 Maricio, man, how you been, brother? Been very good, man, very busy. Lots to keep up in the space these days, but keep it busy and just trying to work away and stay focused. How about you? Same thing, man, I'm actually been very low key. I haven't been quite public. Just paying attention, sitting on the sidelines. The craziness happening with today's launch with Libra, the Facebook coin. Yeah. It's interesting, man. How do you think that plays in the long run? How do you see, like, you having your personal experience coming from Venezuela, you're in the Bitcoin business. How do you see Facebook, their Libra coin, in the grand scheme of things? I think, personally, at first glance, I think it's a really good development for the space, at least for our industry. I think you have to look at it from, you have to come at it from the standpoint or the standpoint of, yes, someone else is now looking at these transactions as a conglomerate group of people that are now keeping tabs on what you have and who you're transacting with. But at the end of the day, you have to look at who was looking at that information before and see who that is helping. So I can definitely understand the concerns and perhaps not even a material improvement over the US dollar or over Canadian dollars or over the euro. But if you're a person that's transacting in Bolivars or Argentinian pesos or anywhere south of Texas, essentially, and outside of no ACD country, you're looking at a conglomerate of these, you know, if you want to call it a cartel or you're looking at these companies, but in fact, these are the people that are validating this are already the darlings of the consumers in essentially pretty much worldwide. So to a lot of people in the world, this is a material improvement over their current monetary system. How do you think this fits into the crypto landscape? I think it's a massive off ramp for bats yet. And I think you've just given everyone in the world essentially the ability to grade their government's monetary policy versus a basket of the world's best. So if this thing actually plays out to what it's supposed to be, essentially you've put in a downwards into the right chart of every currency against Libra and then further layer on top of that at downwards into the right chart of Libra against Bitcoin or potentially any other fixed supply digital asset. So to me, it's literally a massive opportunity for new people to learn about crypto in general. And not only that, but you're now not only being taught about crypto, but you're being presented with an off ramp right off the bat for your fiat. Not even that, we're an ability to monetize your. So for example, I say this jokingly, like Venezuelans have two jobs. You have to work to get your money. And then when you get paid, you have to work to get rid of your shitty money. And then essentially now, if you're in an online life, like the way most people are heading towards and you're doing online gigs, it'll be great to know and you can get paid in Libra coin and now you don't have to run and get rid of it. All of a sudden that frees up half of your day to work even more. And the fact that you can now just directly get hard money without going through the whole learning curve of Bitcoin, which again, I love Bitcoin, but it has a steep learning curve. And perhaps it's not necessarily the most intuitive thing to get your hands on. But if my Facebook profile is gonna give me a beautiful UI with a wallet and an option to send and receive instantly around the world with no forex, now all of a sudden I'm like, okay, great. You know, what else can I do with this Libra stuff? And I'm surely it won't be long until there's an exchange that takes your Libra, converts it into Bitcoin. Yeah, funny enough, the French finance minister Bruno Lamar, he stated in quotation, it is out of question, the Libra becomes a sovereign currency. He said we in end quote, enter quote, it can't and it must not happen. I'd be shaking in my boots if I were, because here's, and I actually tweeted about this this morning, this can go Uber on them really quick. And what I mean by that is, you have a group of people like your constituents who are essentially used to a service that has been shoved down their throats because they literally have had no ability to opt out, right? And the way Uber came about was quite interesting to me because when Uber's basically, Uber never asked for permission. They essentially just rolled out their service and they knew that it was a great service and it was better than what was currently available. And their play was to basically get the love of the users so much so that when the government finally decided to act, it would be too late because they would have a massive lobby of users that would, and any decision against them would just be political suicide. And so that worked pretty well in that it just went viral before the government could do something about it. And- Well, the sheer speed that they went at it was like, Travis was a monster. And I would say that's by design. There was no accident around their strategy. Oh, fuck yeah, man. But Travis, Uber wouldn't be where Uber is today. So likewise, I think the reasoning behind the validators is precisely the same with Facebook. If a Facebook decides to go at this alone and they're lobbying us Facebook, then you can basically take the president that, okay, China banned it and they're okay, so we're just gonna take the steps to ban Facebook the same way we banned in China and that shouldn't be a problem. But then all of a sudden, when you're coming in