Hi, everyone. What you're about to listen to is an interview that I took in person while attending the Crypto Commons Gathering Conference in Austria in August 2021. The conference itself was a wonderful experience where people of a lot of different backgrounds and political ideas were able to discuss openly and safely about how crypto can intersect with fostering the commons. What you'll notice from these interviews is that these differences in thought are sometimes apparent because we all come from different places. And what was honestly refreshing about the experience is that we could do it in a supportive environment. This is probably one of the most receptive audiences in crypto to socialism, which was really great for me. Also, a heads up is that you may notice sometimes that the audio was clearly recorded in the house that we were all staying in, which wasn't the best place for recording, but we did the best that we could with what we had. A lot of the interviews will also likely feature in the documentary that I'm making about the world of crypto and its potential futures with a friend. A big reason I was able to make it to this conference was thanks to all the support I received from patrons. So if you find the work that I do important, I hope you'll consider helping out starting at $3 per month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist.

Without without now is your now is your second time. Yeah. I didn't even do that. That's that's great. And now and we have, this guy, Kellsdorf.

But for security reasons, no. Yeah. Nobelsdorf. Nobelsdorf. Nobelsdorf. Okay. My mom doesn't know how to pronounce it. It's

The Daniel Noblesdorff. I'm currently not based anywhere, but, usually, I'm in Caracas, Venezuela. I actually work across Latin America, so most most of my experience is going across the region and engaging, from the grassroots level, all the way to governments and corporations and startups and social impact companies, coming into the region. I had, like, a guiding quest, let's say. So it's like, I'm in a quest to crowd an open source nation states. So I'm very interested in the logic of both nations and how we're gonna scale this models of governance so humanity is sustainably, spans across the stars as a multi planetary species. That's my deal, sir. Yeah. And besides that, I've been helping out, with running pilots, for trust lines in Venezuela, which is fun, and we'll I guess, we'll go deeper into that. Yes. We will. You've already given this explanation before on the podcast, but in case people haven't listened to that one, could you explain a bit what,

