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Aug. 3, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:19:13
Episode 8 – Aug 3, 2023 – Ernesto Contreras from DASH, a super high speed cryptocurrency...
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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, the free speech video network.
And our show, which features co-host Todd Pitner, is called Decentralized TV. Todd and our guests will join us here in just a second.
Our guest today is Ernesto Contreras.
He is the head of growth for the project called DASH. Dash is a, well, it's a well-known cryptocurrency that's been around for many years.
And we're about to find out what's special about Dash, thanks to Ernesto.
So welcome, gentlemen, both of you to the show.
It's great to have you on today.
Hola!
Hi, guys.
How are you?
It's a pleasure talking to you.
I appreciate the Spanish pronunciation of my name.
Ah, yes.
It's great to be here.
You are very welcome here.
Yeah, thank you for joining us.
And yeah, it always bothers me when Americans do the really kind of lazy American pronunciation of Spanish names.
So I always try to give it a little bit more effort.
But hey, welcome, Todd.
Also, great to have you back.
Thank you.
We're all here today.
So look, the website is dash.org.
That's D-A-S-H dot O-R-G. And the slogan here is Your Money, Your Way.
And now, just before we turn it over to Ernesto here, just to say, we talk a lot about privacy coins here on the show.
Dash is not actually technically what we would consider to be a privacy coin, but some people think it's a privacy coin.
But it's kind of a misunderstanding.
So, Ernesto, can you kind of start off and tell us about Dash, what it is and what it isn't?
We'll start there.
Yeah, well, once again, thank you for taking the time and the friendliness.
So Dash is short for digital cash.
Dash is a payments cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin.
Dash was launched on the 18th of January of 2014 by Evan Duffield and a group of developers that, you know, saw that back in the day Bitcoin was great but was lacking some of the characteristics of money, of cash.
You know, when you pay with cash to someone That person or whoever gets the bill doesn't know that, you know, this bill came from Todd and Todd has, you know, 100 other bills in his wallet.
So in order to solve for that, Dash started having some privacy features at that point.
And Dash in that moment started being called Xcoin.
And then it was rebranded as Darkcoin a few months later.
And then in 2015, it changed to Dash.
That privacy feature that Dash has from those days is basically CoinJoin, which is a similar or the same function that Bitcoin has right now with different wallets, but it was implemented at the wallet level.
I see.
So back from those 2014, 2015, 2016 days, I believe Dash was the only coin that had CoinJoin at the core wallet And that gave the tag of a privacy coin to Dash from those days.
And if you Google, it's still out there.
And some, funny enough, or I don't know if it's funny, but some regulators still take Google as their only search tool.
That is funny.
Yeah, so...
But, you know, we have continued to work on the...
Digital cash angle.
That's Deeply ingrained into the DNA of Dash Core Group, which is the organization that I work for, and all of the Dash Network.
You know, we always try to bring more freedom by bringing more use cases, making it easier for people to live on their digital cash, and by integrating into as many and many merchants and providers that we can.
So Dash is digital cash.
Well, I have so many questions for you.
I know Todd does, too.
So one of my questions is, is Daesh better known in Central and South America?
Is that really where its core audience is?
Because I've watched a lot of your videos, and you've talked about Venezuela, you've talked about Brazil and Mexico and use cases, and it's amazing to me that In many ways, the people of Central and South American countries actually recognize the utility of this faster than do North Americans.
Yeah.
Well, I joined the Daesh team back in 2018, so they had already walked a few steps.
And back when I joined, We were having these conversations of, you know, crypto is not everything for everyone, so let's break it down and let's see where we can have some strategic growth.
And back in that moment, we saw that there were five segments of potential growth, and they were the people that were buying cannabis.
The cannabis industry is legal in many places, but even though it's legal, they don't have access to bank or banking systems.
So the other option was, of course, crypto trading.
The other option was remittances.
And the other vertical was online sports and gambling.
And the last vertical was places where the financial system is not working properly In the strict definition of high inflation and all of that, because when I say that today, many of my American friends are like, well, it's us.
But what we meant in that moment was, you know, hyperinflation, banking system collapsing, and so on.
So we started working with these five, and we called it five hypotheses of growth.
And then, you know, because you only have so many resources, you know, there's only so many people.
And once we started going there, one of the avenues that gave a lot more traction was the financial troubled economies with Venezuela at its head.
Because unlike what you said, for example, the U.S., a lot of people in Venezuela were getting paid in the local Bolivar's.
And then their purchase capacity was being decimated, you know, by half every week.
So in those places, we had a lot more integrations and a lot more usage.
And that's one of the reasons why you hear that of all the things we did, for example, in LATAM. Back in 2018, as far as I know, we were the first Crypto to be accepted at a whole complete restaurant.
Church's Chicken integrated Dash in 2018.
In Venezuela, we also had integrations in supermarkets and many more.
But what people don't know is that we, even though that got a lot of press and a lot of attention, we've continued growing.
And for example, I think it was two years ago, we launched an app.
I think we're good to go.
I'll close with this part.
For example, the legal cannabis industry, that opportunity never took off because banks were forcing the legal cannabis entrepreneurs to not take cryptocurrency because that was considered high risk.
So banks were telling them, hey, you're an ultra high risk if you're doing legal cannabis and then crypto.
So, you know, we see that governments are always trying to tell people what to do.
And, you know, we got to adapt to that and figure out how we can bring more freedom.
Wow.
Okay, Todd, you want to jump in?
Yeah, I always like to kind of walk before we run just for the sake of people who, you know, might be new to crypto.
And I just, I like this that I read.
It's Dash, which is near instantaneous crypto transactions.
You can transact with Dash nearly instantly, just as you would in the real world, at the point of sale.
A quick summary here.
Dash is a cryptocurrency that is optimized for payments and focuses on usability.
Dash introduced several innovations that improve scalability, speed, reliability, cost effectiveness, and user experience compared with other digital currencies.
The DASH network is also the longest-running decentralized autonomous organization, or we would say DAO, utilizing built-in governance to allocate network resources to organize and support the network, which I really want to dive into that too.
But it seems to me like the utility of DASH that you guys have focused on has been at The point of sale, which fascinates me.
Can you unpack that a little bit?
Tell us where you've been successful with that.
Go ahead.
Let me add to your question, Todd.
That's a great question.
How does Dash achieve this?
Is it a really fast block time?
Does it require fewer confirmations to be considered good?
How does it achieve the very rapid transaction capability that works at point of sale?
You've got to have that at point of sale.
Yeah.
Well, as I said, and thank you for bringing that up, that was a very good description of Dash.
We've been optimizing for being digital cash since, you know, day one, even before it was called Dash.