with MasterCard and Visa and Uber and Lyft and a bunch of other people that are saying, this is how we're gonna do business in this country. And you can say no to us, no problem. Good luck winning your next election. That's powerful, man. That's a powerful lobby. It's interesting because if you look at their partners, they're like validator partners, none of them are banks. Why would they be? The banks are not global in the sense that no bank has the same presence overseas. They do, they look like they're the same, but if you go try to send a transfer to your account in a different country, they'll tell you, sorry, we can't do that. So they are not global truly. These tech companies that are validating as at least the ones that I've had a look at, for sure global companies, companies that have a presence. And again, it's an aggregation of niches, right? Like you have Facebook users, you have Visa users, you have MasterCard users, you have PayPal users. You have, now you have Mercado Libre, which is like basically eBay from LATAM is already working with them, like to integrate a huge user base. So you're essentially going to bully governments outside of the OECD world to take your coin or else. And I think, again, it's gonna be very interesting politically to see how the governments are gonna try to create a narrative that this is a bad thing. Because again, if they do that, can you just imagine a group led by Facebook and those companies essentially putting together a lobby on why this currency will benefit the population and what that will do to crypto in general? Essentially, you're gonna put monetary policy in the forefront of the conversation globally. So I'm incredibly excited for that. I personally don't think a square root of this is priced into the market today. My hopes is this is an amazing awareness campaign that Facebook is doing on their own behalf, but the entail of that, it benefits a crypto environment. Because now you start onboarding two billion people, they're using verbiage like digital currency, cryptocurrency, which is fucking amazing. And then they onboard, they go down rabbit's hole and they're like, okay, this Libra thing, what is crypto? Oh, shit, what's this Bitcoin thing? Oh, what do you mean? What's the censorship versus uncensored? What's permission versus permissionless? What is private keys versus not? And they go down the rabbit hole and then through like education, sheer mass force of education, they realize, well, fuck, Bitcoin's just better. Listen, man, I couldn't agree more. I think the way I see this is a progression of, right now, I live and work in a, just put yourself in the shoes of a Venezuelan person right now. You live and work in a shitty monetary system. You're a young Venezuelan person, you know about computers. You've only only been taught to have bolivres and like I said, you're working two jobs right now. And not only that, but the only way that you get anything in Venezuela is you have this little card called the, pretty much the regime card, which is the Carme de la Patria. And that's just like your subsidy card. And that's where you take everywhere and that's how you buy things. So the government already knows everything you do. And people hate that. So for me as a Venezuelan, I look at this and I'm like, okay, first of all, the idea of Zuckerberg looking at my transactions is phenomenal compared to the Venezuelan government looking at my transactions. I honestly, that's from a trust factor. It really, you have to look at it from what's your base point, right? So again, material improvement in that sense. Those people perhaps don't have the time like we were talking about going down the rabbit hole. You have the luxury of nights off to read about Bitcoin, et cetera. But all of a sudden you're gonna be transported into a better system because you have this Libra or you have a Facebook profile. So already you have an empowered individual whose money is not dwindling. That's better for the world. I'm happy about that. Regardless of Mark Zuckerberg looking at his transactions or not, that guy has an ability now to save. And from there to actually taking the leap of saying, I wanna learn more about this. Is there a way for Mark Zuckerberg not to look at my transactions? And then you'll find crypto for yourself. Like we won't need to teach them. How do you think the on-ramps will work in Venezuela to get the Libra coin? That again, that's what I'm most interested to see what's gonna shake out because... Because right now what Bitcoin is more or less local, it's peer-to-peer. Correct. But now the Venezuelan government is in a unique spot in that it's removed its currency restrictions. So right now you can freely trade Bitcoin dollars, any kind of foreign exchange in Venezuela, just a completely new development. And like it's very recent, happened last year. But the interesting thing about that is that right now there is no Libra coin. But suddenly like tomorrow or like today just the same way today you can go buy dollars, tomorrow you could set up a Libra exchange. And the way the tech companies work, a big risk from doing these on or setting these local college subsidiaries in these high-risk countries is that, man, they're hard to manage and staff. But as a tech company, you could just have a partnership with the Venezuelan Central Bank or whichever big bank in the state. And you potentially don't even have to have a person there. You know, you can run these things completely digitally as long as you have a banking partner. So the government's gonna wanna have their hands on whatever