 Even if you support Bitcoin and you think that Bitcoin is a good option for yourself, I think in good conscience we have to say that that doesn't mean that it's a good choice when it's imposed or introduced without the appropriate process. Earlier this week, El Salvador's Bitcoin Law, making it a nation's legal tender for the very first time, went into effect. It was an interesting day to do so as leveraged traders were liquidated and the top token dropped by as much as $10,000 on some exchanges very quickly, providing ammunition for those claiming volatility could make the move unworkable. But it did happen. We're going to talk about it on Today's Show. My name is Adam B. Levine and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. On Today's Show we're joined by Stephanie Murphy and Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello. Jonathan Mohan is out this week. So folks, we're going to try to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. After our last episode over the summer on the El Salvador Bitcoin Law, we received some listener mail that corrected some of our misconceptions, which we'll talk about a bit later in the show. But let's just start with what happened and what it could mean. Well, the launch went somewhat unexpectedly, very big news. But at the same time, there were some technical snafus from what I heard with the government hosted wallet that was intended to provide exchange and Bitcoin receiving services for those who wanted to use it. That service was overwhelmed and crashed. And I'm not quite sure if it's back up again. And that coincided, of course, with a pretty significant drop in the price of Bitcoin, about a 10% at some point, almost 12% drop, which of course in Bitcoin terms is not completely unheard of. But for those who are new to that experience, must have been quite a shock. Another user, Matt Alberg, had a thread on this where he basically was investigating how does the wallet work, what technology was it using, and kind of what are the eccentricities around it. Because this is a really interesting situation where the government is actually providing this wallet. It's not the only wallet that you can use, but it's a wallet where they're incentivizing you to use it because they're giving you $30 basically for signing up in the first place. So it's a way to sort of airdrop to the users in El Salvador. The kind of broad takeaways from this Twitter thread are that once you've actually signed up, you can only send transactions with that $30 that you get for free to other Chivo wallets initially, but eventually it does open up. It does support lightning. You can send from lightning to Chivo, you can send lightning from Chivo, and it does use native Segwit. So as a wallet, as a technology stack is concerned, like when I think of government wallet, I think of like, what's the worst possible way you could deploy the technology? I actually think it's not that bad. The internal thing, that's probably just to stop people from creating lots of accounts and then farming it out or something like that, or at least to make it a little bit difficult. But again, if it natively supports lightning off the bat, that's a pretty advanced wallet for our current era, wouldn't you say? Yeah. I mean, supporting Segwit is ahead of its game really. Yeah. I mean, as far as official tools are concerned, it seems like there is definitely something there. Now the kind of challenges that they saw with the infrastructure, that definitely did seem to be real. It seemed like their servers were overwhelmed and they took them down for a while. El Salvador president, Naib Bukele, was on Twitter apologizing to people and asking for patience kind of in the early morning following the rollout. And just in general, it seemed like it was a pretty exciting day where a lot of things went wrong, but it didn't break in a fundamental way. And I think that again, for those of us who have been watching this technology for a while, that's on the one hand expected and on the other hand was a real question mark when you have a government trying to actually integrate something like this and then do a large scale rollout, something that's really never been done before in this type of context. Yeah, the only way to do something that's never been done before like this is just try it and expect that there's going to be problems. The key words there are large scale rollout. And before kind of we look at this cynically and go, hey, well, government, Latin American country, what can you expect? Let's remember that many of the more sophisticated, much better funded, supposedly more sophisticated governments in the world often screw up large scale rollouts. Think about the original deployment of healthcare.gov. I was just thinking about that. Yeah. How about the stimulus checks? The deployment of the stimulus check? Absolutely. The COVID vaccine registration everywhere in the world, not just in the United States or big scale projects like that. Very often day one, especially if you have very high demand and a lot of people try to sign up at the same time, this is exactly what happens. So I think we should be kind of cutting them some slack and recognize that this was a difficult project and sounds like they pulled it off. OK. One of the threads on Twitter that really kind of caught my eye was a fairly long one from Alex Gladstein, which came out a couple of days before the actual changeover, the actual implementation of the law took place. He actually went down to El Salvador and while he was there, he participated in a number of protests, talked to a