So Dash transactions take about a second and a half.
You know, usually when I tell you, hey Todd, I paid you, before I finish, usually you see the Dash in your wallet.
Wow!
And the cost is about a twentieth of a penny.
Wow!
So, the way this works is that, you know, we're a fork of Bitcoin, but Dash, and I'm going to try to keep it as simple as possible, Dash has a two-layer system.
There's the miners, And they mine blocks every 2.5 minutes.
And then there's another layer called masternodes.
If you want to run a masternode, which is in many ways similar to a regular node, except that you've got to have a thousand dash collateral, And you provide service to the network.
One of the services is that whenever a transaction is broadcasted, instead of having to wait for confirmation from all of the network, you get a confirmation from a subset of these masternodes.
And this happens in a much faster way.
And the technology is called instant send.
So, going a little bit more technical, when you see a Bitcoin transaction, in the code, the transaction is signed with TX as transaction.
You know, it has a bunch of things, the amount, the wallet, and then TX. In Dash, it is signed with IS, which means instant send.
And whenever the network reads that IS message, it tells TX. The receiving part, hey, this transaction is signed for instant send, therefore you can credit it immediately.
Then are those master nodes kind of randomly rotated or something to achieve?
Exactly.
There's a subset of about, I think it's 4,300 master nodes all around the world.
And then there's something called, I'm drawing a blank now, but it's a quorum.
That's a subset of these guys and that's rotated every whatever.
And then that quorum is the one that's randomly selected to validate the transactions for a period of time.
So even if you and I thought we were bad actors and we wanted to trick the system, Number one, we wouldn't know when it is her turn to be selected and then we would have to coordinate with a big enough number of other masternodes that we might not know who they are in order to treat the system.
So, back to what this means is that there are a bunch of exchanges That have taken the instant send approach.
And for example, when you send Dash to Whitebit, which is an exchange in Ukraine, you can be credited in a few seconds.
When you send Dash to Kraken, they detect your Dash in a few seconds and you can see it there.
So there's a bunch of exchanges that have taken the instant send approach.
And other exchanges are a little bit more cautious and they wait for one confirmation, which is still not bad.
Because you can send your Dash to Coinbase or to Binance, for example.
And, you know, within 2.5 or 5 minutes, you can have it credited.
We see a lot of usage for traders when prices of cryptos go crazy.
Because, you know, you have a bunch of Dash, for example, in your wallet, and you can take it out of your cold wallet and send it to an exchange and buy Bitcoin or sell it, you know.
Well, that's a really important point.
I've been using swap services like SimpleSwap to swap.
At first, I was swapping Bitcoin for other altcoins.
And I was like, oh, this is horribly slow.
So then I switched over to using Litecoin, which was a lot faster.
And I didn't know that Dash was supported by Kraken, by the way.
That's great to know.
But I wonder...
I wonder what exchanges exist between Dash and other altcoins, because if it's this much faster, you're right, it makes all the difference.
Yeah, there's about 267 exchanges globally that are accepting Dash.
You can go to Dash.org and see the full list, but from the major names, we have Coinbase, we have Binance, you have Bitfinex, You have almost all the major exchanges in local geographies.
And, you know, some of the...
I know for a fact there's an exchange called ChangeNow.
They implemented instant send.
So what happens is when you send Dash to ChangeNow, they detect it faster.
And then the other part is depending on the other coin.
Correct.
For example, if you're changing Dash for Bitcoin and they do six confirmations, you'll still have to wait, you know, your 60 minutes for the six Bitcoin confirmations.
Right.
But at least we're solving one of the parts.
Right.
And going to Todd's question about the point of sale, what this means is that whenever a merchant or a website decides to accept Dash and they do it through a system that does not force for unnecessary confirmations, you can what this means is that whenever a merchant or a website decides to accept Dash I'll send you in a minute or after we finish a link of me paying in one of the supermarkets that I mentioned in Venezuela.
And you can see that, you know, even though they integrated Dash into their cashier system, it takes about 10, 15 seconds for them to confirm the crypto transaction directly at their checkup store.
So we have already people in the real world using these things.
And this was before El Salvador became popular for implementing Bitcoin.
And we've got a few years of experience doing this and it's great to show I love this because I love use cases, right?
Exactly.
I mean, I'm loving what I'm hearing so far.
What's your take so far?
So, I read somewhere when I was doing my research, we're not only focused on fast, low-cost, scalable payments, but also on spreading seeds and seeing which one grows.
I'd love for you to talk about that, Ernesto, because there are two really important problems in crypto, I think.
Governance and then funding.
And it seems like you guys have what is called, correct me if I'm wrong, decentralized governance by blockchain.
And it's really kind of revolutionized how a decentralized community can effectively, fairly, and efficiently fund its own development.
Is that...
Do I have that right?
Yeah, yeah.
One...
And, you know, it makes me so proud to be part of Dash because we've been pushing the innovation and figuring out, you know, both the things that work and the things that do not work within these new systems.
And everything that you refer to, Todd, is talking about the DAO. So back when Masternodes were implemented, The same team that implemented this said, well, what else can we do with this besides fast confirmations?
Well, these masternodes can vote yes or no on certain projects that are put in front of them.
So what happens is, instead of, or unlike crypto projects where 100% of the mining rewards go to the miner, it all started with that saying, let's allocate 10% of the treasury of the mining reward to something called a treasury.
And let's have this thousands of masternodes vote every month for whether they think a certain project will help scale Dash or not.
And those are the seeds that I'm referring to.
If you go to dashcentral.org, you will see that right now there's about 15 active proposals and anyone around the world can go there and say, hey, You know, I have this decentralized TV show and I want to talk about Dash.
Would you sponsor it?
And then people will ask you questions.
People will, you know, check for your references.
And then if the Dash network believes that there is value If it's not on promoting itself on decentralized TV, then they will vote yes.
If they believe that it is not or it is not at this moment, they will vote no.
And then at the end of the month, there's something called a superblock.
Remember that I mentioned 10%.
It's a little bit more because it's changed in percentages, but let's say 10%.
It gets distributed at the end of that month.
And let's say that that 10% this month is going to be about 2,600 Dash.
If you ask for 50 Dash, then 50 of those 2,661 that will be minted will go to the wallet that you presented when you put forward your profit.
So that's a way of spreading seed.
And in the years of operation, Dash has had teams...
Independently and without asking for anyone's permission except the vote, Dash has had teams in Colombia, in Thailand, of course in the US, in the UK. Dash has funded exchanges to pay for their exchanging of the work, wallets, etc.
By the way, Dash Core Group is funded every month by this system.
See, I love this system, and I'm really glad you brought that up, Todd.
