Ben McKenzie

And they were so great.

And they care about the community.

So that's just an observation about how frauds work, which I think is really fascinating and kind of dark.

Exactly.

And the reason we went to El Salvador, Jacob Silverman and I and had a film crew down there.

We went there because El Salvador was the only country in the world that was trying to use Bitcoin as real money.

Huge marketing, I don't want to say stunt, but it was really a national experiment.

And like, can Bitcoin work as money?

Almost as their national currency.

It looked like that's where it was going to be heading.

Parallel to the dollar.

They were already dollarized.

El Salvador is a very poor country.

The average Salvadoran makes about $400 a month.

And the foundation of El Salvador's economy, a quarter of the economy, is remittances, is the money that the two to three million people of Salvadoran descent who live here send home to their friends and family.

That's really how the economy works.

And so they would use things like Western Union and MoneyGram in order to send money home.

The pitch from this guy Bukele, who now American audiences are familiar with for a different reason, but this guy Bukele came in, he was a former marketing guy, and he had the idea that, well, look, if we can build a system on top of Bitcoin, a national system, and people can use crypto to send money home and avoid the fees that Western Union and MoneyGram charge, because it could be like, you know, 5% or 10% or something like that.

And we just take a tiny piece, like we take a much smaller percentage to facilitate it.

Then it's a win-win.