number of people. Did he participate or he just attended? I think he just attended, right? Yeah, just attend. I mean, like, what's the difference between participating and attending? I guess you're right. Oh, there's a big difference. You could attend to document it, but not participate anyway. That's fair. Yeah. I don't think he was protesting against the move, but I think that he was attending and again, attempting to both, you know, understand what's going on there and then also put it into sort of a broader context and see kind of where the challenges are around this stuff. So really what he found is that just because of how fast this happened, which frankly is unsurprising, I think that if it happened here and it was, you know, our government trying to do something like this. Yeah. In one month, we're completely changing the money. Surprise. Exactly. Yeah. Like that seems totally reasonable. So again, like, there's a lot of just mistrust by nature of how fast this went. And also by nature of the fact that there wasn't really a requirement for any sort of cross political consensus, right? You know, Naid Bukali and the party that he largely controls or the party that he leads have a super majority in the government. And so they don't really need anybody else's buy-in. They just kind of need to decide that they're going to do it. And then that in and of itself is a process that people can frankly have a lot of suspicion about because, you know, there are good reasons for doing this that we understand. But there are also lots of bad reasons that could be a reason to do this. And so again, as we see this sort of manifest into real life, I think that we're going to see which one of those it is perhaps. Perhaps we will still not know going on. But, you know, again, andres, to a conversation that we've had many times before, Bitcoin is helpful for people who are lower on the socioeconomic spectrum, right? And it's helpful for people who are unbanked because it can act in that way. But it also creates this pathway for corruption to take place outside of the traditional banking system and to utilize the characteristics of the blockchain to actually, you know, like embezzle money or hide money or take bribes or stuff like that. So it seems like there's a big portion of the pushback. It's just uncertainty of knowing why is this being deployed? Is it for the reasons that they're saying? Or is it for these other reasons that they will then take advantage of? Especially when 20 years ago there was this push for dollarization. According to the people that Alex talked to, they were opposed to this Bitcoin transition because 20 years ago El Salvador switched on to the dollar system and it benefited the banker class, basically, and did not benefit most people that were kind of more working class. And also it was pushed and it seemed kind of top down and they're not being really told the whole story about it. And it was just kind of reminiscent of exactly what happened back then. And it seemed like a lot of people thought of this as something that benefits the bankers and not most other people. I am shocked and surprised at the possibility of these moves benefiting the bankers that has never happened before. Right. But all jokes aside, I mean, I think there's an important distinction to make here, which is even if Bitcoin can help the underbanked and unbanked, even if it has pros and cons under any context or any perspective, there's a lot to be said about the process by which decisions are made and where the power for decisions lies. We've been proponents of Bitcoin not as an imposed system, quite the opposite, but as a voluntary participation system, often used despite governments not wanting it to be used and chosen as a currency by individuals, very much a voluntary system. So I can look at this and say, hey, this might help some people, but at the same time, there are valid concerns about the way that this was introduced and the lack of process. Process matters. It matters in democracies that have strong opposition. It matters even more in situations where one party has dominant control. We had this exact same conversation when Narendra Modi demonetized the currency in what was in November of 2018 and the chaos that caused. And again, that was a relatively authoritarian move without any public review and announced as a surprise. So even if you support Bitcoin and you think that Bitcoin is a good option for yourself, I think in good conscious, we have to say that that doesn't mean that it's a good choice when it's imposed or introduced without the appropriate process. It's also worth noting that the way that this was rolled out basically has some kind of informal guidance that's come from parts of the government that speak to when and where people have to comply with this that like the guidance has been softer than the law was. Oh, that's interesting because we had a discussion about this, I remember in our initial show about this topic where the law basically said you have to accept Bitcoin unless you can't basically. And Andreas was kind of speculating this is going to apply to the big companies more than like small businesses and families kind of vendors. But I wasn't so sure about that because the law wasn't clear. And so you're saying that it is more something that informally the government is saying is going to be applied to big companies who have the budget to deal with this and stuff. It seems more like they're attempting to soften it by talking about how they're going to do enforcement. But frankly, I hate this method of enforcement. I hate it when