WBD199 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin World #6 - What Happened in Venezuela with Stephan Livera & Peter McCormack

Interview date: Tuesday 27th February 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Stephan Livera from the Stephan Livera Podcast. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

With the collapse of the Bolivar, many Bitcoiners, including myself, asked whether Bitcoin could help. Could Bitcoin reduce the impact of hyperinflation? Could locals mine Bitcoin at low energy costs to earn an income? I visited Venezuela to find the answers to some of these questions and asked fellow podcaster Stephan Livera to interview me about my experience. We discuss the realities of life in Venezuela and the myths and truths of Bitcoin adoption.

“I was wrong about Bitcoin in Venezuela. The name of the game is survival, get me Bolivars and Dollars and let me eat. I don’t fucking need Bitcoin right now.”

— Peter McCormack

Interview Transcription

Stephan Livera: Peter, welcome to What Bitcoin Did!

Peter McCormack: Thank you guest host of What Bitcoin Did. Listen look, I appreciate you doing this. So I wanted to get the story out of my experience going to the Venezuelan border and into Venezuela, but I didn't want to do it as a monologue, I wanted someone to grill me, and there's no better person to ask than you my fellow podcaster, guest host of What Bitcoin Did today, so thank you for doing this.

Stephan Livera: Of course, it's my pleasure. So we're going to talk through your experience recently with your travel and you went to Venezuela, then there's the border town, and we've got Colombia. I guess this is what we can cover, but let's just start with why did you want to go to Venezuela?

Peter McCormack: Great question, a couple of reasons. So there's the Bitcoin reason and then there's the general reason. My first broad awareness of Venezuela obviously came from Bitcoin, I was aware of the country, but I mainly took an interest back in June, I think it was actually May 2018 where I was introduced to Alejandro Machado, he writes for Caracas Chronicles and he wanted to talk about what's happening in Venezuela and can Bitcoin help. So we met up in London and recorded a show, and ever since, I've taken an interest in what's happening in Venezuela. I think I've done three shows now about it.

But I think as Bitcoiners, we're very quickly to jump at opportunities, in some ways, I think we can be classed as... Opportunist is a kind of negative word, but we spot opportunities, whether that's Tony Hawk tweeting about Bitcoin, and suddenly everybody wanting to speak to him or whether it's somebody saying about an opportunity in Venezuela. Whenever there's an opportunity for Bitcoin, we all seem to just suddenly pile in and take an interest.

So I've taken interest in Venezuela for Bitcoin and I wanted to go out there and just see the reality. But also, I have this other show Defiance, there's been protests in Venezuela, there's obviously a very screwy political situation at the moment. I also wanted to go and just see what's happening in the country just at social level as well. I kind of went for both, primarily Bitcoin, but also just to see what's happening in the country.

Stephan Livera: Tell us a little bit about your process of researching it. Weren't you a little scared of going there that the government might stop you or it might be unsafe or something like that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, definitely. I was a little bit scared up front because I think it had the third highest murder rate in the world at some point. The picture I had of Venezuela was a country in absolute chaos, descended in absolute chaos and almost Mad Max style. But it wasn't like that when I got there, which was great! But yes, I was slightly nervous, but I did my research, and the two primary things were to have a local fixer to look after you, to make sure you're in the right areas at the right time, and if you're in the wrong areas, how you should behave.

So when we went to the slums for example, you don't have your windows down with the camera out filming, but when you're in East Caracas, you can take a photo with your phone, whereas in West Caracas, you keep your phone in your pocket because it will get snatched. There were simple things like that and at night time, where should you go, where can go out and where you can't, which is, after dark you really just don't want to go out. So having a local fixer to look after you, which was good, which I had set up, who picked us up from the airport. Even to the point where at the airport, it was "be careful."

There was a story of an Egyptian man who got shot outside the airport, shot and killed. There's things like that that you have to be aware of, you can't be naïve about these things, it's not worth dying for. Then the second side is going in as a, I say pseudo journalist, let's say content creator, there is not a free press within Venezuela, they don't want any anti-government messages be relayed to the rest of the world. I've seen that since, I did a short interview with Max Kaiser about the experience that went up on RT, and I have had a flood of people directing messages at me over this last 24 hours, which is clearly government propaganda, or people who...

Either there's some loyalist Chavezsters who refuses to admit the reality of what's happening in Venezuela, or they're just part of the government. But that flood of propaganda has come my way. So we had to plan going in carefully. When I travel the world, I don't know about you, do you take your gear with you?

