The complexities and bureaucratic hurdles Sophi faced when working in the Dominican Republic, and how these challenges highlighted the need for decentralized currency solutions like Bitcoin.

The unfairness of existing financial systems and how Bitcoin levels the playing field.

Sophi's key takeaways from Bit Block Boom: The shortcomings of the Muun wallet and the potential challenges of base-layer Bitcoin transactions.

1. The importance of understanding that not only is Bitcoin itself scarce, but there's also a scarcity in the transaction space on its base layer.
2. The pivotal role of the Lightning Network for the future mass adoption of Bitcoin.

Sophi's contact info:

Twitter: @internetsophi

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SimplyBitcoin

To learn more about Bitcoin: Join the Orange Hatter Women's Reading Club.  Visit https://www.meetup.com/womensbitcoinreadingclubwithorangehatter

Please email questions/comments to Tali@orangehatter.com

HODL UP is available at www.freemarketkids.com.

Remember: Knowledge is empowerment! 

Mentioned in this episode:

Free Market Kids Short

Get your HODL UP ("The best bitcoin game ever!") at www.freemarketkids.com.

Tali: Hi, everybody. Welcome to Orange Hatter. Today you're listening to part two of my conversation with Sophi.

Sophi: ... to come to the United States. It's hard to go through that trauma again.

Tali: Well, they're very lucky to have you and to guide them to Bitcoin, which is our hope. Right?

Sophi: No, and I'm very lucky to have Nico, honestly. We're like, our whole family is lucky to have Nico, because he's really the one who spearheaded us and made us understand and was like, no, you guys really need to understand this. And once he got it, you know, I started to understand it and he started telling his parents, my parents, his siblings, his cousins, like, I mean, well his cousin knew about it because he was living in Venezuela, so he knew, knew about it from necessity, but it's, yeah, we're, we're all very lucky and very privileged to not only know about Bitcoin, but to also know about self custody.

Tali: Yeah. Let's talk more about self custody. We were talking about how you became really convicted to look into Bitcoin was because you were trying to take money out of like your own money out of a bank. Tell us about that.

Sophi: So yes, this was my orange pill story, coincidentally. It took Nico two years to orange pill me, because I had a lot of questions and I wasn't sure that you know, of what Bitcoin really was.

Again, the technical aspect has never been my forte. I'm the type of person who understands things through A, experience, and B, asking questions. So when I started working in the Dominican Republic, this was one of my first jobs. I had to manage a company where I was doing real estate construction and also running like kind of a medical distribution center. And so to do all of those things, you had to be moving money left and right all day. And when I realized that it wasn't like the United States, you had to write a letter and put the company's rubber stamp on the letter. If not, it wasn't a valid piece of paper and you had to sign it and you had to put like, you know, the company number and all of these things.

It had to be like, In such a way written that, you know, unless it was in that specific sort of way, and unless that letter was taken to the right, you know, bankers and whatever, you weren't gonna move your money, you weren't gonna move your company's money that the company owned. So there was this system, this bureaucratic system that was slowing down the way that you could do business.

And then I started to understand, oh, this is why everything takes so long to do in these countries. I don't, I, I didn't understand it before... and I kind of felt like, well, maybe, maybe it's like a cultural thing, maybe it's... no. It, I mean, on a certain level it's a cultural thing, but it's not, it's, it's a, it's a bureaucratic thing where everybody makes it difficult for you to move your money, because of the laws and the steps that are in place for you to do this. So when I saw that this was happening, I was like, this is why we need Bitcoin. If we just had Bitcoin, all of these people would cease to exist. Like they would literally just like poof, go out of, like disappear and you wouldn't have to deal with them ever again.

And everybody would be able to do business freely and that's when things would get interesting. That's when real competition, real innovation, real entrepreneurship and business would surge in these countries because these people are very hard workers and they're smart and they want to succeed, but it's, it's, again, it's the government and it's the bureaucracy that doesn't let them. And that was very sad for me.