you have laws that are more harsh on the books and then the guidance around how you enforce them is like, oh, but don't even worry about it. It's not too bad. Oh, yeah, that's terrible, because then they can change it at any time when they want to in the future. Or apply it unequally to some people or others and use it as leverage when you behave in a naughty manner and then decides to apply it strictly just for you. I mean, selective prosecution is fundamentally an unjust mechanism. And it seems to be sort of just the way that things are in the given era where everything is illegal and any decision to prosecute seems like it's a selective decision to prosecute or not. So I don't want to dig too much into this. I think people probably have already heard about this because this was such big news. What I kind of want to do is I want to draw back the conversation and talk about kind of the macro implications of this specifically from the idea of this being the first nation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. What does it mean for the country? What does it mean for like the ideas that we've had about Bitcoin for so long? Because like that's what I'm still really trying to grapple with. My assumption going back as far as sort of the issues that we saw with Cyprus and Greece was that Bitcoin would be used as a reserve asset where it is the reserve that then backs a fiat currency or a central bank digital currency, perhaps in the modern era. But that is not what they did. What they did is they actually literally adopted it. And as we discussed kind of at the top of the show, the initial wallet created by the government or at least created by a government contractor and offered by the government is pretty sophisticated as far as Bitcoin wallets go with negative Segwit support. There are plenty of exchanges that are out there that are really big that still have not actually gotten on to the native Segwit standard. Because again, it's a development thing that maybe you don't necessarily have the resources or want to spend the resources to do right now. Well, they did hear same thing with lightning. Like lightning is a project that at this point, like it's pretty mature. But at the same time, it's definitely not in wide use by consumer applications. It doesn't come standard yet. Yeah, exactly. And yet it is present there. Now, of course, given the types of value scales you're talking about in El Salvador, it totally makes sense that they would have lightning. And again, from the Bitcoin beach experience, it seems like that sort of is the model that they're following. And they've done a pretty decent job of it, at least from the outside perspective. Yeah, to put it simply, Bitcoin and El Salvador wouldn't work without lightning. I mean, it's not even an option. You can't operate at that scale on the purchasing power of the average El Salvadorian salary, which is, of course, the case in the majority of the world, which is why we need lightning. So yeah, I think it was a must have, not a nice to have. When we're thinking about this as kind of like a first, is this the model? I know we don't have enough data yet to decide this yet. But like, should I realign the way that I'm thinking about this away from Bitcoin as a reserve asset and more towards a lightning network driven actual legit currency that's in use by normal people, not just the thing that's backing the money that's being used by those people? Well, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I mean, it could be both. I think it's really interesting that they're doing this, because like you said, it's kind of unexpected. I think there were not just you, Adam, or us on the show, but there were lots of people who were thinking that was their expectation that Bitcoin would become more of a reserve kind of asset and not like cash, basically. And I don't think they're mutually exclusive, especially with a technology like lightning. Why not? I think lightning redeems Bitcoin back into the position of a very powerful medium of exchange capability and means it's not delegated only to reserve currency use. But I honestly hope, Adam, from a broader perspective, that this is not the model we get to see in the future primarily because I don't want to see top down application of Bitcoin as a nation state project rather than as an independent international currency that is chosen by the people who choose to use it. I really agree with you there. I think that this is not ideal for all the reasons that you just said. But at the same time, you think about how something like this could happen. And it actually does make some sense that a country that has effectively a supermajority in control that doesn't need consensus for anybody else and who thinks that this is potentially valuable to their ambitions for the country would be the first because literally there's just less process to go through there. Now, when you talk about this rolling out kind of bottom up and just being selected, are you imagining that this is something that like a citizenry within a country would just start using spontaneously by nature of the advantages that it has? And then the country would over time decide, hey, everybody is already using this. So you might as well just recognize it because this is the reality. How do you envision a good path towards a country adopting this as a form of legal tender? Or is the argument here that it shouldn't even be legal tender? I don't even care if it is legal tender. I think governments will possibly see that not having the option to collect taxes in Bitcoin will only erode their