Stephan Livera: Yeah, for me I take the zoom and some microphones, I tend to travel relatively light though. But I know you took a video, or you were aiming to take some video?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was aiming to take video, but my normal travel for the podcast, I've got one of those Pelican cases, those hard cases and that essentially has three mic stands, three mics, the zoom, the cables and everything in, and that just travels the world with me. Then on this trip, I also took a DSLR camera, a road mic for the DSLR, a couple of lenses and a microphone for my iPhone as well and a Gimbal for my iPhone. So I took all the video equipment, which I was using in Chile for the riots in Santiago.

Now what I was told is that if you take all this equipment into Venezuela, it's going to be very suspicious, you'll probably get... One or two things will happen. You'll get turned away at the border because it's very obvious you're a journalist, or you will have to pay a significant bribe to get in and to be honest, going in was more important than not. So what I did is I left all the equipment in Bogota, at a hotel. It was a bit of a palaver because we were trying to figure out, because I was going to El Salvador afterwards, so I was thinking, "can I get the equipment shipped to El Salvador? Can I get someone to fly it to El Salvador?" What I ended up doing is, I left all my audio equipment at the hotel.

I also had a camera man who joined me, Adrian, who joined me for Colombia, Venezuela and El Salvador, and we left the majority of his equipment. So we took an iPhone each, which by the way now, the iPhone 11, I've got the Pro-max, but the iPhone 11 can create broadcast quality video, which is great. So we took one of those each, I had my mobile iPhone microphones, you can get these ones that are just plug in, and we took a DSLR each. But when we got to Venezuela, we went through immigration separately, rather than together as two guys with the same...

Stephan Livera: It looks too obvious.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it looks too obvious. So he said he's a photographer, and I went in as somebody who works in marketing, which historically I do, and I'm here as a tourist. Which in some ways I guess I was a tourist as well, but anyway. There's a couple of times I was nervous, I was nervous at immigration, they were tough, they did ask the questions firmly, they did look at you with huge amounts of suspicion, but that was fine. We got in, we got through, so that was fine. So mainly the couple of things to prepare was how we get the equipment, what we can take, and safety.

Stephan Livera: So where did you land? Did you land and then go across the border on a bus or a train that kind of thing? Or did you land directly there?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we landed directly there. So the day before, we went to Colombia, stayed overnight in Colombia, and then we took at flight to Cúcuta for the border. But then we flew back that same night, we didn't cross at Cúcuta. Although we did get filmed by Maduro's guards, which I'll explain in a bit. But then we stayed again back in Bogota and then we flew into Caracas and that itself is an experience. I'll tell you a couple of things that stood out for me. As we were flying in... Well firstly even before that, booking your flights. So there are three airlines you could book.

There were a couple of domestic airlines, Laser and I can't remember the other one. But the other one has been sanctioned now or blacklisted by the aviation authority due to safety. So I was like, "well I'm not flying with you." The second is Laser, who have grounded a number of their planes for problems. My dad was an aircraft engineer, and there are certain airlines or certain aircraft he always said, just don't fly them because air safety is incredibly safe, but it's incredibly safe because of the due diligence and the processes they have in place and if an economy is struggling and the airline doesn't have the money to maintain their planes, they're cutting corners, and that's not a risk I want to take.

There was another airline called Wingo, I think that's part of Copa, it was like an EasyJet here, a low cost airline which flies four times a week. So we ended up flying with them. But there were a number of things, like we nearly didn't make it for a number of reasons. So we were trying to get the equipment sorted and we were going to FedEx it, and we went to the FedEx place, and then they couldn't take it. So our taxi driver had to then drive the equipment back to the hotel, but we had to get to the airport and we didn't want to risk missing the flight, and there was so much traffic. So after FedEx, we got about 15 minutes away and we realized I left my passport at the FedEx place, and we were already cutting it fine...

Stephan Livera: Oh no!

Peter McCormack: Then we had to go back and get that, and we got the passport. Then when we got to the airport, we went to check in, and I didn't have a ticket, even though I booked it, so it turned out they cancelled my ticket for no reason. So then we had to book another ticket, and then we finally got through it was really cutting it fine to get through. But the thing I noticed most about when we came in to land is, airports are brightly lit places, there's a lot of light in an airport, and this felt really dark coming in. There were lights, but it felt dark, there wasn't a bright city and there wasn't a lot of light at the airport.