So I was like, wow, this is an unstoppable force. You can, you can self custody your Bitcoin. Nobody can take it away from you if you have it in self custody. You can transact with it peer to peer now through lightning more than the base layer because, well, we can get into that later, but that that is a revolutionary thing, and that would take power away from so many corrupt people that it would almost disincentivize corruption altogether.

It would actually go the other way. It would incentivize people to work harder and to create better systems that would compete, so that, you know, they would be the, the ones that have power, so to speak.

Tali: Yeah, and, and the strangest thing in my mind, I can't wrap my head around is that your money that you earned with your hard work isn't under your control.

That is really, really strange to me. But it also, like you said, like bureaucracy when it slows people down, it's almost like if I, if I make a very crude comparison to the mandated team projects in colleges, you know, you get a group of people together and there's almost no incentive for someone to do better than the other because, either if you can have a lazy person who never shows up to your group meetings and who will get the same grade as the hardest worker, who's the leader of the group trying to pull everybody together.

The person who cares the most works the hardest, but everybody gets the same grade and you take away the incentive. And then it's like, why should I work that hard? You know? Because you have other people who are just along for the ride. But if you take away the forced group, kind of like what you're saying, I almost see bureaucracy as that, that forced group, then you allow people who are willing to work hard to be rewarded for their hard work.

Sophi: Yeah, that's absolutely correct. I mean, dismantles, all of like the socialist kind of aspects of society where it's like now we're focusing on the individual because this is a peer-to-peer technology. So that's the thing about Bitcoin, it kind of disrupts all of the socialist kind of tendencies in society where we give everybody an equal outcome. Because this is a peer-to-peer technology, it focuses on the individual. So now the power is given back to the individual, but so is the responsibility. So that group effort that you're talking about, where one or two people, the hardest working people are carrying the weight of all the society, that completely goes away and now everybody has to prove themselves and is incentivized to prove themselves because if not, they won't survive.

And that's, that's exactly what Bitcoin is based off of. You know, you earn it, you buy it. Like you can't just like make it out of thin air and that, that's what the fiat has been for such a long time. People have just been literally making it out of thin air while you've had to work for it. And earlier you were saying that you know that you are, you're working for money that isn't really yours, that you can't even control.

Well, that's the illusion that also has to be broken from people. Like the money that you have in your bank account isn't actually your money. It's an IOU. It's something that the bank says, okay, this is your money on paper, but where is it? We are using it to make ourselves more money, and we're using it to enrich ourselves.

Tali: Yeah. I love that Bitcoin literally levels the playing field and I, I think, I think that's the, the one thing that I really try to convince precoiners about what is actually happening, the, the unfairness of, of what our system allows. So, okay. So I wanna talk a little bit about a recent post that you made, 'cause I know that you just came from Bit Block Boom and you wrote that you had three lessons that you, you learned three main lessons that you listed. Would you mind going over those? 'Cause I'm very curious.

Sophi: Yes. Okay. So the first one was: Muun wallet sucks. So I'll tell you a story about that, but actually I'll circle back to that one 'cause I know everybody wants to hear about it, but that's the least important one. The, the most important thing that I learned at Bit Block Boom is that not only is Bitcoin itself scarce... so as you know, there are only 21 million Bitcoin and there will only only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. But there's also scarce hash rate space. So the way that I kind of understood it is like the space to transact is like a memory card, and there's transactions that are waiting in line to happen and to clear and, you know, the, the miners and, and the nodes and whatever, like everyone is, is working really hard to, to make those transactions happen, and then those transactions leave and new ones come in. So I learned that in its high point, the there can only be like 200. I'm very much simplifying this. By the way, if you guys want a deeper dive on this, I suggest you go check out Bob Burnett talking about it at Bit Block, Boom, but I'm very much simplifying it, so excuse me, to all of the very technical people if I'm butchering it. But there, uh, on the high side, we can basically, on the base layer, we can only handle 200 a a little over 200 million transactions. There are 300 million companies in this world and there are 8 billion people.