ability to hold it as a reserve asset. And if enough people use it, they're simply forced to adopt it very much like other technologies have worked in the past. So that would be my ideal. But to the point you just made of a country that where you have a robust supermajority or the ability to do things with authority, without opposition, etc., etc. But look at other countries and what they've done that are in the same position, India banning it and going straight down the central bank digital currency surveillance where China banning it surveillance where etc., etc. We're seeing the exact opposite. We're seeing these fake surveillance currencies that double down not only on the fiat side, but on the closed system, government control, top down surveillance aspect of currency, really dystopian models. Even in Venezuela with a petro, right? Again, the exact same thing. The key ingredients seem to be closed platform, either no backing at all or impossible to audit backing. And then we sprinkle some surveillance on top and we sell it to the people as equivalent to the cryptocurrency that they've heard is empowering and liberating. So from that perspective, what El Salvador has done here is surprising. It is surprising because I don't think that many countries will actually do that. I think we're going to see two completely different models. One, authoritarian countries that do central bank digital currencies and even non-authoritarian countries that do that, kind of a super fiat with extra surveillance and some hope that that will allow them to bail themselves out of debt. And on the other side, a very grassroots and in many cases, gray market use of this probably to evade the very central bank digital currencies that I described as the first model. And the in between seems rare. Yeah, I have to agree with you, Andreas. Whenever governments have something to say about legislating Bitcoin, it seems like nine times out of 10, the examples we've seen, it's in the authoritarian direction and not in the freedom direction. So I almost think it's better if they legislate it as little as possible. But I kind of wonder, I remember this show that we did about the IMF in their blog post. Andreas, I don't think you were there for that one, but the IMF doesn't want this to happen. They really don't like that El Salvador has passed this law adopting Bitcoin as a national currency. It's actually more than legal tender, as we discussed on our show, I won't rehash it. But this could be thought of as an FU to the IMF and these world central bankers that want to have great power and control and El Salvador is kind of saying, nope, we're going to kind of step aside from that whole system and utilize an alternative. Yeah, so I mean, the thing that jumps out at me immediately about this is that what's really interesting here is we're actually talking about authoritarian approaches on both sides of the pro and con of Bitcoin, right? We're talking about a country that on the one hand in El Salvador has effectively by fiat instituted this as something that the country has to care about and people who do not care about it have to care about. And I believe that the reason why they are doing that is because they view it as an opportunity. And so the government is taking this action and they're kind of dragging the people along with them. That's not actually that different from what's happened in India and many other nations. It's just that instead of seeing it as an opportunity and dragging the populace along in one direction, they see it as a threat. And so they try and scare the population and going in the other direction, try and threaten them into moving away from it. So again, you look at these projects and it's really interesting to think about why El Salvador didn't go the central bank digital currency route. It's rather surprising really. Yeah. But I mean, again, I think it really comes down to this question of who conducts your monetary policy, right? In a world where you control your own currency, like for example, India, right? Right now the status quo is that you control the dynamics of your currency, at least to the degree that that's possible to do within our current system. So the idea that something like Bitcoin could come in and displace your currency is a threat. And that's why, again, we're seeing this move, I think, and it will accelerate rapidly now towards these central bank digital currencies that effectively allow you to take monetary policy and program it into the units of currency, which makes your monetary policy actually even more powerful at the cost, of course, of the people who are using your currency. On the other side, if you were a country like El Salvador where you weren't really using your currency for monetary policy and you were sort of importing monetary policy from whoever's currency you were using, then Bitcoin represents something that's like a halfway step to your own monetary policy. It's not your own monetary policy, but it's also not someone else's monetary policy. It's a neutral monetary policy. That strikes me as an important difference. So perhaps really the differentiation we're going to see here is countries who are controlling their own currency and thus their own monetary policy, they're going to move towards central bank digital currencies. But if you're on the US dollar, well, what are you going to do? Jump to somebody else's equivalent of the US dollar except they have even more control over their dynamics? Or are you going to move towards a more neutral platform where you don't have to worry about future shocks because the