 My name is Mariano Conte, I work at the Maker Foundation, and this is living on DeFi how I survive Argentina's 50% inflation. Of course, that's the title that I came up with around two months ago when I submitted this presentation. Four months ago when I was just outlining what I was going to say, this was the title, how I survive Argentina's 40% inflation. And if we jump to today, sadly, the actual talk is called how survive Argentina's 50% inflation. And let me tell you, we still have three more months in the year, so I don't know what we're going to end up. But anyway, how do I survive Argentina's inflation? You probably know, I'm not going to give you three guesses. The answer is very, very simple. I get paid in die. That's it. I get paid in a stable cryptocurrency that is pegged to US dollar, which is the dollar is something that Argentinians value very, very much, even though some people in the US might say it is inflationary in its own sense, it has its own problems. For somebody in Argentina, let me tell you those problems are absolutely nothing. Let me take a step back. This is the quick agenda for today. I'm going to do a recap of Argentina's economy in the past few years. There's not going to be any charts or lots of numbers, just going to tell you a story. The rest of crypto in Argentina, my personal story, and what DeFi can do today for us and for you. If you managed to catch Rune stock, his stock is a lot about the future, mine is about the actual present. Here's one thing. Everything I'm going to say is totally the truth, at least in my perspective. There is going to be one lie. I don't want to call it a lie. Let's call it a twist. I'm going to leave that for the end. Let's go. Argentina late 2011. I was living in Mexico until 2010. Really nice economy. It doesn't feel like it, but let me tell you, once I got into Argentina, things were starting to get really bad. We had capital controls. It was really hard to get access to USD. There began a secondary black market. The government said that the USD was worth X and the black market said it was worth Y. And if you worked for an outside company, the government would try to take your dollars and buy them at the official rate, which was really low. And people started finding lots of different ways to get access to dollars. I'm not going to go over all of them, but let me tell you, Argentinians are really, really resourceful when it comes to acquiring dollars and other currencies that are much, much better than the Argentine peso. There were some memories of 2001, the Corralito, which was when the government just decided to freeze all of our bank accounts and just let us take a little bit of money out every month. They actually pacified every single US dollar bank account, and then they forexed deflated the value of the peso. So it was a complete disaster. And around 2011, 2012, you know Argentina has a culture of working, freelancers working for outside companies. We have really good tech knowledge. I see a lot of you here, and some of us are figuring out how can we get paid? And of course the answer was Bitcoin. We started a lot of us getting paid in Bitcoin in those early days. And it worked really well for people who got in around that time, 2012, 2013, 2014. And I was talking to some friends, we all remember those who got in early, but not the people who got paid in Bitcoin in 2018, maybe, when if they couldn't actually trade it back to pesos in a couple of days, they would get maybe their salary reduced by 20 percent or something. So what it gave us early on, Bitcoin, was protection from the system, access to an economy that was somewhat unavailable for a lot of people. But it had volatility, of course. So let me say more or less how we are right now in Argentina. Capital controls are returning, sadly. There's going to be an election soon. And the markets have more or less spoken that things may turn bad. So the government is already coding caps on how much USD we can buy. And since everything depends on the US dollar in Argentina, things are starting to look a little bit rough. Just last month, Central Bank published a list of names with the equivalent of social security numbers on an official bulletin with the names and those numbers of people who had bought more than 10K USD, essentially doxing them to the whole country. Another thing that they're doing. If you work for an outside company and you invoice in USD, when you get that money into your bank account, you have to liquidate it into pesos within five days. And most of the people, what they do, they buy back US dollars once again, they lose like 7 percent spread. So it is starting to get bad. But this time, we've seen this before. We've always seen this crisis before. I believe that now we are prepared to do something about this. And the answer, for me at least, and for the people I'm trying to get into it, is die. Because die for us, the people who are living in these kind of countries and economies, die is better money. It has all the advantages of a cryptocurrency, but pegged to a currency that is really, really valuable to us and that has implications and good properties that our local currencies at least now don't have and may never have. So let's get a little bit into my crypto story. Like it was said, I've been living off of crypto for five years. I started in late 2014 getting paid in Bitcoin to escape capital controls, as I've said. And then I found Ethereum in 2015 and went more or less all in. And 2016 decided I want to work at the best project that there is in Ethereum and luckily found Maker where I've been working for over three years. But one of the happiest days of my life was when we deployed the alpha version of single collateral die called Psy. And a couple of weeks after that, I got my first paycheck 100 percent in Psy. That was a really amazing day. And just a few months later when we released the die that you guys know and use every day now, the next month my paycheck came in 100 percent die. And it's been that way ever since. And this is also true. I was thinking about it and I've never bought crypto with Fiat in my entire life ever. Every single token that I have, I'm not going to call them. Let's say every single token that I have, I've earned it via my work. And this is something that I'm actually really, really proud of. So let's get even more personal. So what do I do with my paycheck? There's two worlds. There's the Fiat world and the crypto world. We cannot yet go into a store and purchase everything with die or with ETH or with Bitcoin. We're not there yet. What we can do is I offer them once a month into pesos, just the bare minimum to pay rent, to pay groceries. I use one credit card. I pay off my credit card to the full amount and I stay as close to zero as I can. It's like Argentine pesos talks it to me. So I try to avoid it. And then the crypto world, what everybody does. I buy some ETH. I loan die into markets like Compound, DYDX, Nuo, I buy token sets, Dharma. And then I'm earning interest in a stable currency. And I acknowledge that there's risks. There's platform risks. There's smart contract risks. But let me tell you, if you have pesos in an Argentinian bank account, the risks are non-zero and they're actually very much, I would say, the mid-20s, 