Then when we got off the plane, that's when you started to notice lots of little things. So I'm going to go ahead and probably cover a thing that you would ask about, and we should go back and cover Cúcuta. The airport was sparse, there were few staff, there was these weird massive posters which had monetary, like different notes on them, money notes on them, which I thought, "that's a weird thing to have in a country with such a fucked up financial system, to have kind of money propaganda on the walls." But everything was sparse and that was the trend for the whole trip.

Stephan Livera: So let's bring it back to Cúcuta and the border town then. Tell us a little bit about your experience there. What kinds of people did you meet there?

Peter McCormack: That was a really interesting experience. I'll tell you a bit about why I went there. I don't know if you remember Cryptograffiti went there?

Stephan Livera: I didn't know that, but I know of.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and I don't know if you ever saw the stuff in the press about when Venezuela closed the border and there's that long bridge and it was empty and there was a big yellow container in the middle and they were saying people can't cross. Cúcuta was crazy by the way, but I'd heard about this border town that was a lot of people coming from Venezuela into Colombia for whatever reason, to buy things, to earn money, and I wanted to check it out, but I was given the impression it was a very, very dangerous place. Again, it didn't feel too dangerous when I was there, and maybe I'm being naïve, but when we landed in Cúcuta, we had a separate fixer there who picked us up, and he was explaining the danger in that border town.

There are a lot of murders there, there is a lot of crime there, and there are a lot of Venezuelan people who have come in and you can see it. There was like a significant amount of people trying to clean your car windscreen at the traffic lights, you get that in poor areas, but these people looked especially poor. You could just see drained grey faces, and he was also explaining that there's a lot of prostitution here, there's a lot of crime, and Cúcuta hasn't always been the safest place, but now it is an unsafe place.

Stephan Livera: Worse.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's gotten a lot worse. So the first thing we did with him, before we went right up to the border, he took us to an NGO that feeds around 9,000 people a day, and this was about a mile or maybe two miles from the border. One of the other things that you have as you get nearer the border is you've got these... So you've got the border itself, which is the official crossing, but you've also got the smuggling routes and the reason the smuggling routes exist is that there are certain goods that the Maduro regime will not allow into Venezuela. So you'll get stopped from bringing them in.

So these smuggling routes, they're controlled by the paramilitaries, and they allow people to essentially take things through by hand, and you pay people to take it through, and sometimes there's guards the other end who'll accept a bribe. We started seeing just some of those people, the fixer was explaining who these people were, and what they were doing, but there were not a huge amount of them. As we were driving through this place just before we got right to the border, you could also see into these homes, and he was explaining, you've got 10, 20 people living in a room.

There's a lot of people in the streets, there was a little tent city, quite similar to what you see in major cities now. I was in Austin recently and you have them in San Francisco, Los Angeles has got one, I don't know if you've got them in Sydney., you've got them in London and this seems to be a recent phenomenon over the last decade that people are living in tents in streets. There was one of those, there was a huge cue of people, and he said that they're basically cuing up to be fed.

There were mothers sat on the side of the street breast feeding, there were children running around, but it felt, I guess it felt like I was in a refugee camp. I wasn't, but it felt like a refugee camp. It felt like what I see on the news when you see like a Syrian refugee camp.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, very confronting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, very confronting, a very desperate situation, a lot of misery, a lot of sadness, it wasn't great. That was my first experience of something like that, and it did take me back. Then we got to the NGO and went in, and essentially this started out originally, I think it was just like a hut that was feeding people and now they have this whole facility that provides about 9,000 meals a day and medical facilities. So we went in there and that's where I had my first interview and I met a guy who essentially works there feeding people, giving out the food, helping preparing and giving out the food and he was just saying the situation is getting worse and worse.

They cannot feed enough people and the demand for people, the amount of people they can't feed is growing. He just said it's a desperate situation. What you would see in there was a very strong contrast between the children and the adults. Just every adult looked weathered, tired, thin, a lot of very thin looking people, fed up, desperate, and then you've got these kids running around all happy in smiles, which is one of those unusual situations like kids just seem to be happy in any situation because they don't understand the gravity of what's going on around them.

Stephan Livera: So how was the NGO being funded, is it donations? Is it government money or what's the funding situation like there?

Peter McCormack: As I remember, I can't remember the exact, but I'm pretty sure it relies entirely on donations. It certainly won't be anything from the Venezuelan government, I'm not sure on the Colombian government. One of the interesting thing is that most of the countries have shut their borders to Venezuela, because there's been such a significant amount of migration. I asked the people in Colombia, I was like, "why has the Colombian border not been shut?"