whole thing is predictable and based around peer-to-peer technology that requires kind of consensus in order to change that? It strikes me that perhaps that is the difference that we're seeing here. And why El Salvador, although it is using a somewhat authoritarian method to implement this, did not choose to go the central bank digital currency route. It's almost like a central bank de-dolarization. Yeah, exactly. I mean, like for El Salvador, not for India. For India, for China, for any of these other places, it's like hyper-centralization. Once you have the ability to have the central bank have insight into and control over the dynamics of all of the money. Like at least with dollars, you can take them out of the bank, grab them from an ATM and stuff them under your mattress. But if you have digital dollars, well, if they decide that, hey, this stimulus check that we're giving you, it has an expiration date or it can only be spent with this outlet or for these approved uses. Like that's something you can actually do with central bank digital currencies. And it allows you to kind of supercharge your monetary policy, at least again, if you're a believer that monetary policy in that way has beneficial effects rather than just negative externalities. Oh, I can't wait for that. Your stimulus check can only be spent at a hobby lobby. So this idea that this is de-dolarization and the currency wars and seeking a neutral monetary policy as strategic advantage is something we've discussed many, many times. But we've discussed it on the one hand as a war of currencies between the big superpowers and on the other hand as kind of the hedging steps that individuals need to do for de-dolarization. And El Salvador seems to fall somewhere in between where as a nation, there lack of control over US dollar policy, which given the interest rates recently, you know, they wanted low interest rates. Well, they may have gotten more than they bargained for, right? Because it's one thing to want low interest rates in 2000 to juice up the banking sector. It's a whole other thing to then go through a 20 year zero interest rate trap that is now heading into negative interest rates. Maybe they don't want that anymore. In fact, that could be a very good reason why you want to de-dolarize your monetary policy. This is exactly what I was thinking. So if that's the case then, I mean, it seems like that's a pretty solid argument for getting the people on board with it, right? And I wonder, maybe he did, I don't know, but I wonder why the president didn't go on TV and say, look, the US, these central bankers are these globalists, frankly, are like controlling us with their monetary policy from afar. And this is a step towards breaking away from that and gaining more national sovereignty. I think that would appeal to a lot of people. And I don't know if anyone tried to make that argument to Salvadorians. I'd be curious to hear if we got any local feedback on that. Yeah, I mean, we'd love to hear from you about your local perspective. But I mean, I think the key to me is that they didn't have to, right? Like they didn't really explain much of anything. Technically, they had this political mandate, but I mean, it still helps to get the people on board with what you're doing, don't you think? I mean, it's like, it builds a stronger country if the people are kind of like, yeah, we understand what's going on and they're not protesting. I don't disagree with you at all. I also just don't think, again, like clearly from the way that this happened, that wasn't the priority. The priority was making it happen. Otherwise this would have been done in a different way. So again, we can speculate about why they did or didn't do something, but like they didn't really spend any time building consensus. They didn't really need to. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really curious about that. Like maybe the thinking wasn't, you know, more of a national sovereignty thing. It was more of, I don't want to speculate, but I don't really understand what the motivations were for this and for doing it so fast at the expense of unrest, I guess. I don't know how big those protests have been and that's another interesting thing. I'd like to hear more from people in El Salvador, kind of like a first person perspective. You know, how much resistance has there been? How much public appeal and promotion and positive campaigning has there been? Is this that controversial or not so much? Because apparently this president has fairly high popularity ratings. I don't really know much about it. So it would be interesting to see, but then again, I think to the point that Adam was making earlier, this is going to be watched very carefully. Now, if we assume that this recipe of central banks that don't have very strong control over their monetary policy, or nations that don't have central banks, that for whatever reason have adopted an adjacent super currency, whether that's the US dollar or as is the case of a few countries in the Balkans, the euro, either off officially or unofficially have adopted it as their main currency and therefore don't have monetary control, maybe they're going to look at this very carefully because this could become a trend. Maybe I believe Montenegro has the euro, a couple of other countries in the periphery of the European Union use the euro instead of doing their own currency. And one of the big reasons, of course, is because it is expensive to print and manage a currency. And if you don't have a big enough population to support it and to create enough economy of scale and