And thank you, Ernesto, for that explanation.
And the fact that you're getting so much traction with point-of-sale retailers, that really strikes home with me.
Because I run a very large certified organic lab-tested food and nutrition retailer.
And we want to be able to pay our upstream supply chain raw materials providers in crypto.
And so one of the things that I'm trying to do over time is to convert those people, like convert a supply chain, or as much as I can, into crypto.
And you can appreciate this, Ernesto, because the speed of Dash means that if I'm buying, let's say, 10,000 kilos of quinoa from a supplier, you know, if I... Pay by a credit card or a check.
They have to wait.
They have to wait to see if the fiat currency is ever going to be reversed or if it's fraud or whatever.
If I pay in Dash, man, in two seconds they know it's done, it's irreversible, it's immutable, they can ship the quinoa, and commerce moves faster for the whole supply chain.
So this is something near and dear to me.
So that's why I appreciate you hearing this.
Your comments on that, Ernesto?
Yeah, I did like this because usually it takes, what, three business days?
At least, yeah.
Yeah, for the fast ones.
Sometimes you go hold them for weeks.
It's crazy.
Yeah, I always remember, you know, a few years ago I started in China and I was sometimes receiving money from my home country, Venezuela, and once my money got lost.
And, you know, I started going to the bank with a Chinese friend, of course, to help me out.
And the way the money flowed back in that time, it was the Venezuelan bank was sending a wire to a Panamanian entity, Panamanian entity to a European entity, European entity to a branch in Beijing, and Beijing would then distribute to Shanghai.
And what happened is that in one of these stops, a number didn't match, so it got reversed.
And then when I went to my Chinese account, they were like, no, there's no money here.
And when I called the Venezuelan guys, they were like, no, there's no money here.
This is, of course, an extreme example, but this is how the legacy banking system is set up.
And we've been working to try to solve this problem for years.
And we've found a couple of key insights.
And number one, you'll be successful trying to I don't know if it's evangelized or to convince people.
If you can solve a problem for them, we were very successful at getting some things in Venezuela because in 2018, their point of sale system was completely not working.
Literally, you would go to a subway store and they wouldn't have a way to take your money.
So they were losing sales and we came with this thing.
We're like, hey, take that.
And they're like, yeah, give me that.
Number one, if you solve that.
And then number two, there are other Friction points like, you know, what's the fee to go in and go out?
How can I avoid volatility?
I would lie to you if I didn't say that, you know, that's a big deterrent because, you know, especially the cryptos that are not Bitcoin.
When we go, I mean, everyone loves upside volatility.
Hey, you paid me $10.
Now I got 12.
I love it.
But the other way deters people.
So if you put in place solutions for those things, number one, what is the problem?
You're getting the money fast.
Number two, making sure you're not losing value on the cash-in, cash-out, and then the volatility, then you can start getting some good tractions, and I'm sure your suppliers will appreciate that.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's the key.
Todd, you want to jump in?
It looked like you wanted to say something on that.
Well, you were talking about volatility, and I did have one question related to that, just if you could educate me a little bit.
I took a look at the chart, all-time chart, and it's kind of crazy.
It looked like, you know, it started out of the blocks and just shot up to, like, I think I have this right, $1,234.
And then it just came down and I think it hit like $41 and then went back up to $409 and I think it's trading around $34.61.
Can you explain that kind of volatility?
Because when somebody takes a look at that with a skeptical eye, that just looks like an initial pump and dump.
Well, but FTX, I got to add the FTX factor.
Like every altcoin chart looks kind of similar since FTX, actually.
Well, this goes back to the year, to 2014.
Oh, okay.
Right.
But yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I mean...
And I'm not throwing shade on it.
I'm just...
That's one of the things when you...
I wasn't even going to bring it up, but when you talk about volatility, I think it's fair to bring it up.
Yeah, yeah.
I opened myself to it.
So...
Before joining Dash, I was working at an exchange.
I'm very happy to say they're the largest exchange in LATAM. They're BITSO in Mexico.
Back in those days, I remember asking the CEO at the day, hey, why did Bitcoin or Ether jump or decrease in price today?
And his answer was, initially I thought he was being a little bit rude to me.
Then I understood, well, more people selling than buying.
More people buying than selling.
So what you see, and I saw it from back in 2016 days, is that price does what it does.
What I do tell you is that I've seen with Dash and other altcoins that the way their token economics are set up, Allows for them to react stronger or softer to the moves of the overall market.
And, you know, everything is linked to Bitcoin.
And what I've seen with Dash is that this Masternode system, because it locks up a lot of the floating amount of coins, I think, this is my personal opinion, makes the Dash price more susceptible to strong ups and strong downs.
That makes sense.
Yeah, because there are fewer remaining coins to buffer fluctuations.
So what I've seen, and I've been living this chart literally since 2018, so I've seen that sometimes when the market is either with a bad sentiment or a good sentiment, and something happens within Dash, the price shoots up.
Or the price goes down stronger.
For example, recently when the government of the US started mentioning coins, we were one of the coins mentioned and that brought us down heavily.
So my response to this is, and I've learned to give a very honest and careful response to merchants and people that are using this because If you're taking crypto as a way of payment, you're literally getting your wages and the food on your table through this method.
So what I say is, hey, this is a great method to get paid immediately.
You have to put in place solutions or checkpoints to mitigate volatility because it can hurt you, you know, or it can help you.
But you don't want to, you know, go to gamble with your paycheck.
I want to add a comment about volatility also to answer your point there, Todd.
As we are a merchant, and of course we accept payment in dollars, and nobody talks about the volatility of accepting payments in dollars, but I do because I know that every month Those dollars are losing purchasing power.
And of course the government misleads us with their fake inflation statistics as all governments do.
But you can go out to a restaurant or the grocery store and you can see, hey, I'm losing maybe 1% a month or maybe at some point up to 2% per month in the United States right now.
So As a merchant, I would rather accept something like Dash and knowing that, okay, I might do a batch conversion into something else every day or two days or three days or something.
I probably won't even go into fiat, but I might convert it to a stablecoin or something, right?
Yeah.
Whereas if I'm taking dollars, I have a 100% chance of losing purchasing power in those dollars.
In fact, I want to get rid of the dollars faster than I want to get rid of crypto, frankly.
Yeah, and something that...
It's very interesting that you say this this way, Mike.
This is one of the findings and the education points we have been discussing with merchants when they're taking crypto outside of the US, because what we see is we tell them, hey, Now you have, let's say, your Argentinian pesos, you have dollars, and you have another freedom tool that is crypto.
And within crypto, you can, you know, hedge in different ways.
So, you know, this Dash thing can go up stronger, but it can also go down.