30s, 50s. There is sort of there. So I would much rather trust you guys with my die than the Argentine government. And another thing that's happening, this is getting more common every day. I'm sure that there's a lot of you that get paid and die, your salaries, maybe it's in full, maybe it's some amount. But I've been talking to so many of you. People get paid in die and you use that die to put it into things like Compound, earning interest. And for the ones that actually live in countries like Argentina, Venezuela, you're escaping volatility inflation, you're escaping control of like a crappy government and crappy economy. So this is not only happening in Argentina, it's happening in so many places. And what I always say is like, if you want to see what crypto can do today, look south. The emerging economies, people like me, everybody has stories like this and talk to these people and learn from them and try to build for these kind of people too. And this is something that we're doing at the Maker Foundation, working with local companies from a lot of the Latin American countries that I mentioned, also Mexico, Brazil, helping exchanges and on and off ramps and maybe creating point of sales or working with die wallets and the most important thing of all, educating people, educating people which is key. I say we, this is personal. I want people earning and saving and die. I try to get as many people into this as I possibly can. And okay, we come to the twist, right? It's not a very big twist, but I like it nonetheless. I've mentioned all of what I do, that earning and die, getting things into compound, like having a normal, there's a lot of people in Argentina that I know that do this, but I go one step further, right? It's like I'm not a normal person who works for an outside company and gets paid. Like I'm up here talking to you at DEF CON. I work in the Ethereum ecosystem with all of you that I can help make this place better and this ecosystem better. So what do I do? I turn everything I get into ether. Because I believe in this. And when I see all of you, I think that this is the right thing to do. I am a maximalist and even though it would be better to just maybe keep everything and die, this is not what I'm going to do. I'm up here. I'm making this world better. And I turn everything into it. Like I told him, I asked a friend of mine, so what's your trading strategy? And what he said is I try to buy a little bit every day. So that's exactly what I do. I try to buy a little bit every day because of all of you, you know? The core devs, the EIP writers, I went to so many talks today. Teams working on Ethereum and Face Zero, One, Two, all the community. The people who tweet, eth is money over and over and over. Even you guys, I love you. It is because of you and that's what I'm going to keep doing. And just remember, a strong eth makes for a stronger die. Die is a stabilized version of ether. So everything that we're doing, I think, is encouraging the die ecosystem and that's going to make at least the people in my country that I'm trying to get out of the crappy economic system that they're in we're helping to make it better. And now I would like all the Argentinians here, which I know pretty much every one of you, to just like stand up. I want to see all of you because most of you, and you see that there's a lot, most of them, most of them have stories very similar to mine. And I want everybody who didn't get up to just look at them. And I'm taking Argentina because it's what I know, but I know that there's probably a lot of you from other places that face these equal problems. But look at the people who stood up and talk to them. It's like, what I've said today, this is an anecdote, but enough anecdotes and it starts to resemble something of kind of like data. And that's the way I see it. So, we're all trying to get DEF CON 2020 in Buenos Aires, because we know what it is to live off of crypto. I think it's the right place to be there, because you all know that what I'm talking about is what we leave every day. And just like, do everything I'm saying that tweet DEF CON VA 2020. And thank you very much. We actually have like five minutes for questions. And this is the last talk of the day. So, if anybody wants to get up and ask a question, you're free to do so. Otherwise, yeah, I see a couple of hands, please to the microphone. We got more t-shirts. We do have some more t-shirts. And we have the, yeah, look for us after. Every time you said your friend does this, your friend does that, does your friend exist at all? This friend is an amalgamation of a lot of people, including a lot of the people who stood up. OK, sorry for this, but how do you pay taxes? Yeah. And this was in one of my slides, and I decided to take it out. I do pay taxes. I decided not to put it in because talking to people from so many different countries, tax laws are so different that I would end up spending most of the time discussing tax strategies. I pay my taxes, yeah, but I might do better in another country. It's like, if you want to know what I do for taxes, like, come to me after and I'll, I mean, I've said almost everything. I'll be happy to tell you the rest. But since everybody's coming from different countries, I don't want to assume anything. Anybody else? We're good? Hey, thanks. Very inspiring, by the way, as someone who also gets paid in crypto. I wanted to ask a question. What were some of the largest challenges you had to overcome in the last few years, you know, leaving the traditional finances behind? So first it was just basically off ramping. The fees were way too high. They still are sometimes. So for me, sometimes it's even easier. Maybe I can change dye to pesos or maybe I can get dye into ether into dollars and then dollars into pesos. It's like, there are many different ways to, and since the economy changes every day, there may be a good or better way to do it differently. And then just another was I started using only cash and that didn't really work for my credit history. So I did have to go back a little into the system via credit card. And just the fact that I thought that I could be using crypto every single day and that is not the case. But I use it once a month at least to off ramp and that is enough for me. Well, and aside a little bit that I buy every day. Hey, great talk. You're putting yourself out there basically explaining how you're banning the rules against the government. Aren't you afraid that there might be some consequences to that? Like that the government starts taking other measures to find people like you? I think it is possible, but I'm not trying to make myself a martyr or anything. We've seen plenty of other people do what I'm doing over the years. First with Bitcoin, now I'm doing this with dye. So I don't want to say that it's a price I'm willing to pay. But if we get enough people outside the system, then maybe we can get the system to see that there is something wrong and help it change with one minute. Thank you very touching talk. Thank you. I'm traveling to Argentina in December. And what's the best way to change dye or ether to local pesos and locally? I'll give you my telegram. Great. So if there aren't any more questions, thank you so much for staying. I love you all.