network effect to really have robust monetary policy, it may be difficult to support it. But unfortunately, what that means is that then your interest rate is whatever the interest rate needs to be in Germany or the rest of the European bloc, rather than what it needs to be in your country. So if you're going to be under someone else's interest rate, maybe it's better to have a neutral policy that is algorithmically determined. We'll see how that plays out. So we're very early in the kind of rollout of this. And I think that again, the next six months are going to tell us a lot, not just about what's going on in El Salvador and how this is going there, but kind of what is the map for the future? And does this particular experiment wind up being like a shining example that is a success that can be replicated? Or does it look more like a horrible warning that tells people exactly the thing that they want to make sure they don't do if they ever try to do something similar, which would certainly set it back? You know, one comment that we got from a listener of the show named Raphael was specifically on a bunch of like little tiny areas, right? Like forking. Bitcoin is now legal tender. But what happens if Bitcoin were to fork? Which one of those Bitcoin would be Bitcoin in the eyes of the law? Or now are there two different types of Bitcoin? Like clearly the forks that existed in the past for Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, things like that, those are not considered Bitcoin when they're talking about this law. Wait, but is that clear, Adam, though? Because I haven't followed this in a while actually, but like at one point near the fork of Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash was saying, no, we're Bitcoin. And we did the show about the three popes of Bitcoin. In the Middle Ages, there was this period of time where there were three people that were claiming to be the Pope. And then how do you know which one is really the Pope? And how does that get decided? Is that true? Like, is Bitcoin Cash basically still saying, no, we're Bitcoin or have they stopped that? And does the law actually make it clear that it's Bitcoin Core, not Bitcoin Cash that they're referring to as legal tender? I'd like to reframe this a bit, which is that very much like the process of consensus which emerges after the fact and eventually. So you have hardening consensus over time. After six blocks, you can talk with great certainty about what transactions and blocks were included six blocks ago. But you can't very comfortably talk about what transactions and blocks were included in the current block because it may get reorganized. After 100 blocks, you can collect the Coinbase reward. After thousands of blocks, then you're completely sure what transactions and blocks make part of the chain. So you can say similarly, I can tell you what Bitcoin was a thousand blocks ago. I can tell you what Bitcoin is six blocks ago. But I can't tell you what Bitcoin is in five blocks from now because that is a process of consensus. And consensus is something that emerges from the system retrospectively and hardens over time as it's buried by more blocks. So we can easily say, okay, so when the law says Bitcoin, we know what that is now if you're talking about the past. But we don't know what that's going to be six months from now because if a fork occurs, they will be forced to pick a side. Even by not acting, that is still picking a side. I'd like to read a little bit from a rather extensive commentary that was sent in by another one of our listeners named Federico, who also is local to the area. And just generally, this is a very skeptical perspective. And again, a lot of locals are very, very, very skeptical about this both because of kind of their history and past experience with the government and also with using currencies and these vast changes as we've discussed. So I'm just going to read a little bit of it. And then I'm actually going to post the whole thing along with this. Like I said, it's a long doc, so we'll probably link it from the show notes rather than putting in the show notes itself. But reading from this, the local implementation in El Salvador is nothing but a socialist experiment. The central bank published on August 20th the norms that regulate the Bitcoin legislation and a few comments to illustrate my point. First, the Bitcoin definition reads, Bitcoin colon legal tender according to the Bitcoin law that uses the technology blockchain and quote, Bitcoin legislation did not define Bitcoin as the digital asset with the ticker BTC. Could this open the possibility to treat any cryptocurrency as Bitcoin? So he's not even concerned just about other like forks of Bitcoin being treated as Bitcoin or recognized by the state as Bitcoin. Yeah, that's a very unclear definition. Yeah, exactly. Like it's not very specific. So his second point, the subject of the legislation are only financial institutions, i.e. the banking industry. So any crypto exchange website, e-wallet provider, BTC, ATMs, payment services, etc. can only offer their services if hired by a bank or a financial institution. Do you see Coinbase partnering with Banko-Agricola? Would Bitcoin beach wallet become provider for a different bank? It's no secret that the government in the executive branch and the Congress have a terrible relationship with the banking industry. Does this mean that banks can't get near Bitcoin services leaving a monopoly for the government offering? Then another point that he brought up was each bank that offers exchange services or a digital wallet must