You know, one-two-two addresses. Yeah.

Freeze a bunch of addresses. And then, and now they're working with the FBI or something like that. I didn't see the details, but, you know, I think they're going to position themselves as like not, not dangerous, right? You know, not, not, not, not a problem, which means they're going to do whatever, you know, governments tell them to do. They'll still be useful technology in as much as it's permissionless. As long as it's permissionless is still useful, it's not censorship-resistant, so be careful. But it's still useful for people in Lebanon or Argentina that they can get a dollar without an ID. Like, no, it could get frozen tomorrow. Not very likely if you've got $50 of it. Like it's probably fine. But you know, we're playing with, you know, assumptions at this point. That's not why people use Tether. They don't use it for censorship resistance. They use it because you can use it without an ID. And that's quite powerful. So I think these things will still be useful to lots of people, even as they get frozen in certain aspects. But for human rights activists and stuff like that, they've got to be really careful. And that's why, you know, we need to, you know, do what we can to make sure these resources are available. If they want to learn how to raise money in Bitcoin and trade that for cash and trade that in a way, which doesn't dox them, then, you know, hopefully we can get that info to them, you know, so they can continue their important work. Yeah.

Yeah. Bitcoin's censorship resistance, I think, will increasingly become more important for the entire world. But right now it's especially important in anybody who's living in an authoritarian regime, like a Hong Kong and, for instance, like Hong Kong monetary authority has really been at the forefront of CBDC research. And I want to talk about what you guys built over at the Human Rights Foundation, this new CBDC tracker. So tell me a little bit about how this project came to be, what you guys built and where people can find it. Sure.

Well, look, we invest a lot in financial freedom and obviously have a program at the Human Rights Foundation where we help people learn about Bitcoin, help people learn about how to use it safely. And then we have a pretty vigorous grant program where we support projects working in the surround the world. But at the same time, we need to look at the other side of things, which is the CBDC, which is the end game of fiat currency, which is the ability of the government to remove cash and coinage from the economy over time, whether it be by the user preference or force, doesn't really matter. The end goal is to have no kind of private money, no sort of cash or coinage and that people instead use either what they currently use in terms of corporate money, bank-issued money, whether that be Visa or Bank of America or Venmo or PayPal or WeChat or whatever. And then have no other recourse. Currently, people have a recourse. If they don't have a bank account or they don't want the government to know they can use cash. It is to take the cash, coinage away, replace it with something that's tractable, monetable, freezable, modifiable, you know, can be immediately increased or decreased depending on what the government wants. So the CBDC is something that has a lot of human rights implications. Certainly, you won't be able to use the CBDC to support human rights activism if you live in an authoritarian country, that's for sure. So it's like a dictator coin, basically. So, you know, we are opposing that first and foremost by educating people. So you can go to the CBDC tracker. It's atraf.org slash CBDC tracker. You can go to it today. You can just look at the status of CBDC projects in different countries. It might shock you. I mean, there's about 120 countries that have some sort of CBDC official program. There's almost 60 that have built a CBDC, whether it be a pilot or something out in the wild. And there's close to 20 governments that have issued and have a publicly facing CBDC project of some scope. In Nigeria, it's like the entire country, for example. In China, it's very, you know, large parts of the population have access. In Russia, maybe it's only the clients have a handful of banks, but the point is there's creeping close to 20 countries that have some sort of actual public facing usable CBDC. Now they're going to face tons of adoption challenges because, I mean, these things aren't that desirable. Like they don't pay interest. Like they're clunky. They don't necessarily interface with other things. But governments, you know, they can force this stuff to through. So over the next three or five years, I think you're going to see them try to engineer them so they're more palatable. Maybe they bear some kind of interest. God knows what. Yeah. So so there's ways governments can, you know, use carrots and sticks to get people into this thing. Ultimately, Bitcoin is the escape, which is awesome, but glad we have it. But, you know, that's not going to stop governments from trying to pursue this, Andy.

Well, it's a great tool. And it's important just to keep tabs on what they're building over there, just to kind of understand the other side of things of where things could go. If, you know, we don't push for Bitcoin's adoption, if we live in this CBDC world, I think all of us could probably agree that that would be a problem when it comes to individual rights. It could be really a tool for authoritarianism. So thank you for building that. And thank you to, I think, Nick Anthony and I think one other person kind of led that project. So appreciate it. It's a good tool for the communities. So go check it out, the CBDC tracker. The last thing I want to talk about a little bit, you brought up like how there's some problems with mobile wallets and a lot of the big arguments on Bitcoin Twitter right now is revolving around the fees. And Anita Posh has a lot of work in Africa. And she's taken the side that it's kind of pricing out some of these people and no poor countries who can't afford these high fees because of these, you know, ordinals and inscriptions. What's your take on it? I'm just curious to hear your thoughts around this. I mean,