explore the trust lines? No. I mean, the well, the situation in Venezuela. Situation in Venezuela, that's that's very let's if if we generalize, of course, the situation in Venezuela, you can think about the hyperinflation. You can think about the subsequent devaluations the the core our currency has have had. Like, the most recent is the announcement of moving from the sovereign Bolivar. I I I this I completed this, like, the appropriation of words by the government in any context. So that's why the quotes, unquote. So moving from the sovereign Bolivar all the way to the digital Bolivar. It's not digital digital, but, anyway, there there are rumors of what they're going to do with that, let's say, because of the cryptocurrency, but I don't really know right now. The the whole thing is, basically, I took out, six zeros out of the currency, you know, just to make transactions easier to happen in terms of, like, how people take manage accounting and and everything like that. But, of course, that has some unintended or probably intended consequences on the on the national economy as a whole. So right now in Venezuela for I don't know when was the last time actually I took money from an ATM. At least in two years, I haven't done it. Way before the pandemic. At least six months before the pandemic. Maybe one year before the pandemic, I haven't taken cash out of an ATM in Venezuela. I have had bills in my hand, but, you know, I don't even know their value anymore. So that kind of scarcity, of course, poses, some some potential consequences. Like, the country has been, further on dollar rise. You can go to a supermarket and say, like, oh, this cheese is 1.58. And you're like, you feel even better seeing that because, you know, it's not like a moving number that maybe when you get to the to the cashier to pay for it, it already changed. Because it used to be like that, and you had to, like you know, when you were going to the supermarket grocery shopping or whatever, you had to, like, be very structured and fast about the timing during the day because, you know, the price has changed currently on the during the day. So the dollarization has taken us forward down the path of, let's say, people are transacting with USD dollars in cash and but they don't have, change. There's no change in the country. So you had a $100 bill, $20 bill, etcetera. It's very difficult to get change. We are highly digitized. Not everybody has a bank account, but we are very, very much highly digitized. We had systems like Venmo, sell from The US, and even people using those systems in Venezuela among themselves. If they had a family member or something that holds them or maybe they had an account themselves. So we had a local system called Pago Mobile, that people use to to pay digitally, that has saved some hurdles in terms of, how people pay. But even so, like, not everybody has a American bank account access to one. So sometimes you get paid and you have $20 and you have to go and this has created an emergence of people using IOUs in a very artisanal way. So, you know, very, like, word-of-mouth kind of thing. Like, yeah, I trust you. You trust me. You come to the cafeteria every day. So, yeah, I I'll give you a coffee next time for free, and you just pay for the whatever, for the cake. So those kinds of things, like, happening very organically, but eventually, you know, it was one on top of the other, on top of the other, on top of the other, and people started, like, printing IOUs. Even even having, like, fake, US dollar bills with, like, you can sign here and do all this other person how much, etcetera. So a lot of people, you know, it's not it's not perfect at all. You carry a bunch of paper in your wallet or whatever or in your house, and you wash your pants. And you're like, I just destroyed $7 of coffee. So that was the basis, and I I I know, Alisa's work and trust lines, for for some time now. So that was the basis of going back to that idea that, okay, we can use this as, means of accounting and and with I mean, thinking about the the complexity that we can add on top with the ripple effects. That was basically the the main idea. And just as well, besides money thinking about, like, economic solid around solidarity, like, we had the case of and maybe I'm going too long on this, but you let me know. That's right. We had the case of the the the power failure that took over the country for, like, three, four days, in when was that? 2019? Anyway, it was terrible. But the thing is, like, some people played, the competition game, like well, not the competition. The scars of the game. Like, I had a power plan. F everyone else. I had my power plan, but then they ran out of fuel. But the people that played collaboratively, you know, you have the power plant. Can we connect this to the other house? And then I had some fuel. I had some, you know, some food is gonna go bad. Can we share around these things? And, oh, I had a fridge that whatever. A solar panel. We can connect the, you know, people that play the play collaboratively really made it in that sense. Like, small communities, like, banding up together and saying, what do we do with the I don't know. The we had a lot of failures with other old services down there. So most buildings and houses, they have wells, and they're usually a shared resource that that the community put together. So what do we do about, you know, taking the water out and taking to the old lady in the 9th Floor? Oh my god. Well, let's do it for her. So, you know, those are small economies of solidarity. That's people exchanging a value that's it's not a one equals one. It's like I helped you fix your car, because my nephew is gonna be gonna come over and he knows how to fix the car. He's gonna, oh, because that's, Senora Jacinta just gave me, like, one kilo sugar the other day, and let's help Jacinta. He she's she's so awesome. So, you know, those kind of changes, I really want to capture that there. We haven't focused as much there, but it's it's a really powerful construct, in terms of, yeah, how how this has happened in some small communities across the country, in itself. Sadly, there's no research on that side of the whole thing. We've done a lot in terms of merchants, and we can talk about that. And the the other logic that really attracted me, into bringing TrustLinks to Venezuela was, like, volunteer networks. People that want to chip in some time and but maybe they just know this NGO, but it's not about the NGO. It's about the cost, and it's about the skills, matching their skills to particular causes, let's say, the SEGs or whatnot. So those are different avenues that we can certainly go, and we can we can probably we we will probably explore in the in the future. Not not so far in the future. Ideally, I would guess.

I mean, as as I mentioned before, we we we focus on the part of, merchant adoption because of the IOUs, the interest in IOUs. The research that we did I don't think we had the numbers numbers. Anyway, the research that we did was, I will say, one of the most detailed research on, like, potential merchant adoption of these kinds of technologies down in in the country, besides, many well, to be honest, just a small number of one on one interviews, but a big number of, like, reach of getting people to to to give us their point of view on some some particular structures, like, will you had you lost an IRU, would you prefer x? Do you feel safe about, you know, using this kind of tool, like, in your phone for accounting. What happens if you know, this of course, it's a complex, situation on their interns. Like, of course, there's problems of security. So how does the how does that fare into the into the potential adoption? But basically, yeah. I mean, it's it's been it's been interesting, but it's been very, very difficult just to to kind of train the trainers and get people on board in that sense that problem is there. Everything says, like, you know, the problem is there. They're open to a solution. They really want to tap into this. But the the the adoption of the tool is is is some is something we're working on and iterating very hard right now. And some fun things may come in the near future. So yes. Yeah. Just historically,

The red The Turkey.

