Hi everyone, I wanted to make a video to talk a little bit about some things that have been going on in the Argentine media and some comments that I made about the Global Tech Forum in Argentina, amongst other things. So, let's go through it.
I am a supporter of the philosophy of what Milei is trying to do in Argentina, and it’s pretty remarkable when you see the cuts that have resulted in a massive reduction in inflation and a real measurement of poverty. The current state of affairs in Argentina as a whole has changed. When he got elected as a proper libertarian, I was deeply excited about the prospect of us being able, as a society, to finally test a different way of governing and run it in real time against other countries. Over an arc of three to five years, we could actually have data points on whether these policies work or not.
For a long time, people like Ron Paul and others of his kind have been discussing why these are good ideas. I wanted to meet Milei, spend some time with him, and basically pick his brain about where he wants to go, what he wants to do, and to understand whether blockchain technology could serve as an appropriate substitution for the governing services that the government of Argentina used to have.
You see, you can’t just cut something that represents 70% of your economy and assume that the free market is going to come in and do an adequate job. There are many things that the free market does well, but it would be utterly disingenuous to say that everything always has to be the free market. There are reasons why we have laws, the rule of law, courts, commercial protections, oversight, and police. The question is: what is the balance between public and private? Can there be a third option, blockchain, that acts as a regulating mechanism for both and an interoperability mechanism to avoid a government from getting too powerful and overcoming the private sector, or the private sector getting too powerful, forming a cartel, co-opting the government, and turning everything into a corporatist society? This creates incumbency advantages using regulation, which is what has happened in the United States.
I was very excited to see if there was an intersection point between these two if it was part of that agenda. Initially, we flew out to Argentina and spent quite a bit of time talking to various people in and out of government. We went through the entire presidential protocol, and my prior statements are accurate: it got terminated. It got terminated by people in the orbit of the president who seemed to want to turn access into a commercial game rather than a game of merit.
The media in Argentina reached out to me; many people wanted to interview me and say, “Tell us more about that.” Their intention is not to have a real dialogue about who Milei is or what he is doing; they simply want to run the headline “American billionaire says Milei is corrupt and accepting bribes.” That’s the headline they want, and I’m not going to give it to them. I just won’t do it. I know the game these ghouls play; I know who these people are, and they have absolutely no interest in the future of that country or the solvency of that nation. All they want to do is get ratings and play a political game. Our media does exactly the same thing in the United States.
There are many distasteful things that people do, and I’ve learned to judge people in a more nuanced way. Is it possible that things like Libra can be transformed into a force for good for the Argentinian people? Probably. There are many different paths that a person could take to do that. Fundamental changes would have to be made in the token distribution, the infrastructure around the token, and a game plan would have to be put on the table for where real use and utility would come from. An mCoin is not fit for purpose for these things other than to enrich the people who have launched it, as Coffeezilla and others have repeatedly pointed out.
For all those who endorse meme coins, that’s not my place to say whether it’s in their heart or in their ability and intention to go one way or the other. It’s a wait-and-see, and it’s their integrity and character that will guide them. If they actually want to push this project along, then I hope for the best because I think blockchain could be an indispensable part of governance. But that doesn’t discount the fact that Milei has been a force for change in Argentina and has radically transformed that government from one of malaise, where people believed the future would be dimmer, to one where people are optimistic. Every metric has improved: direct foreign investment, global standing, and overall belief that Argentina will recover and its economy will grow rapidly. GDP growth will return, and competitiveness on the global stage will improve.
No way does Libra change that in any way, shape, or form. I truly wish that things would have been different and that certain people would not have been introduced to Milei to convince him to get involved in these things. But here’s the reality that people are missing: if a person is in their 50s, 60s, or 70s, as Trump is, or Milei is, or other politicians who are in the ruling class, this technology is so blatantly alien to them. Think about it: they grew up in a time before the internet or cell phones. They grew up at a time when you wanted to hang out with your friends; you got on a bicycle and rode to their house. Maybe they were there, maybe they weren’t. You could call them on the phone, what you’re calling a landline, and their mom would say, “Oh, I think I saw Johnny. I don’t know.” That was where they started, and they walked through the technological miracles and innovations.
They saw things like the personal computer revolution, the dawn of the internet with the old 56k modems and the little screeching that tied up your phone line, and then the rise of social media. Some people have adapted exceedingly well; some people haven’t. AI and blockchain are two very new innovations, and they have radically different cultures, radically different structures, and radically different rules. It’s very hard, if you’ve been through many of these changes, to enter in blind and expect good results. It is very easy for scammers to take advantage of a person’s reputation and status and use them to enrich themselves, even when people have the best of intentions.
That’s why every great leader is not just a leader in their own right, but it’s incredibly important for leaders to have a good inner circle around them. We’ll see in the next six months to a year changes in those inner circles. When leaders have scandals or problems, we saw this with Reagan and Iran-Contra. In the speech last night with Milei, I have every reason to believe that he’s going to make systematic changes in the people around him and how access works, and furthermore develop stronger due diligence for blockchain technology.
I do believe that Argentina has some of the best and brightest minds in the cryptocurrency space, and Milei doesn’t have to travel very far to talk to people from Buenos Aires who speak Spanish natively to actually get great advice. People like Sergio Lerner, for example, who has been in the Bitcoin space since 2010. In fact, he was the person who figured out how many Bitcoins Satoshi had. The founders there and their team have one of the largest blockchain working groups in all of Latin America. They’re incredibly talented, extremely smart people who can give sound and extremely accurate advice. He’s the president of the country; at any given moment, he can pick up the phone and call those people. They will take the phone call, and out of duty to their nation, absolutely give him good advice. I encourage his administration to do that.