And what I've seen CFOs do is that initially they're like, no, no, no.
Take this crypto and immediately convert it to dollars, for example.
And then as they start getting used to this new system, they're like, okay, I'll keep, you know, whatever, a small percentage of that in crypto alone, maybe Bitcoin or maybe the other.
And then they start seeing that that's another tool in their toolbox.
Right.
So once you're educated and just like you mentioned, well, maybe, you know, I know I'm losing whatever percent in dollars.
I'm in the US, what other options I have?
And that's the beauty of this internet of money.
It gives you more options.
And I'll turn it back over to you, Todd.
I'm sorry to keep interjecting here, but think about it.
As the US prints more trillions of dollars, You know, the actual real inflation or let's say the devaluation of the dollar will only increase.
I think this changes the equation in the minds of many people, just like what happened in Venezuela.
As the local currency began to become increasingly useless over accelerating time, more and more people needed something that was more stable and exchangeable.
I think the same thing is going to happen in the U.S. We are now at $32 trillion in debt.
The Fed is about to probably do another interest rate raise, and the money printing is causing the inflation that the Fed is trying to fight by raising interest rates, which is contracting the economy.
So the economy is getting hit hard, but the money is still becoming increasingly worthless.
Todd, what are your thoughts on all those dynamics?
Well...
What I'm interested in, I think about this, and because we live in America, and we just really don't feel it, right?
It's like, I remember going on a cruise a long, long time ago when Venezuela was very, very wealthy.
And I was admiring this family.
It was just like there was this patriarchy.
It had just like 20 family members there, and they were talking about Venezuela.
And then it was like overnight...
It turned upside down.
And Ernesto, I know that you lived that.
Your family lived that.
Would you mind just giving us a little bit of insight?
Because, Mike, when you say $32 trillion, and I think they printed a trillion last month, something like that, it's like, what is the tipping point to where we start going all Venezuela?
You know what I'm saying?
So what do we look for?
What could trigger that, and how fast can it happen, and what are the consequences once it does?
Yeah.
Well, number one, I really hope it never goes that way because it's way beyond numbers.
It destroys lives.
It destroys future.
It creates.
Just to give you a reference, Venezuela was about 26 million inhabitants back in 2010.
10, 2011, and 7 million of us migrated, one way or another.
So that's almost a third.
And many horrible ways from that wealthy place that you mentioned.
To give you a reference of what hyperinflation means, back in 2018, 2019, Venezuela had, I think, a million percent inflation.
And what that means is I was there for a Dash conference and I wanted to bring some chocolates to my family and friends in Mexico.
And I bought a bag of a very nice chocolate called Toronto, like the Canadian city.
And that same bag of Toronto's in the same place, at the same shelf, from one Friday to the next Wednesday, costed more than double.
So I paid, let's say, 100 believers on Friday, and then I was like, hey, I'm going to buy another back, and I paid 220 believers on, I think, three days later.
So that's what a million percent inflation looks like.
Prices double or more every week.
But the good news is everybody's wages kept up with it, right?
Yeah, that just destroys your eating capabilities, because what happens is Almost everyone, you know, makes their income in the local currency, and there's no way you can keep up with it.
It's impossible for me to remember the numbers, but, you know, let's say a doctor's wage was 50 bolivers, and then things start doubling every week.
And then within a couple of months of that monster inflation, you cannot even buy a bag of these chocolates that I'm talking about.
And then what brings to that point, which is your question, Todd, it's a series of wrong decisions by the central bank and the government.
And, you know, there's many flavors of that.
Many places of the world have lived similar situations, but they all have a few things in common.
Number one, a lot of printing of money.
Number two, price controls.
Number three, quota of the industries.
And then corruption and other things.
But these are the Three that most resonate with me.
My wife is Ukrainian, and when I speak to her mom about what happened back in the Soviet Union days, they apply the same formula.
When I read about the failing Germany, Back before World War II, they also applied the same formula.
So it's, you know, the government prints more money so they can pay the doctors and say, hey, we increased your salary to 75.
And then they go and they force the private entities to sell something at a certain price.
And therefore, private entity stops producing that.
And then when they bring it from another place, they must always keep up to the inflation.
So it's like, I don't remember the exact name in English, but there's like a steam cooker, that's the name, where you apply pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure.
And then the way it liberates, it's just by...
You know, in that mix, and kind of what you mentioned there, I saw this when I lived in Ecuador, too, that anytime you have price controls, you get tyranny, because then the government has to enforce price controls, and they have to enforce rationing or limitations.
So, for example, when I lived in Ecuador, the government was subsidizing gasoline.
So that the locals wouldn't rise up and riot because of unaffordable gas, right?
Well, but then gasoline was a lot more expensive in, let's say, Colombia or Peru or other places.
So a lot of people would try to load up on gasoline and they would export it.
They had a black market.
So then they had police SWAT teams cracking down on gasoline, smugglers.
And then I was going to a gas station to fill up with gasoline in a container one day for my generator because the power grid went down a lot.
Which will come to America, too, by the way, probably soon.
And the gas station attendant is like, no, you can't do that.
That's illegal.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
Oh, you have to have a permit to put gas in a container.
And they explained to me, because of the gas smuggling, because of the price controls and the subsidies, I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't get just a container of gas here.
But it's a spiral.
It's a spiral.
What you described happened in Venezuela as well.
So, like I told you, it's a series of things a lot of smart politicians say, oh, this time is going to work, and then they apply the same formula, and it's the same result.
And, you know, what you said...
It's all added into the mix of the big corruption because then maybe you pay the policeman or you pay this other guy at the gas station and they'll let you fill up the thing.
Oh yeah, we always paid the policeman.
Yes, we did.
And what you saw in Venezuela in particular is that Yes.
Yes.
Fill up his thing for his house, but then some general guard is taking thousands and thousands of liters to Colombia because I'll share with this data because there's so much we can talk about this.
At one point, The most profitable business, legal or illegal, in the world was taking gasoline from Venezuela to Colombia.
You're kidding me.
It was more profitable than selling cocaine or anything else because literally a full truck of gasoline costed less than a dollar and all you needed to do was pass it to the other side of the river And then it would be, you know, $10,000.
I don't know the amount, but it was more profitable than any other venture in the world, including weapons, including everything.
And of course, when you start seeing Bitcoin and crypto, you see that everything in life is about incentives.
So you incentivize that and then people are going to do it.
Oh, no.
There was a big river, and they had rigged up ropes, and they were swinging containers of gasoline across the river, and then the people on the other side would catch it, and that's how that smuggling route actually took place.
It's pretty wild.
