Ben McKenzie
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I go out into the real world, and immediately I'm meeting guys like Alex Mashensky, who's running this company called Celsius that sure seemed like a fraud, and sure enough was, and he was arrested and ended up in jail now.
And so there are obviously a lot of sketchy players, but that doesn't mean that the fundamental thing couldn't work, right?
There are sketchy players and all sorts of stuff.
I would say one real pivotal moment was when I went to El Salvador.
It's the only country in the world that was trying to use Bitcoin as real money.
And to your point about sending money overseas and the validity of that argument.
El Salvador's economy, the foundation of it is remittances.
Millions of Salvadorans who live in this country, who send money home, and it's 25% of the economy.
It's really the foundation of the economy.
And so they built this Bitcoin system and it was like, maybe you could just use crypto to send money home and avoid the fees.
So if crypto was going to work as money anywhere in the world, it should work in El Salvador.
Like, I walk through a market, I try to pay, you know, it's a dollarized economy.
They make an average of about $400 a month in El Salvador.
It's an extremely, you know, poor economy, relatively speaking.