Ben McKenzie

But not only that, on the day that it came into effect, the price of crypto crashed dramatically.

fantastically, like 50,000 to 40,000 in the span of a few minutes or a few hours or something like that, which is really interesting.

Because if you think of the whole thing as a lot of like insider trading, that might be front running.

You see that this big publicity event is happening.

People are expecting the price to go up.

That's a really good time to sell.

As it goes up, you sell.

And you could be shorting at the same time and making a ton of money.

Anyway, I have no evidence that that's true, but it is weird that it crashed so quickly.

That failed, but Bukele was undeterred.

He was like, we're going to build a Bitcoin city in Eastern El Salvador.

We're going to mine Bitcoin from a volcano, and we're going to build a city off of the proceeds.

And there was like a model of this golden city, very Gaddafi-esque.

And I'm like, okay, I got to go check it out.

So we drove 100 miles east.

tiny little fishing village, super remote.

San Salvador is a somewhat big city, but it's a very small country.

They are also a net importer of electricity.

Like they don't produce enough electricity for their own country already.

So this was not financially feasible, but it was a marketing ploy.