And they said to me that they have a long relationship with Venezuela, there was a time when Venezuela was the richest country in South America, and they were a poor country, and there was a lot of migration into Venezuela from Colombians who wanted to earn money and buy things. He said now its come the other way that it wouldn't be morally right for them to close the borders to these people and shut them off from the world. That has meant that a lot of people have come into Colombia, and that's put a lot of pressure on Colombia.

Interestingly, when I flew from Mexico into Colombia, there was a guy next to me, he was a French-Canadian guy, and he was with his Colombian girlfriend and she was very sympathetic towards the Venezuelan people but she said that the pressure is getting really quite tough on the people of Colombia, because they want to be sympathetic and help, but she said, there are Venezuelan people coming to Colombia now, and there are a couple of things that happened. They're willing to work for and do manual jobs, any kind of job, for half the price or even less than somebody in Colombia would do it and the employers are taking advantage of this, which means a lot of Colombian people are either losing their jobs or not getting their jobs because they're losing them to the Venezuelan people.

She said that is creating some discontent now, that that is upsetting people, they're starting to build a certain amount of resentment, which I think it's understandable. But I do have to commend the people of Colombia, they have been very accommodating to the Venezuelan people, and they've been a lifeline to them when other countries have closed their borders. So that was kind of interesting.

Stephan Livera: Right, and from what I understand, it's a common story that someone from Venezuela might try to leave and earn money outside and send it back home. In this case, because it's a border town, there might also be smuggling of goods back home to their family. Can you tell us a little bit about that operation and how that works?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think the best way to explain that is to talk about the journey up to the border because it's really interesting as a place and it's chaotic, but a couple of things stood out. One thing that stood out is that given the opportunity people will learn to create an economy, and there is an economy in Cúcuta, and that is the people who can't earn money and make money in Venezuela have come here and this economy has sprung up, which shows, you'll probably give me some libertarian free market reason why this happens, and you'll be entirely right, but there's no restrictions on them. They can just come here and there's people buying and selling different items and goods. I saw one lady walking back with a huge sack of toilet paper, because perhaps she can't get toilet paper.

Stephan Livera: That's a hot commodity!

Peter McCormack: It is. Perhaps she can't get it in Venezuela or perhaps it's really expensive in Venezuela, I don't know the answer, but I just saw that and that stood out. So there are all these people who've realized, "right, if I can get a little bit of money, I can go to Colombia, I can buy a bunch of toilet paper for X, and I can sell it for Y." So there is this crazy economy that exists there. But what happens is, as you start driving in, a couple of people started running up to the car, and I was like, "that's a bit weird." He said, "don't worry, that's about the smuggler routes which the paramilitaries control."

The closer you get to the border, it gets insane. Hundreds of people are running at every car because what happens, there are people who will take a taxi up to the border, they've got a bunch of stuff they want to go to their family, perhaps maybe even because there's another economy the other side that I'm unaware of, but for whatever reason, there are people who take taxis up to the border with goods that need taking in, and these are goods that have to be smuggled in. All these people running up to the cars are so desperate to earn money, there isn't enough goods going across, so they're all competing.

They'll run across, they'll run by the car, I've got some video of it, the people chasing the car because the second you open the door, they want that piece of business. I don't know how much they earn, but if they earn a dollar a day, that would be a good day. So bear in mind that people in Venezuela, I've seen the average salary per month ranges between $2 and $5 dollars a month, the average, which is fucking ridiculous, right? So if you're earning a dollar in a day, that's amazing. Perhaps if they do earn a half a dollar, I don't really know, but they're all so desperate. As you get closer to the border you've literally got hundreds of people running at the car.

But before we went up to the border, we went and visited another NGO, and I told the story a couple of times because it really stood out to me. So this NGO, there was nobody in there at that point, but again, they provide meals and education. So we went through these gates and it was essentially a courtyard which could probably have about 300 people sat comfortably. There was a set of bathrooms, a kitchen and then there was this kind of covered area within the courtyard, which was like a school. It had a blackboard, it had some shelving full of books and that really stood out to me. I've got a friend who works at the UN, and when I go to New York, she's given me a tour of the UN, which by the way if you ever go and you want to do the tour, let me know, I'll take you, because it's fascinating.