But this is why DASH and projects that we're talking about here are so important, because when you have an honest ledger, You have an honest ledger.
You don't have to deal with all the money printing or necessarily the price controls, and you actually have something that people know that no government can just artificially create trillion-dollar entries on the Dash blockchain, for example, or the Bitcoin blockchain.
And this is what I think more and more people are beginning to realize is that an honest ledger has intrinsic value, even if it's backed by nothing physical.
Whereas a local currency like the dollar backed by the government has kind of negative intrinsic value because you know they're going to cheat.
They're cheating every day.
They're printing trillions every month.
So this is why the time for crypto right now in our world is right.
Let me ask you this.
In the interest of time, what about privacy?
Because we love privacy features in coins.
That's typically who we interview.
And Dash, in our view here, I think Todd agrees with me, we wouldn't consider Dash to be a privacy coin, and CoinJoin is fine in a wallet, but that's not really an intrinsic privacy algorithm, you know, or structure in the system.
Has Dash ever thought about privacy, or is that just not the mission of the coin?
Yeah.
Well, Dash was born with privacy roots.
That's why it was called Xcoin and Darkcoin.
And there's a lot of libertarians and people that really, really put privacy at the forefront of their lives, at the core of Dash users and holders.
So there's a big privacy component there.
Since implementing CoinJoin, Dash has started to develop other innovations like the Masternode Network, the DAO. Recently, we're working on something called Evolution, and that has put the privacy discussions a little bit on the back burner.
So while we continue to work and we continue to Make sure that there's at least user-grade privacy in the network, that those elements like stealth addresses or the signature rings have not been implemented or, to be honest, not even discussed at the network level.
Maybe that's a discussion that we should talk about soon.
Some people are wanting to bring it back and put it more at the front and center.
I personally think that it's a human right to have privacy, and you need to figure out how you're going to balance that with the very strong view that regulators are taking over right now.
Yeah, very good point.
Todd, your thoughts?
Yeah, my question right now is what's next for Dash then?
You're the global head of business development, so you would know.
What are you really focused on?
What should we all expect?
Yeah.
There's two paths of growth for Dash in the immediate future.
Number one, we'll continue working on the payments issue.
And that, you know, sadly has not really taken off because not a lot of people are paying with crypto for several reasons.
One of them, I would say, in the U.S. is that, number one, it's a taxable event.
So people are not so happy to have to, you know, tell someone when they pay for an ice cream with crypto.
And number two, it's still a bit with friction.
And there's not too many problems that you're solving.
But we still work on that.
We'll continue adding more platforms.
We had this amazing partnership with an app called Dash Direct that allowed you to spend Dash in more than 150,000 locations in the US. Regrettably, because of the Regulatory environment, they're slowing and they're not going to be able to continue taking crypto.
So we're losing that partnership and we're figuring out how to bring something else.
That's one angle we'll continue working on.
Can we just stop on that real quick?
Yes.
So what was the regulatory environment?
Literally, what stopped?
Because that court decision on Ripple and XRP just happened that really works in your favor, so things might be changing.
Oh man, what can I say?
There's like the way I, Ernesto Contreras, as a cryptocurrency user sees this, and this is not the position of Dash, The way I see this is that there's like two fronts of the battle.
There's the legal battle and the things you see on the news and the statements that politicians and regulators say, and then there's the actions that partners and the banking system are taking.
So, yeah, there are some wins, but at the same time, what I think is happening is that a lot of banks Are you know making it more difficult for wallets or for Crypto cards and many of these solutions to operate.
So some businesses, especially those businesses that operate in the U.S. and have multiple services, have had to at least not continue accelerating their crypto products.
So is Dash now just kind of strategically, and I can understand why, just focusing anywhere but the U.S.? No, not really.
Like I said, the Dash network is completely decentralized.
There's a big base of users in the US. And the beauty of crypto, and I saw it in Venezuela, is that it's like water.
You know, you can't stop it.
You're holding here.
And if you block it in one place, it's going to find another place to go.
Right.
With this partner, you know, they're not continuing their crypto venture for now, but we already found other partners that are willing to take over and continue serving this segment.
You mentioned...
You mentioned, Ernesto, that people were not really keen to be able to use their crypto at point of sale because that would become a taxable event.
Can you unpack that?
Because I understand that it's taxable for the retailer.
For the merchant, yeah.
Or for the merchant.
But if I bought something from Mike, why would I have to report anything to anybody?
Yeah, well, I'm not a tax expert, so I'm repeating what some of our partners have said.
And what I understand, and again, I don't live in the US, so this is even...
So what I understand is that when you sell crypto in the US, you have to compare that to when the moment that you bought it, and then that's either a profit or a loss.
So when you're paying for crypto, In the view of many of the tax people that I've spoken to, that can be considered a sale.
And therefore, you know, let's say that you bought your Dash, you know, a few days ago at 33, and now it's at 38, then you would have to say, hey, I made five bucks on this transaction.
Or vice versa, you bought at a thousand, and now you're selling at 33, so you can write that off as a loan.
There are systems that help you to take care of this.
But still, there's a big doubt because there's not a lot of huge clarity on whether, you know, I'm paying for someone's ice cream.
Is that an actual sell?
Yeah.
Our theme here at decentralized.tv is building the infrastructure of human freedom, and that infrastructure you just commented on, that doesn't sound like it leads to human freedom.
Mike Adams, are you familiar with privacy coins?
No, but what Ernesto just said, I believe that's the correct interpretation currently, but there needs to be a lot more clarity.
I mean, I can only imagine millions of people scrambling to go through their whole history of like, what did I ever pay for this coin?
Or maybe, actually what I bought the ice cream with was coins that I bought at a higher price.
Yeah, let's do that.
I just want to give, since we're going to wrap up this segment here with Ernesto, I want to give him an opportunity to just kind of summarize Dash for the audience and just kind of hit the highlights again and to wrap it up.
And then, Todd, you and I will have a reaction to this interview, which has been really fascinating.
But go ahead, Ernesto.
It's all yours.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you, guys.
So I was going to finish with the other side of growth for Todd and the audience.
We're very close to releasing an upgrade to the Dash network called Dash Evolution.
Evolution will allow to have all of these high-efficiency features And allow you to write on the blockchain.
So one of the first examples that we are about to launch is names.
So instead of sending money to my cryptographic address, you'll go into the Dash wallet.
And if I secure the name Ernesto Contreras, then you Google that.
Well, you'll look for that and then you'll be able to send me money.
So that's going to open up a bunch of ideas and things.
And I see Mike kind of thinking of some of the options.
So that is also something that's coming.
And something that we just released, we released something called GroveDB, which is a way, which is a cryptographic database that enables you to do secondary index query proofs.