I mean, like, for example, in Venezuela, we had a number of cooperatives that basically feed the country. Basically, the the the people eat in Venezuela at least thinking about, yeah, you know, agriculture. Thinking about agriculture in Venezuela, basically, cooperatives are feeding the country. And it's been like that historically, but it's very difficult to tap into that space at least into the biggest, note in terms of cooperatives in Venezuela. It's very nearby the Colombian border. It's very, you know, it's when you map a stakeholders, you have to think about Colombia, paramilitary, and guerrilla. You have to think about, like, government officials coming over and saying, hey. I want 5% of that. You have to think about so many things in that sense, and and even sometimes, there's a story of the there's a story of the military tapping into the cooperatives themselves and saying that, this is my land. Continue doing what you're doing, but this is my land now. And you just give me a. So it's it's kind of difficult to get to that. And the other issue will be, like, connectivity down in those places is not exactly the best because we're talking about the Andean region of the country, which is what feeds the country, basically, has the best best conditions for that. And it's really it's really difficult in that sense. So that kind of that kind of that's why we haven't really tried to tap into that source, even if we know it's there. So we the we've mapped, certain potential other pathways for, let's say, pilots besides the focus on merchants. Just making a small parenthesis on the focus on merchants. The main thing that the main way the the main the main reason we went down that path is that there is in place a very strong and and beautiful relationship with a net worth of 2,600 merchants, in Venezuela that start they started to naturally, sell goods and services over WhatsApp because, yeah, that's that's the kind of, messaging apps in in in the country. So, basically, that's why we went that way, but we do had a math thinking about what I was mentioning before, like volunteer networks, co working spaces, or, like, entrepreneurs sharing resources because, you know, when you are going down that path, resources are scarce. Even just knowledge, not necessarily access to capital is what I mean. Just as well, like, time banking in different aspects, in other aspects beside this and tapping into, food production cooperatives. But, yes, it's it's there. It's kind of waiting for us. Now we reshuffle resources a little bit and finish up wrapping up, like, how the current pilot with the merchants is going, and and we may, yeah, do some experiments in that sense. What I find interesting when you said, Lisa, is that a lot of these projects

But this one,

A pagre? Yeah. Pagre. Yeah. Yeah. A vale, pagre. That's

because they, you know Yeah. It's part of the construct.

saving their doing their savings in Bolivarastras.

A more structured form to be shared

Super secure. And super scalable too. That's great. I I I didn't know some of these things.

Family. Yeah. You guys are there in my book, you know?

Yeah. I wanna be on top of that. Go ahead. Let's say something. I mean, like, it's it's beautiful, but in a sense, it's it's the niche. It's such a niche kind of thing. Like, we have we have very little people coming from, like, projects in the field besides blockchain. You know, and that's kind of something that I'm like, yeah. I can I can talk blockchain and crypto with you and DeFi and whatever, but it's like, dude, being, like, in the field, working with the grassroots, very complex situations across, like, the world, whatever? Like, I mean, I come from, like, all of the technologies. I helped cofound an augmented reality startup at one point, launch a civic innovation lab for nonviolent protests, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And those kinds of things, like, I mean, like, I certainly want to see, like, eventually, and and we had a good start anyhow. But we had a more meshy meshy distributor kind of thing with other bridges to different communities because these are the people we are building for. So I won't mind, like, putting down some money for a scholarship to bring somebody from x project from well, let's say a country that everybody says that's not my country, Kenya. So something like that down here and say, like, you know, tell us your story. Like, what's going what's going on down there in the sense from the maybe not will really perspective, grassroots economics, but, like, the user perspective. Like, how is it for you when you adopted this system and the way that it change your everyday life and your relationships of transacting value? Those are things that I really want to know besides systems design, which is beautiful and amazing. One of the main reasons I'm here, but that's, like, one track. So the humans that are living in those systems, I really want to see them amazing start for this, and I can be cheesy about it. Such a so so such amazingness that I can be cheesy and say, family. But, yeah, I mean, besides that, this is something I wanna do a pool, and build towards. So yeah.

Yeah. I never prepare for that, but I can't. I guess, Twitter profile. I have a Twitter. Yeah.

thinking about the context in Venezuela, it's easier to find we I mean, we are represented in Trust Lines. Venezuela in Instagram is what people use down down there. So trustlines.b, the tiny one, e, and, basically, you can you can find us there. Besides that, I'm basically everywhere as knobs, k n o b s, d A o. Yeah. I know where she's saying. Bospor on my hand. Yeah. I know. Well, then, anyway, I need to do fine. That's it.