 I feel like today, people like myself, we have actually the means and the power to fight and it has never been a time in the world actually like that until Bitcoin came in 2008. Everything is possible actually, because money is everything. When Fodig Jop was a high school senior growing up in Senegal, he was accepted to Emporia State University in Kansas to study engineering and to play basketball. But before enrolling, the value of the tuition money his father had set aside was cut in half overnight because of a backroom deal spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund and the French government. So all the money that my dad saved for me to basically go to college overnight was worth 50% less. That experience is what led to Jop's current career as a software developer working to make Bitcoin easy to use as a medium of exchange for anyone in Senegal with a smartphone. Bitcoin is not controlled by anybody, nobody can come overnight and say that now it's worth this much or 50% less or 40% less. So if you're in a country where maybe your money might be devaluated on the whim of other nations interfering with the local economy, storing your money in Bitcoin might be a better deal for you in the future to preserve your wealth and preserve your value. It's providing a parallel store value and a superior one that is not going to be the whim of the French government, the US government, the Senegalese. Senegal has been subject to monetary colonialism since 1945 when France ratified the Bretton Woods Agreement, which gave it control over the currency of 14 African nations. On the morning of January 11, 1994, the CFA Frank, or CIFA, was pegged to the French Frank at a valuation of 1 to 50. The following day it was cut to 1 to 100 after the French government gave into pressure from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to devalue the currency. Not only did this temporarily crush Job's college dreams, it also led to widespread political unrest, as West Africa's subsistence farmers could no longer afford to import essential goods, including drugs to treat malaria. It was really a big uproar for these African countries, but the local people really found themselves pretty much robbed because your purchasing power overnight was worth half. The cruel irony was that the economic fate of millions of Senegalese was completely out of their own hands. Despite the Human Rights Foundation's Alex Gladstein, no amount of protests could overthrow their economic masters. I went to the embassy, I got rejected. They say, actually, I didn't have enough money, and I was really heartbroken. Job's father was eventually able to pull together the money, and Job got to attend college after all. After graduating, he came across a video featuring a Senegalese scientist and historian who criticized the French-African monetary system. At this time, I wasn't actually very conscious about what really happened. Job says it was the first of three awakenings that set him on his current career path. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. The next was Steve Job's famous 2007 announcement of the iPhone, which ultimately led him to consider how poorly traditional banks serve the citizens of Senegal. Everywhere you go in downtown, there's a bank in every corner, Bank of Africa, Bank of this, Bank of that, Bank of whatever. And for me, I can't help but wonder, I said, with so many banks here, how can we have the lowest number of banked people in the world? Who are these banks serving? The people who actually live in these remote areas have to pretty much travel about two to four hours just to go inside a bank. Job's handheld computer created an opportunity to circumvent these institutions altogether. My vision of the future is that ultimately, your bank account is going to become pretty much your cell phone device. But Job's revolutionary new communication device needed a decentralized monetary system to match, which is where Bitcoin comes in. Reading Satoshi Nakamoto's groundbreaking 2008 paper led to Job's third awakening. When I read the white paper, they said, okay, well, this is a weapon for us to fight oppression. But the Bitcoin network alone isn't well suited to becoming a medium of exchange for everyday purchases in Senegal or anywhere else. It's because it currently has the capacity to process only a handful of transactions per second, which is where the Bitcoin lightning network comes in. So Bitcoin, for it to rival the likes of Visa and MasterCard, it would have to do upwards to like 20,000 transactions per second, or like maybe 25,000, even 25,000. Today, unfortunately, Bitcoin only does seven to about 12 transactions per second. Lightning network works like a bar tab. You go to the bar, you open up a tab, and you pretty much go back and forth and take as many transactions as you want, and then you settle in your bill at the end of the night. So Bitcoin is a base layer, but unfortunately, it's not really fast or nor is it cheap. So basically, what happens is you and I, we open up a channel or like a lightning network channel, you know, basically, we put some funds in there that we'll log, and then we can project as many times as we want, millions of times, basically. At the end of the month, we basically go settle on the Bitcoin layer itself, which is a little bit more expensive because, of course, it's the base layer, but lightning-wise, our transactions will pretty much cost a fraction of a 10. So it's almost instant and almost free. And then at that point, we can rival the master cards and the visas of the world. With Bitcoin, the lightning network and ubiquitous smartphones, Job thinks it's possible to build a new free market monetary system that will finally liberate Senegal and other African countries from the last vestiges of colonialism. I feel like maybe governments are still threatened, maybe. But to me, open-source technology is just beautiful. And I believe actually that our work is so important that we have to do it no matter what the consequences are. So if you can leverage this technology to fight the oppressor, right? And technology, open-source technology is actually what we need right now. And it's here. So why not use it?