What this means in...
Kind of my accent field English is that you'll be able to search a database and get a cryptographic proof with more than one variable.
So let's say, for example, That you wanted to search how many people are born in Brazil and they had the flu in 2020.
If you had that database, you would search for everyone that was Brazilian and get a cryptographic proof of that.
Everyone that had the flu get a cryptographic proof of that.
And everyone that had it in this year get a cryptographic proof.
And that's going to allow you to do searches that are validated Within more complex things.
And that's part of all of evolution.
That sounds powerful.
I didn't think anybody got the flu in 2020.
They vanished.
Maybe that's a whole other debate.
We have a bonus whole episode for that.
I can imagine.
But I think what you're describing there, Ernesto, is that Dash is going to be much more than just a coin.
It's going to have a computational infrastructure layer that I think a lot of innovative developers will find very interesting things to do with that.
And I don't know what...
I mean, I'm very familiar with relational databases and indexing and so on and SQL queries and things like that.
I'm trying to think about the use cases for that.
Not clear to me yet, but we're open to hearing about that more.
I'm sure you have some interesting use cases in mind, but we're going to have to wrap this up here for now, just in the interest of time.
But Ernesto, I want to say thank you.
This has been a really fascinating discussion.
It's been a real pleasure.
Yeah, it's been my pleasure to talk to you guys.
The conversation has been very interesting and, you know, thank you for giving us the opportunity to show that, you know, Dash has come from a history of payments and efficiency and now we're getting ready to go into the next stage,
which is going to bring those same features of efficiency and fast transactions into all of these opportunities of more complex You could use it for elections.
Voting or supply chain tracking of food materials.
Yeah, with the efficiency of a second transaction and inexpensive.
So we're ready to, you know, enter this new world of, I don't know if you want to call it Web3 or crypto or whatever, but it's just the future of finance.
Very cool.
Ernesto, is there anywhere online that people could study up more on that?
I mean, because it sounds fascinating.
I was just looking at your website and I'm just wondering if it's anywhere there.
Yeah, definitely.
You can go to Dash.org and go for the blog.
And in the blog, you can look for Grovedb, that's G-R-O-V-E-D-B as in database.
And, you know, I'll send you guys some links so you can post them.
And this is still in the, you know, the research phase of what can be done.
But GrowthDB is out already.
And one of the first things, and we mentioned about growth, is I'm talking to some partners and kind of presenting to them.
I feel like back when people invented the wheel, we're like, hey, we got this thing.
What can we do together with it?
So we're looking for all these builders and dreamers to try to build more things with us.
Very cool.
Love it.
All right.
You can stack wheels.
Use them as big poker chips.
I think that's the only utility for it.
Well, that might be it.
All right, the website, folks, is dash.org.
This is D-A-S-H.org.
And I think you can find the Dash coin on various exchanges and so on.
I mean, all the swap sites, I think, support it, and many exchanges do as well.
So we're now going to say thank you, Ernesto.
It's been a pleasure.
And now we're going to talk a little bit behind your back, but we'll say nice things.
So don't worry about it.
It'll all be good.
But thank you for joining us today.
Thank you, guys.
It's been an amazing conversation.
Thank you for the time.
Thank you for the invitation.
And I hope that we can talk a lot more in new places.
Look forward to it.
Yeah, you're definitely welcome back.
So have a great day.
We'll talk again soon.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you, Todd.
All right.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
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Okay, let's take a look at the scorecard for Dash, Strengths and Weaknesses.
The strengths are, it has very fast transfer of coins, just seconds.
Very low transaction costs of just a fraction of a penny per transaction.
Healthy daily volume of $61 million.
It has a two-tiered distributed node system for security and speed of transactions.
This makes it very useful for point of sale retail transactions.
It also has an innovative DAO governance structure and is widely available through crypto exchanges.
So it's relatively easy to convert Dash back into fiat if that's what you want to do.
It also has a decentralized API. Weaknesses Dash is not technically a privacy coin and is largely based on Bitcoin code with additional enhancements.
Dash does not conceal transaction amounts or wallet IDs on the blockchain.
This would make Dash easier for governments to confiscate or track compared to true privacy coins.
There are also high barriers for point of sale retailers to upgrade their retail systems to accept any crypto, Dash or otherwise.
Best use cases.
High utility for local retail transactions such as farmers markets and retail stores where very rapid transaction time is necessary.
Also, Dash is excellent for online retail where transaction certainty must be determined in mere seconds before shopping carts time out.
All right.
And Todd, my co-host, joins me now to give you the reaction to that interview with Ernesto Contreras.
And Todd, I don't know, I feel really positive.
I mean, we learned a lot.
And I love what he was describing.
What's your take on it?
We learned a lot, but barely scratched the surface.
True, it's always the case.
Yeah, I would recommend for anybody just to go to YouTube and search for Ernesto Contreras, which I can't say it as well as you, but it's C-O-N-T-R D-E-R-A-S and put Dash next to it.
He'll pop up.
He's been a face for Dash for a long, long time.
And if you're Dash curious, which I am now very much so, please go watch some of those videos because he takes a lot deeper dive into it.
What appealed to you, Mike?
Well, so you know I'm all about use cases, and I think that the real-world use with a rapid transaction system, I think that it really shows that Dash has practical application in the real world.
And the name fits.
Dash implies that something is fast, and this is blazing fast.
I didn't know it was even that fast.
But that's pretty amazing with the master nodes and how they're rotated in order to be, let's say, 51% attack resistant, things like that.
So I love what I learned about Dash as well.
The only thing that it lacks that I know you and I both agree on is privacy, right?
Right.
We both love privacy, but not everything has to be privacy, right?
So in terms of Dash versus Bitcoin, neither one of them we would consider private, but in terms of point-of-sale transactions, Bitcoin is just too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome.
Bitcoin's never really going to work to go out and buy a coffee, really.
I mean, not on a large scale.
But then you have Litecoin, right?
So there are some alternatives out there.
True.
Right.
That have been in the market forever and are accepted as well.
So I really, man, I would really encourage them to go down the path of privacy, resurrect it.
You know, it's been part of their DNA. True.
Resurrect it and see if there's anything that you could do.
Because, man, what I didn't like hearing, and I think Probably, right?
But in the U.S., I can only imagine.
I mean, can you imagine literally paying for coffee and then having to report on it that, you know, you bought that Dash for $0.30 and you bought the coffee at $0.40 and so you have a capital gain there, right?
Yeah.
You know, nobody's ever going to do that.
Nobody can track that.
I mean, but I think it's a good fear tactic to keep crypto out of point of sale.
Well, it's a creepy fear tactic, that's for sure.