One of the things she showed me there is they have these boxes which are a school in a box. So if there is a war or crisis and refugee camps are popping up, they deliver these schools in a box, like the big case, the size of a desk, but they can drop into zones that schools can spring up, so children can still be educated and that's what I really liked about this NGO, I was like, it's not just trying to feed people, it's trying to maintain an education for the children, which I think shows a real deep care for the future of those people. But when we went in, there was nobody in there, it was empty apart from one guy who was there with his wife and his baby.

We were setting up our camera equipment, because we were going to interview the director of the NGO, and he was waving me over, and then started talking to me in Spanish, and I don't speak Spanish. So my cameraman translated and he said, "are you doing interviews?" And I said, "yes." And he said, "oh, can you interview me?" I didn't understand what he was saying, but he was crying as he said it, and he was saying people have to know what's going on in Venezuela, I want to tell the story. So I said, "yeah of course, no problem."

This guy, he's got four children, three are living in Venezuela with her parents, but his new born baby and his wife are with him, and they made the decision, because there was no work where they were in Venezuela, they made the decision to come to Cúcuta for him to find work, and send money back, send food back, send whatever, they kept saying rice, but whatever to send back, because the mother and the father can't work. He'd been there a week and couldn't find any work, so he was really desperate. They were living on the streets. They're in their 20s, they've got a baby that's less than a year old, like nine months old and they're sleeping on the street.

This is why I get really fucking annoyed with these arseholes on Twitter who come and start arguing that you're a liar, you're spreading propaganda, you didn't really see Venezuela, you're just trying to support an American coup, blah, blah, blah. It's like no, I saw a guy in tears who is explaining to me that him and his wife and his baby are living on the street and he said that every night you sleep with one eye open because people will try and steal your clothes from you at night. He was crying telling this story and it was very, very emotional, it affected me quite a lot.

Then after the interview was done, this is the bit I've told people, I was like, I've got to give this guy some money and it's one of these things I guess the more you do this, it becomes a habit you might do less. But you can't help but just want to give them some money. I had like $100 in my pocket and I decided I'll give him $60, right? So anyway, at the end of the interview, I checked, I said is it okay to give him money?

They said yeah, and I gave him $60 and he collapsed in my arms like just wrapped them around me and I've never had somebody hold me so tight and his eyes were streaming. It was like $60, what does that buy you? That doesn't even buy you a pair of trainers, right? And if you needed some new trainers Stephan today, you just go and buy them.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, you wouldn't think that hard about it, right?

Peter McCormack: You've probably ate a stake once that cost $60 and never even thought about it. It turns out, I said to the guy, "look I know that's a lot of money to him, but what's the reality of that?" He said well, his whole family can now eat for three months. He can go home, he'll be with his kids, and they're good for three months. Whilst it's kind of obvious to actually go through that process of $60 bucks is nothing to your eye, but to see how that changes someone's life and to see almost the worry drain from his face, that really affected me.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, and because in your mind as well at that time you're thinking, "well I want to help people, but I can't help them all", right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, there was no way I was going to suddenly go to the bank and then distribute money to everyone. I gave a few bits of money away here or there, but you will just be hounded and potentially put yourself in a dangerous situation. We were in a private situation and he had a baby with him. Another thing that struck me is that every now and again there were kids running in and out, they were letting them in like one or two at a time, and what was happening was the kids were coming in and they were coming to the taps to drink water, and then leaving. Also washing themselves, but even getting water is quite difficult there.

So the kids knew they could come to this place and they could drink water. I also then, my fixer... So this is also my first experience with Bitcoin, so there were two things. I'm trying to be as objective as possible about Bitcoin and the opportunity in Venezuela. I almost don't want to look at it and say the opportunity for Bitcoin because I don't want to be an opportunist about Bitcoin. I want to almost come at the angle as, "how can we help them?" If Bitcoin can help, great! But rather than look at them as an opportunity for Bitcoin. Do you understand the difference?

Stephan Livera: Yeah, it's more just like Bitcoin would just get adopted naturally. It's not like it needs anyone to go out there and shill it and say, "yeah, use this." And it's more in the general case of what can be done as opposed to, "let me shill my Bitcoin to you guys."

Peter McCormack: Yeah and perhaps if I didn't have Defiance, I would have gone there and looked for the opportunity of Bitcoin. But now I have Defiance, I wanted to go and see what the story is, what the truth is and relay that back. So these were my first two experiences of Bitcoin. Firstly they had a donation poster on the wall and all that said to me is, "we need money to run, we rely on donations, we'll take your Bitcoin." But I almost certainly will say that they would take your Dentacoin. All they're going to do is they're going to convert whatever you send them into dollars so they can buy food and the necessities and pay people to actually, I don't know if they're volunteers or paid, but to actually run the centre.