I guess you could say. I mean, it's true that a resurgent interest in transacting in Bitcoin makes on-chain payments more expensive. But we've always known that. Like, we've always, you know, I hope that, you know, one less than the last three, four, five years is that we're not going to use Bitcoin on-chain for everything. So I'm not, I'm not like upset that, you know, people without a lot of capital can no longer transact on-chain. Like, you should know that that's coming. So that's here. So we need to create other solutions for them. Some of that will involve probably upgrades to Bitcoin, as we saw with SegWit, Taproot. I think we're going to get more of those along the way, slowly over time, as the community gets more comfortable with different ideas and solutions. Those changes to Bitcoin will enable, you know, more and more people to use. Some of the trustless properties of Bitcoin that make it so great, it'll allow more and more people to be their own bank. But you're also going to have products that come out that use Bitcoin that allow more people to be their own bank, you know, with different trade-offs. I think that immense or really interesting, you know, experimentation with e-cash is what how Finney, you know, thought would end up maybe happening. I think that's really interesting, you know, with some Bitcoin deposits, you can create an e-cash bank. Anybody can create one. I think that that's really interesting. I think there's going to be improvements to lightning. You know, I think that lightning is going to play an instrumental role in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but you know, it's not going to be what 7 billion people use every day, you know, for transactions. So you know, if there's going to be other layering technologies or other platforms or products that require some sort of small trade-off, where you're going to, where you're going to end up serving everybody in an eventual Bitcoin world, right? I don't think that I was never that into like top shots or NFTs that that's not changed just because they're on Bitcoin. I don't. I mean, I don't personally see a lot of value in it, but look, I don't demonize people who want to use Bitcoin that way. I mean, you know, use Bitcoin, however you want to use it. And if there's a lot of interest in using Bitcoin to mint other tokens or to trade art, well, that's good. That's that's demand for Bitcoin block space. I mean, I think I think that, you know, there's like whole debate over, oh, no one's using Bitcoin, you know, the the fee markets never going to make it. And then all of a sudden we have a moment where it's like, oh, it's pretty clear. There's like going to be a lot of demand for Bitcoin block space. Oh, wow. These are two. I mean, you got to choose one. I mean, come on. Like you can't like so. So critics of Bitcoin will rotate through this as we move through this. So let's say we're in a peak now of demand, maybe mid next year, the fees are back down again. You're going to have the same people say, look, there will never be a fee market. It's like, well, first of all, this thing's going to be cyclical. But yeah, like over time, over the next few decades, it will not be the equivalent of, you know, I don't know. So like let's say, so what are the fees right now? To be in the next, we'll take a look here. I have the look, but hold on.

I hear the miners are getting more than like the block reward right now in fees.

It is. Oh, there's a cool little.

About 100, 128 sets.

Here it is. There's a Twitter account called Bitcoin core fee or core fee helper. So as of 20 minutes ago, to get into the next block, it's 355.9. That's per bite. So it's $31. If you want to get in an hour, it's 13 bucks, 12 hours, it's 11 bucks. Three days, it's $2 and $0.30. One week is $2 and 20 cents. So the minimum to get in is $1.50 right now. OK. So that is the equivalent of a day's wages for some people in the lobby. Right. Yeah. So we're already, you know, and this may come down, but like you're already seeing a world where like it's going to be pretty prohibitive for people to transact on chain. You know, honestly, $1.50 is a lot, you know, for most people in the world. Like that may sound a little shocking, but like it actually is a significant amount of money for billions of people, $1.50. Certainly $30 is a lot, you know. You know, we bulk at $30 as a bank wire fee. You know, like that's crazy. So yeah, I mean, this is what's happening. I mean, that's why we're so interested in, you know, changes to UX that can help people address this, things like FEDI mince, things like different approaches to different layering technologies. This was always the way. I mean, we're always going to have this hyper secure. Increasingly, I think expensive in the future base layer. And then you're going to go up from there. I think this was this was the way that we can preserve the court of centralization and censorship resistance of the network. So it's going to be tough for people that want to use on chain. There's no question. But I think over time, it's going to be something like if we do it the right way, if it plays out the right way, it's kind of like a savings account, like on chain, hopefully for individuals. So like in the same way that you might have like a brokerage account, right, or like a stock account, I mean, how often do you withdraw? I mean, not that often. Some people don't withdraw for years and years and years or even decades. Some people might withdraw maybe in six months, they want to like move something around. OK, fine. You know, paying a one time fee is OK for that, you know, once in a great while. Paying a high fee is going to be OK. But, you know, the good news is depositing is always free. Sending Bitcoin, right. And and, you know, like that, you know, that that part, that part's interesting, like not not not sending is free, but the recipient, meaning the receiver, it doesn't have to necessarily pay anything to receive an on chain transaction, which is really interesting. And then we're going to find ways for them to spend it. Like there's going to be collaborative transactions, potentially, where you can team up with 100 or 500 other people and split the fee or reduce the fee. There's going to be ways for you to trade, potentially your private key, even to somebody else in a way that's pretty trustless. That's commerce blocks from working on that. Who knows? I mean, people are going to come up with crazy innovations. I mean, what really left me with a lot of hope is from the Africa trip is, I mean, you know, people in Wall Street are still kind of value. They were not going to come up with a way for people to use Bitcoin without the internet. That was not like a problem they were going to solve. So we're going to have so many new people coming into the ecosystem. And it'll probably be African entrepreneurs or Latin American entrepreneurs, for example, you know, or some South Asian entrepreneur that comes up with a really cool way to reduce your fee and remain on chain. It's probably not going to be somebody in Wall Street or Silicon Valley, right? So that's why it's so, so important for Bitcoin that it be a global phenomenon. Like your, you know, Bitcoin will be better than more global it is. I think that that's really the big lesson that I took from the, from the, yeah. Yeah. Stay tuned. And thanks for having me on.

Yeah.