The media is not going to help, and in fact, they’re going to do the opposite. They’re going to try to paint everything with a brush of corruption and bring down an administration that, frankly speaking, is a force for good, all things considered. But it’s obviously Milei’s decision—where he wants to go, what he wants to do, and how he wants to approach these things.
One of the reasons I flew down there is I wanted to connect him to a broader network of people within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, including American regulators, to have a broader conversation about what this technology means. While it’s unfortunate that these types of things happen, this is not going to stop the cryptocurrency momentum that’s in Argentina, which is some of the strongest in the world. It’s also not going to prevent Milei from being able to interface with the industry later on. He just has to decide to pick up that phone and call the right people. I’d encourage him to start in his backyard because he has a lot of very good people and good connections there.
For my part, I will continue being a supporter of the libertarian cause, and I will always support the hybridization of government with blockchain. I believe that you need to have a public sector, a private sector, and a blockchain sector. Only when these three things are put together can we ever truly return to that notion of the government being a trust and us being the beneficiaries of it, allowing society to evolve and improve.
No one is completely honest; no one is completely free of humanity. The great part about blockchain is it doesn’t matter if you’re the president, a peasant, or someone in between; it treats you exactly the same way and forces everybody to play by the same rules. The existence of a capability like that is what moves society forward.
The other thing is the interoperability between other nation-states. You have this concept of the Smart Cow effect: only one country has to figure out the ideal model, and because it’s open source, every country gets it. All the cows get out if one smart cow can open the gate. My hope was that Argentina could serve as that example because, in the absence of all these government services, some of which people will dearly miss, there is an opportunity to rebuild them using blockchain infrastructure. This would allow the private industry to come in and have appropriate oversight, preventing them from getting too powerful, forming an oligarchy, and overtaking the government, turning it into a corporatist structure. This creates a balance and allows us to realize the dreams that libertarians and others of different political persuasions have always had.
At the end of the day, I have to believe that the majority of people who enter political science and governance, at least when they’re young, want the world to be better and want humans to be better. It’s absolutely true that the longer they stay in, the more cynicism they succumb to, and the longer they stay in, the higher the probability is that they become corrupted. That’s why we have to have the disinfectant that is blockchain technology.
So, as unfortunate as these events are, my hope is that we can all just move on. My hope is that Milei’s government gets some wisdom from it and utilizes the resources in his backyard. There are a lot of amazing people and institutions there, whether it be UTN or a lot of the Bitcoin and crypto companies that have a deep and intimate understanding. Perhaps a reset is in order for them to move forward.
Libra can be transformed into anything; new distributions can be encumbered. It can be relaunched under different infrastructure; it can even be a layer one if they so choose to do that. There are plenty of utilities and uses: voting systems, things for supply chain budget systems to track real-time the entire budget of the nation. There are a lot of people who would love an opportunity to come in and work on that as an open-source project, starting with the Argentinian developers, of which there are tens of thousands who are native to the blockchain industry.
Of course, we would, and I know for certain that other people like Avalanche and ICP would, if only given an opportunity. So, it’s their decision what to do with it, how to treat it, and where to go from here. But to the media of Argentina: I’m not going to be your pawn, and I’m not going to be your water boy to carry attacks on the president. You do a fine job of that, and you’re more than welcome to continue your crusade anywhere you want to take it. But honestly speaking, look at yourselves in the mirror and ask yourselves: is that really going to improve the country? Do you want to go back to where you started, or do you want to take a chance to make things better?
Yes, it’s important to call truth to power and sometimes remind leaders that when they become the president of a country, the people they were friends with before have to sometimes, for the good of the nation, take a back seat or a reduced role until they get out of office. Then they can go back to that social network. Maybe it is good to remind a president of that from time to time. But the other side of the social contract is you have to let people make mistakes. You can never allow a mistake to solely define every single thing a person has done.
If you’re unwilling to hold such a standard, then you have to ask yourself: how would your life be if you weren’t allowed to make mistakes, to misspeak, to live under such extreme scrutiny that the minute you slip up, there are dire consequences? These are human beings. As great as they can be, as virtuous as they can be, no human is perfect. So, it’s what they do after the mistake is made, the accountability they take, the integrity they have, and the changes that they make.
The question shouldn’t be whether you impeach the man; the question should be what reforms are necessary so such oversights and mistakes aren’t made again, and who holds them accountable for making those reforms. How do we keep moving forward and improving things? If you’re unwilling to engage in that type of dialogue, then can you honestly expect people to take you seriously? Because your only job is to destroy, not to create, and we will never get ahead as a society if that’s the case.
So, the people in Milei’s government, keep up the good work, keep the faith, and keep building. Every one of us abroad wants you to succeed; we really do. Stay away from the meme coins; they’re tough, they really are. There are a lot of people in this space whose only job is to make a buck. They don’t really care if you succeed; they don’t really care if you build a great nation or not. They just want to improve their own lot in life. As free market economists, you keenly understand the concept of rational actors and self-interest. So, be the master of the Invisible Hand, not the recipient of it.
Thank you all for listening. Cheers!
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