on ram into Libra, it gets created. But like I said, to me, that's the interesting part because one way or another, whether through a local Bitcoin setup where it's peer-to-peer or through a licensed exchange or the regime, people are gonna get their hands on Libra. My only issue with peer-to-peer, it's gonna end up in the same issues as Bitcoin. So I rather opt in for Bitcoin than Libra. My only thinking is if they somehow make an automated system, because I'm not too sure what the statistics is of how many people in Latin America use Facebook. I'm assuming a bunch. A lot, a lot. A lot, right? And so I already have Facebook on my phone. So the barrier to entry of accessibility to me as a human is already there. They have access to me. So my only way that I'm seeing Bitcoin or Ether, or any of the other cryptocurrencies, let me put this, the only way that I see Libra overcoming or getting to the peak velocity of adoption there is somehow they make some integration with a card, some integration with a bank, some form of native Facebook integration where I click a button and my money then it's converted into the Libra coin. Like that's how you get mass adoption. Yeah, well, here's the thing. The interesting part about this is that most countries in the world already have running Visa and MasterCard networks. Visa and MasterCard already have partnerships with all the major banks in every country in the world. So they have a huge lobby to get banks on board. Again, I think of this, this is incredibly orchestrated from what I can see. And this is a mastermind governmental lobby effort that's gonna get carried out. They're gonna basically go in and they're gonna bully these governments as a conglomerate of large multinationals to essentially allow this to happen. These guys are creating their own dollar. So in a way, you know, a government, it can go a lot of ways, but essentially... Well, they're creating their own dollar, but it's pegged on a basket of fiat. But not all fiat. Not all fiat, no. Not only the good fiat, technically speaking. If there is such thing. The G20 countries. If there is such thing, but so exactly. So, I mean, as a government, this is the perfect Trojan horse to basically enter into these governments because, and like I said, I think the most powerful treat or the most powerful thing that Libra has going for it is the fact that Facebook is so ubiquitous, Massacre is so ubiquitous, like everyone knows Visa, everyone knows Facebook, everyone knows Massacre, everyone knows Uber. It's... Everybody knows Instagram. Well, and if you have your accounts, how is then a government essentially... A government is gonna have a very hard time saying they're not gonna allow Libra in their jurisdictions. It's gonna be a political battle. Well, how are they gonna stop it? Like, Libra's not even sanctioned in the States. They're in Switzerland. They did the Ethereum play. Well, again, they're gonna make it very hard for the government to argue that this isn't gonna benefit the residents. And most governments are gonna have no option but to say, sure, we'll just treat it as a dollar. We'll work with the banks to sort of have this be a new currency. But the issue is gonna come when bad governments get into a bad place and they need to print money again and capital starts fleeing again. And they go back and they put in the controls that say you can't buy dollars anymore. And like I said, before, the most powerful tool governments had when they did this was to go out on their streets and they were working class. They said, this won't affect you. You don't earn dollars, you earn bolívaris. You've never spent dollars, you've never traveled. This only affects those people who can travel and who have a ton of money. But now that argument has lost all of its power because everyone in the country uses Libra. And so everyone in the country will be affected by any restrictions around Libra. So it's really, who should be most concerned about this stuff? It's essentially governments that mismanaged the currency. And I would put a lot of governments in that bucket. I don't feed in general, man. It's a sinking ship. So I'm excited, man. I think this is gonna be an excellent thing for crypto. And I can't wait to see how many people actually, get this opportunity to get on board it into. You know the interesting scenario that happens? Imagine the governments decide to try to shut it down. And they succeed obviously, because it's a permissioned DLT system. And people then do actually realize how powerful and censorship-resistant Bitcoin is. I think people really underestimate that's the true power of Bitcoin. It's not the price. It's not the brand of Bitcoin. It's the fact that you can't seize it from me. I think it's, I agree with you. I mean, 100%. But I think what's most likely to happen is that a bunch of governments will accept it. A bunch may not. And the people that don't are essentially, when they make their decision, they've sealed their fortunes for the next election. So to me, it's just a matter of, a few people will accept it and the rest of the dominoes will just fall. Yeah. I mean, that's my view from game theory approach to it. As far as what you can do is the only thing that Facebook needs to focus on right now is that a few countries, particularly OECD countries, take it. And those who have- In Toronto, we have one of the validator. CDL is an official validator. Which one of the countries whose currencies are gonna be put in the basket would have a vested interest in not make this happen? Yeah. It's actually beautifully put