But, you know, hence why a lot of people prefer privacy coins, because it's very difficult, obviously, for any third party or bad actor to track privacy.
you know, how much you have or what you're doing with it.
Right.
Right.
Whereas the more transparent coins like Bitcoin and like Dash, you know, can obviously leave behind those telltale signs.
But I love the fact that he was talking about in Venezuela, you know, in Venezuela, the number one concern for people at certain periods of time was just, Hey, we just need a monetary system that works and doesn't lose half its value every week.
Right.
Right.
So privacy was not the number one concern in that situation.
It was more like, how do I buy food in a reliable manner and feed my family?
Yeah, fast, low-cost, scalable.
You know, those were the key driving factors there.
Exactly.
And I would imagine that Dash's price was a lot more stable than, of course, the local currency, you know, in terms of its purchasing power.
So depending on what's happening with your local currency, it shows the relatively higher intrinsic value of a cryptocurrency, even if it has some built-in volatility.
And I think this equation in the US as the money printing gets even more insane, I think it's a natural that more and more people are going to migrate into crypto.
I really do.
Yeah, I think they have to.
You know why?
Because of this show, Mike.
Well, yeah, this show.
And also, did you see Robert Kiyosaki?
You know, he's the Rich Dad, Poor Dad author.
You know, it's so funny.
He and I are saying almost the same thing now.
I saw that he was talking about the BRICS Nations meeting in August and the de-dollarization.
And he said everybody should buy gold and silver and Bitcoin.
And that's almost the same thing that I say.
You know, you've heard my pockets.
I say gold and silver and crypto.
But what I mean is more privacy crypto, by the way, typically.
But Kiyosaki is like gold, silver, and Bitcoin.
So cool.
We're kind of on the same page.
But the bottom line is it's not going to be the dollar.
Or think about Venezuelan currencies or European currencies or the yen right now in Japan.
Right.
Well, if it were the dollar, and you, instead of saying that you recommend gold, silver, and crypto, and instead you said, I recommend fiat, you'd have to write a book that's called Rich Mike, Poor Mike.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, if you hold fiat, you're going to hold it – I mean, you're just going to keep losing value to the very end.
Yes.
And it's going to be worthless at some point.
And how many times has this happened throughout history, the history of governments and nations and money – It's a total step and repeat.
It is.
The other thing about Dash that I... Well, about all of crypto, and I mean, we can see it when we actually take a look at these coins when they launch and what their life was like, and man...
At one point in time, they were a $4.3 billion market cap, and today they are $380 million.
Now, $380 million is still pretty darn impressive for me.
There's a lot more liquidity there than there is in a lot of the privacy coins, for sure.
But isn't that just kind of mind-boggling how...
Something can just massively gain that kind of market value, over $4 billion, and then boom, poof, gone.
There are macroeconomic factors here that I think we've got to bring into play.
So when interest rates were kept close to zero by the Federal Reserve for so many years, that created a money amplification effect.
And it caused, of course, inflation, or I should say, asset appreciation in housing.
In the stock market, but also in crypto.
So a lot of the money was flooding out.
The easy money, the almost free money was flooding out of the traditional finance system into crypto.
And then when the Fed began really aggressively raising interest rates, kind of pulling a switcheroo on the world, and we had the FTX collapse kick in.
Sure.
Then there was this massive contraction of money.
We're already seeing housing corrections.
We're seeing corrections in commercial real estate, huge corrections there.
We're seeing bank failures and crypto contractions.
So we have to understand that there is, in fact, there is a two-way path between traditional finance and crypto.
And they do affect each other.
So the Fed's policies will affect crypto.
And that's kind of scary to me because I don't like the Fed and its policies.
I would rather crypto not have a bridge into fiat currency.
But the stable coins make that happen, like Tether, for example.
So there you go.
And unfortunately, I think you need it.
You need those stablecoins in the ecosystem.
And currently, you need the on-ramps to be able to get your fiat into the system.
Yeah, it's true.
It's true.
But one of my big concerns has always been if you're the Treasury and you want to clobber Bitcoin, let's say, you would just print money because you can print money.
It costs you nothing to print more money as the Federal Reserve or the Treasury.
And then you just buy up Right.
and then you just crash it whenever you want to discredit Bitcoin.
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
Because if you can print trillions of dollars and then you can just use that to buy Tether and then use Tether to buy Bitcoin, then there's your mechanism.
So $32 trillion now, I know that they don't call you microdomos, but where do you think that can go?
Oh, man.
I'm convinced they're going to print money until the end.
It's going to be a big hyperinflation blowout.
Yeah.
There's no question.
So then when that happens, people can say they watched this show and they got a story told to them about Venezuela and what's going to happen.
I didn't get to ask him the question I wanted to.
I kind of forgot.
I'm sorry.
But I was really interested on a human level.
You know, when that all started to happen, and obviously wages didn't match the hyperinflation, it's like, what did people do?
Now, he said like 7 million fled, and I get that, but those who didn't, it's just like...
I mean, my mind just goes to what can I do today, right now, where if this ever happens in the future, you know, I at least have a little bit of runway.
And we talk about this, you know, the food forest, I think.
Yeah, food forest is a huge part of it.
We're both very prepper-minded, so we have taken...
But people need to wake up to the fact that Venezuela can happen here.
Yes?
Well, yes, it can happen.
I mean, I would say observers would point out that, of course, the U.S. dollar has a much larger M2 money supply globally and, of course, the world's largest debt market as well compared to Venezuela's currency.
So it may not happen as rapidly or as severely, but it can certainly happen.
From what I understand, that life in Venezuela, for those who were not fortunate enough to have hard money assets, you know, if you had gold or silver, you were in great shape.
Or if you had Bitcoin, you were in great shape relative to everybody else.
But those who didn't, you know, think about waiting eight hours in line to buy your daily allotment of rice and a chicken leg or something, because that's what the government says.
Or think about the fact that you're a bread shop.
You make bread.
That's your living.
And the government comes along and says you can only sell a loaf of bread for this certain controlled amount.
But if you sell that bread, you're going to go out of business because it doesn't cover the cost of the wheat that you have to buy.
So what do you do?
You start creating pastries.
And you sell the pastries so that you don't go broke.
And then the government outlaws the pastries.
And then they come arrest you for not selling enough bread.
And trying to make money on patients, like that happened in Venezuela.
Wow.
Yeah.
So any kind of economic insanity combined with government authoritarianism can also happen in the United States.
I mean, you're seeing sort of examples of this with the attempted crackdown on crypto, which is in many ways failing, by the way, but they don't want any monetary system that competes with their monopoly, clearly.
Right.
No, of course not.