And as we said, this is a peer-to-peer technology, so there are going to be, billions, presumably billions of transactions a day. What are we gonna do if that happens? Because if, if and when Bitcoin has, you know, mass adoption, there is going to be a problem with transactions, we're gonna have to be paying a fortune for these transactions.

And that leads me to my third point, Lightning, which is layer two is extremely important because what they do is that they take a bunch of those transactions and instead of processing them one by one, they consolidate all of those transactions, like as if you're, you know, the, the analogy that they use to explain Lightning to me is, If you're at a bar and you put your credit card down instead of paying drink per drink per drink, you putting your credit card down and you pay for the whole tab of the night.

So if you're consolidating all of these transactions and then putting them through the base layer, you're, you're helping a lot of that. You're, you're helping free up a lot of that memory space, like essentially. So that was one of the most important things that I learned because I did not know that that was scarce.

And essentially what Bob Burnett explained is that eventually that's going to not allow everybody in the world to have self custody. You're eventually going to have to rely on other people to keep your Bitcoin, which puts us, the early people, because we're still very early and I, this also made me realize just how early we are, in an extremely privileged position that essentially makes us banks, that essentially makes us trustees, people who actually have.

Bitcoin in self custody, though that is gonna be a very rare breed. It's not going to be as common as I once thought because I thought that we were gonna be living in a world where everybody would own their own Bitcoin and it would be this peer-to-peer fantasy land where like we could all transact freely and everything would be...

No, we're like, we, now are depending on Lightning and layer two developers more than ever. This is one of the most crucial aspects of mass adoption, and I did not realize that. And so that leads me to my first point, which is why Muun Wall, it sucks. So Nico was at a poker game. In Bit Block Boom. And he won some money and they sent it to him over from Muun Wallet to Wallet of Satoshi.

And when he, when he was like waiting for the money, he had to wait for like 53 minutes. Like, I don't know why, 'cause the block in. In average, it takes 10 minutes to find a new block. This block in particular took 53 minutes, and what I didn't know is that sometimes it takes three hours and sometimes, sometimes Muun Wallet will just like make a transaction, but it's not really there.

And like, I don't know, it was this whole disaster and, and Nico was so upset and like, we kind of just like made a joke about it. Like, Muun Wallet sucks. Muun Wallet is terrible. Muun wallet is the worst thing ever. And, and these wallets do kind of suck. Like if they don't have Lightning, you're again, base layer.

And in the future you might have to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get your money and to, and to get your Bitcoin. So, so that was the big lesson at Bit Block Boom for me. I think that, you know, as Bitcoiners, we all need to be aware of this situation. Lightning Network is going to be so important moving forward because if we just depend on the base layer, we might be paying a fortune for transactions and to actually receive our Bitcoin and, and so yeah, I think that lightning developers are absolutely going to be crucial for mass adoption and we need to give them more support.

Tali: Yeah, there, there are so many nuances with all of these wallets that are out there. Honestly, they get very confusing for non-technical people like me. So I would have to ask, you know, the developers for their recommendation on which wallet to get. But like you said, If you go on the base layer, because I think Muun Waller has two options.

You can go the base layer or you can go Lightning. And Scott and I were using like both when we were transacting, you know, for our games. But if you don't know to look for that because it's, it's just the difference between one tab being lit up and the other tab being a little bit dark. You just have to kind of pay attention when you're doing that and understanding the difference between the, the base layer and the Lightning layer, that's so important.

And like you said, we're still really early and it will be really interesting to see how the infrastructure is built up around, you know, the, what we're all hoping and anticipating will happen, which is when a lot more people enter the space and there's tons of interactions going back and forth.

Thanks for joining us today and learning with us today.

If the discussion with our guest resonated with you and you would like to dive deeper into the world of Bitcoin, don't miss out on joining the Orange Hatter Women's Reading Club. The meetup link is in the show notes. Also, if there are women in your life whom you think would both enjoy and benefit from learning more about Bitcoin, please share Orange Hatter with them.

Until next time, bye!