together. Now the next question is the other fang companies, when does Google come out with their own coin? I saw someone tweeting that. Yeah. Like listen, like if I was Google or Amazon, Amazon had their own coin long time ago, a fucking Amazon credits in Mechanical Turk. It's a brilliant system. Fantastic. For me, like if I was Google or Amazon chilling on the side, I'd be like, huh, interesting. Like maybe they're experimenting, maybe they wanna go, they're not just gonna let Facebook become the dominant player in this. Well, and that's why I think Facebook was really smart to take the head start and get a consortium. I think this is, I think the effort here and what people are gonna quickly realize is that one single company can be shut down, but they've decentralized that shit. Yeah. I think Facebook's biggest fear is Alibaba in Asia. Cause if you look at the release of the announcement was five AM to correspond with Asian time. Yeah. And so if you're looking at penetration of like Alipay, it's Africa and India. And Facebook has been trying the last five years heavily to get into Africa, heavily to get into India. And Ali, you know, Alibaba is there. Alibaba invested heavily into M-Pesa in Kenya. And people are using like their penetration saturation is heavy in those countries and continents. And I think Facebook is Facebook is trying to create a mode, at least in like Europe and American slowly start penetrating those areas. Cause for them, I think Asia is both huge adopters at the same time, by exact same time is huge competitors too. Like people understand, Alibaba is a fucking beast. That company is crazy. I couldn't agree more. But then, you know, I think that the dynamics that are at play is, you know, you have to create these sort of, at least for now, because it's very hard to grow something global from the start. So I think it's going regional right now. Like most guys are focusing on just blanketing completely on the regions, merging, bullying people out. You're not seeing people out in the East try to take small acquisitions in the West. You're seeing people just focusing on what they do best. I think the Facebook's mode is that it's US based. This has that aspirational aspect to it for as much as people want to hate on Zuckerberg and privacy, et cetera. Their track record is miles above any Chinese company. And so again, it's, I think it's an evolutionary path. I think it's people use Alipay, it's convenient. It solved the problem. Perhaps Libra will solve the same problem and people, who knows? Like people in Asia use WeChat, and by the way, one of the biggest reasons people in Asia don't use Facebook is because it was banned. So that's why they don't have the same penetration there. And that's understandable. So they're doing their best on the places they've been allowed to kind of flourish. And it'll be interesting this East versus West battle, but I think there's enough in those pies that they can be okay without eating each other. So my view is Facebook wants to go for Latam. If I were them, that's where I would be. And perhaps there's a bigger need in Asia and obviously the capital flight, the need to rebalance capital out of China gets everyone excited. So everybody wants to be there. Especially the shit with fucking Hong Kong these days too. Again, I'm actually been quite surprised at, Bitcoin's been rallying pretty strongly, yes. But I felt that given the current events, I mean, I struggled to believe that most of the stuff is priced in. But who knows, right? I just think it's not priced in, but it's on the issue with people looking like, why isn't it going up more in value or why is it more liquidity? Like certain places in the world is like, it's not that easy to get an exchange. Maybe you don't wanna know that you're buying Bitcoin. There's so much KYC, AML factors, security factors. And so that's why certain areas in the world, they prefer cash, Peter Pierre, because it's both physically safer for your identity and you don't wanna kind of give away what your political agenda is or what your political view, your belief system is. Yeah, I mean, again, who knows, right? I mean, to your point, there's friction still or a lot of friction around Bitcoin. And as we get better at it and we get better, local Bitcoins going AML, KYC might have had something to do with this. There's been some recent development. This is an incredibly complex system with so many moving parts, right? But I think inevitably people find the way to get to what they want. And personally, I think that this Facebook announcement is just gonna, it was a firing shot for a bunch of people down the rabbit hole. And if they haven't bought it yet, they probably will end up getting some crypto in the next few months. The Honey Badger don't care. The Honey Badger don't care, man. Are Mauricio working people reach you and tell them a little bit about Ledin and what you guys do over there? Yeah, so Ledin.io is our company. We are Bitcoin saving some credit products. So we offer dollar loans backed by your Bitcoin so you don't have to sell your Bitcoin. If you wanna access cash, you need to do or buy more Bitcoin. Or, and we also launched our Bitcoin savings account. So we're the first company in Canada to do that. We pay 5.1 interest on Bitcoin deposits. And you can find out about us at ledin.io. And if you wanna reach me personally, I'm pretty active on Twitter. My handle is Cryptonomist and then A at the end, so Cryptonomista. And yeah, feel free to hit me up. Always happy to connect. Awesome, brother. Thank you. No worries. Thank you for having me.