The Druid Babylonian bastards are not going to go down easy, Mike.
No, no.
But what I love about crypto is that they can't stop it.
They can declare it to be illegal.
Right.
That doesn't stop the nodes from running all over the world.
So, I mean, you can say it's something.
We call it like crypto transgenderism.
It's like you can say it's a man, but it's still a woman or whatever.
The nodes are still running.
You can say it's illegal.
It doesn't stop Bitcoin.
My private crypto self-identifies as gone.
They said it was illegal, so it's just gone.
Yeah, or as in the firearms industry, boating accident.
Like, where are all your rifles?
Boating accident.
Boating accident.
There must be a million guns at the bottom of the lakes in Texas or something.
I don't know.
But bottom line is, just in the interest of time here, I... I really like what I learned about Dash.
And I think Dash shows that specialization of your coin, focusing on point-of-sale, rapid transactions, gives it utility above and beyond any other coin that I've seen.
And there are point-of-sale Right.
Right.
I'm pretty sure.
- Right.
- So, I mean, and thus their focus, right?
- Well, exactly.
And also I was gonna mention Monero.
So, you know, Monero has great privacy, right?
Number one privacy coin.
But you and I both have experienced that sinking the Monero blockchain is a very painstaking and long process and its transaction speed, it's faster than Bitcoin, but it's not blazing fast.
It's not as fast as, let's say, Dash, typically.
So this, I don't know what you call this second layer they have.
It's kind of like a lightning network on Dash, you know, the second layer of the masternodes, whatever they call it.
But it's a very clever thing, and it gives Dash utility at the point of sale that I don't know that anybody else has really achieved that, privacy or otherwise.
You know what boggled my mind was hearing that they're on like 237 exchanges.
I may not have that number wrong, but a lot of exchanges.
And man, I just know from covering crypto the last two and a half, three years, is it costs money to get on those exchanges.
It does.
And it takes a lot of development time.
And so kudos to them to doing however they manage to make that happen.
I don't know.
But to me, that's just a colossal feat.
Yeah, clearly.
See, that's the other measure of these projects is whether they have, I think, a well-organized advocacy group, outreach group.
Right, right.
And are they effective?
And Dash is.
Yeah, I think that's their DGBB, what is it?
Decentralized Governance by Blockchain.
Yeah, that's what he called it.
That's where you can submit proposals.
You can submit proposals, and if the nodes, if the master nodes end up voting for it and liking it, you get it funded, which is pretty cool, because in a decentralized community crypto, You've got to get the money from somewhere.
You don't go to the bank.
That's true.
That's true.
Oh, also, we need to say, we need to have disclaimers here.
Now, most, you know, we always tell the audience whether we hold the coins of the project we're talking about.
And also, you know, we don't charge anybody to be a guest on our show.
No.
I do not hold any Dash, and that's kind of my fault.
I normally do hold the coins and play with the wallets and everything before we do an interview.
So this is my oversight.
I should have used the wallet.
I didn't fit it into my schedule.
So I don't own any Dash.
I probably will, though.
I probably will...
Acquire some.
I want to check out their wallets.
I want to check out the transaction speeds.
So that's my plan.
I'll probably buy some amount of Dash moving forward.
What's your disclaimer?
Do you hold any Dash?
Yes.
I do not hold any Dash, and I'm with you that I probably will.
I likely will.
Yeah.
I mean, just because of Ernesto.
I mean, he impressed me.
And again, not only on our interview, but on all of the other interviews that I've been consuming, just prepping for this.
He's a super likable guy.
Yeah, he is.
He's a good guy.
No, I love his attitude.
You know, that's the other really cool thing about what we do here on this show.
Think about how many amazing people that we've met who are from all over the world, you know?
Like our friend Ruben in Malaysia.
And we have another project leader we interviewed out of Israel.
And that introvert over in Orlando, Jim Gale.
Yeah, the introvert, right?
That's funny.
But, you know, we're going to be talking to people all over the world on this show.
And, you know, cryptocurrency, it has a global perspective and it is borderless.
You know, you could send Dash to somebody in Venezuela or in Russia or China or Singapore or wherever.
And that's one of the utility factors of all these coins is they are all borderless.
Which, of course, drives the government insane trying to stop it.
Like, no!
We have to control your transactions.
But, yeah, I think I'm going to keep my eye on Dash.
Yeah.
And especially as a retailer myself, you know, I'm wondering if Dash is something that we should consider accepting.
Well, you know, they said they're integrated into ChangeNow, right?
They did say that, yeah.
And the cool thing about ChangeNow, I really love those folks.
Yeah.
You can accept, as a merchant, any of the cryptos, and on the back end, have an immediate conversion.
If you want it all converted and narrowed to it, If you wanted it all converted to the green blah, you could.
Is that a new Elon Musk coin?
What is that?
The green blah.
The green blah.
The fiat.
The green fiat.
Well, yeah.
I know we're looking at the Change Now tools.
My devs are working on accepting various coins.
In fact, they're talking with...
Well, I don't want to give out anybody's names without permission, but they're talking to some good people that you know about some integration.
So we'll just leave it at that.
But we do need to wrap up this segment for today.
Our sponsor for today is the satellite phone store, SAT123.com, which gives you backup communications.
Works anywhere in the world, including Venezuela, by the way.
You can do two-way satellite text messaging with these bivy sticks, or you can get these InMarsat phones that use the InMarsat network, obviously.
I'm sorry, these are Iridium phones here.
The InMarsat down below, these are out of stock.
So, correction there.
These are the Iridium phones.
And, again, they work anywhere in the world, including oceans and deserts and so on, anywhere on planet Earth.
As long as you can see the sky, right?
So there you go.
SAT123.com.
Yeah, it's not going to work in the bottom of a cave or, you know, a sinkhole.
A bonus hole.
Or a bonus hole.
It's not going to work down in the bottom of a bonus hole.
You've got to be able to see the sky.
Otherwise, you've got no comms.
All I have to say is we did it.
We got bonus hole in this episode, too.
That's our weird logo.
It's an inside joke.
Yep.
We're going to fit that into every episode somehow.
But...
Don't freak out the guests with that.
The guests may not know what that refers to, so...
We'll wait until our one-on-ones.
We've got to wait until after the guest leaves.
We don't want somebody to hang up on us like, what are you talking about, click?
And to think, I agreed to come on your show!
And then they're gone.
That could happen.
Who knows?
But that would be the funniest interview ever.
That would probably make their coin very popular.
That's true.
All right.
Well, Todd, another great show.
We've got a break here because we have another interview coming up.
But thank you for your time.
It's been fun.
Oh, this always is.
Thanks, Mike.
Thanks, everyone.
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