first keep custody of Bitcoin. And if fiat is kept in the customer's account, the same amount needs to be kept 100% in the central banks as reserves. And two, they need to collect identity data of customers for KYC and anti-money laundering. Also, banks need to give access in real time to the central bank to all of that data. Again, like this is a much longer document that's just drawing a couple of concerns from it. But there are real concerns around both real ambiguity and also just like the power dynamics that are at work here. Yeah, that's concerning. I agree. I didn't hear any of that stuff before. I'm so glad we have this local perspective. This kind of all fits into a larger context, which is that El Salvador is the fastest moving and perhaps the most comprehensive kind of move towards this Bitcoin as legal tender type of thing. But it's not the only country that's out there doing it. And it's worth bringing up specifically the Ukrainian example. This is quoting from NBC News. The subject is, Ukraine is the latest country to legalize Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency slowly goes global. It says, unlike El Salvador's move this week to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, Ukraine's crypto law does not put Bitcoin on equal footing with the country's national currency. And the long and short of this article is that they're reducing the kind of gray market lack of clarity that has existed in that country for a long time around how cryptocurrency should be treated, what its status is. And so basically, they're doing the thing that we've been asking the US government to do for literally 10 years at this point, right? Which is to, okay, you're going to put rules on it. Just tell us what the rules are. And then at the point that you tell us what the rules are, we can figure out whether we agree with them, whether we disagree with them. But at least there can be some type of stated thing as opposed to, again, the other day we saw Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong talk about the challenges that they've been having rolling out a lending product where basically you can keep stable coins within the Coinbase exchange and then they'll pay you 4% interest over the course of a year. And basically, they went out of their way to comply with the SEC. They've sent people to testify before them and to commit under oath that this is how the system works. This is the reason why we're doing it, etc. And kind of have made themselves available. And so when Brian was talking about this stuff, this was coming after having gone through all of that, they were sent what's called a Wells notice, which basically is when a regulator sends you a notice that says that we're going to sue you about it, so don't launch it. When you look at many of these industries and you look at many of these countries, it's not like they're banning it. It's not like they're even treating it in ways that are challenging. It's that they're just keeping it so unclear about how it can be dealt with in ways that the government will eventually consider legal or not, that it makes it so that you kind of crowd out the good actors. And the only people who are able to make products are people who are willing to deal with that ambiguity because they're willing to take that risk. Or to not be located in jurisdictions that do that. Well, I mean, even if you're not located in the United States, but you touch a single US customer, the US regulators are going to say that they have jurisdiction. So you might be hard to get, but they still will consider you basically a criminal. So I mean, like that clarity here, it seems like that's the other approach that a country that isn't inherently anti-decentralized technology in a form of money whose monetary policy you can't control competing, that's the non El Salvador path to take with this. And I think Ukraine is not the first, but it's a growing trend among these countries who don't really like the monetary policy from outside, but at the same time are okay with competing currencies, or because they just feel like it would be worse to take kind of a hard line stance on it to simply clarify what is or isn't okay so that people who want to do the right thing and yet still want to build with this technology can be the ones who are building this, rather than the people who are comfortable taking legal risk because that's what they do every day. So folks, I appreciate this topic today. I think we're pretty much at the end of this discussion. Really again, this is another, you know, like what is surely going to be an installment of episodes about the El Salvador experiment. We've just seen the launch, it happened, some stuff went wrong, some people are unhappy about it, but it happened. And that in and of itself is something that, again, as long-time advocates for these types of technologies, personally, I find something that is worth celebrating. I hope that it goes well, and I hope that the experiment, you know, that is being conducted there has beneficial outcomes as opposed to negative outcomes, but surely it will be a mixed bag depending on your perspective and your situation in life. Today's show featured Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, and myself, Adam B. Levine. This episode was edited by Jonas and featured music by Jared Rubins and Gertie Beetz. If you've got any questions or comments, send me an email at adamandspeakingofbitcoin.show. And if you enjoyed it, leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. We sure do appreciate that. Until next time, thanks for listening.