That's the entire role of Bitcoin there, is a way to get money to them easily, probably easier than via the banks. That said, my fixers didn't want pay in Bitcoin, they wanted pay in cash or PayPal, which they can do both. Neither wanted Bitcoin. So Bitcoin for me in that instance, all it is "please give us Bitcoin because we want to get dollars." The second thing was, my fixer is a Bitcoiner and he was running a session to teach people about Bitcoin.

So after we did the interview with the director, about 30 people came in and sat down and they had a Bitcoin lesson. What was really interesting about that, again, I have to be as objective as possible, 30 people sat there, they're all very poor, this is extreme poverty, and they sat there having a lesson about Bitcoin, being taught about that, various things like you're your own bank, this is how you manage your private keys etc and I was watching them, and I think it would be very different from a Stephan Livera course, where you would have a bunch of people sat there, attentive, keeping notes, willing to engage and learn. I think these people have got two things, they've got time on their side, their day is filled and it's about survival, earning money, finding food.

But there are a lot of people just sitting around doing nothing, like a lot of people sitting around doing nothing. So they've got time on their side to fill and also somebody saying this is something to do with money, this is a way you can get money in and out of Venezuela, but these people were not hugely engaged as a group. Some were, but I didn't imagine that they're all going to leave and go, "oh wow, this is amazing and new decentralized form of money that can take down the Central Banks, and I can become self sovereign. I'd better start stacking sats."

Stephan Livera: Of course not and they're not in a position for that. It would be more, as I said, more like maybe on the margins, some people might use it to move some money around, and that's kind of it for now, in that scenario.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think the main lesson was look, this is remittance if you need it. If you need to send money back into Venezuela, because a lot of people don't have bank accounts now, they can't get bank accounts. So if you're taking money across from the other side of Cúcuta, the border town the other side, fine, you can just transport dollars. But say if your family is in Caracas and is far away, if you want, you can buy some Bitcoins, send it to them and you can do it without a bank account. That is certainly a use case and it does certainly exist. But there are some realities that really stood out.

So firstly, what was explained to me is that some of these people are sharing phones. So if you're sharing a phone, that's not an ideal scenario for holding Bitcoin. Even if they have a phone of their own, almost none of them have data services, so they rely on being able to connect to some kind of wifi, and also they don't always have access to power to charge their phone. That is a reality. So I don't see these people really as a massive opportunity for Bitcoin, I just see it as, here is a scenario a guy's running a class and that's very cool, I don't imagine many of them left that class and suddenly were using Bitcoin. I don't even know if...

One of the things I should have asked is, you're setting these people up, are you giving them a few sats to get going? Then also to throw into that, like I said to you, if these people earn a dollar in a day, that's amazing, but what is the commission they would pay on turning that dollar into Bitcoin? And if they then have to send that Bitcoin into Venezuela, what is the fee? Say the fee is at 20 cents, and then what is the fee to send it the other end? These people are cups of coffee levels of money, and sub-cups of coffee level of money and we've always said Bitcoin isn't for cups of coffee.

Do they have access to Lightning? Can they understand Lightning? You start to realize like this isn't the opportunity. Perhaps there are some, there's a very small minority, but that's why I put out that punchy title of Bitcoin doesn't fix Venezuela, because when you start to see this, you're like, these people just need dollars and bolivars. Yes, there will be some people who can learn about Bitcoin, but yeah. So after that experience, I kind of realized this trip was a lot more about learning about Venezuela and get an understanding of the country.

The next thing we went up to the border and we were told not to take the cameras, but the guy from the NGO said he would come and that would be fine, and actually it was because everybody loves the NGO. One of the great things about this economy here is that it isn't each man for himself as such, they're all working together to try and earn money to help people back in Venezuela. They're all competing to earn that money, but they're all ultimately wanting to help each other out. As you get closer and closer to the border, it gets a bit more chaotic, there are just people everywhere doing all kinds of things. There's taxis, there's little stalls selling everything.

Interestingly, there was a sweets store, which I thought was kind of interesting. Even in this scenario, there's a sweet store to buy sweets for the kids, which I thought was cool. But what you were seeing was, it wasn't like fruit and veg, and I didn't think about that too much at the time, but my assumption is that that's the stuff you can grow and create yourself, and I'm going to make an assumption here and I should double check this, but I'm going to make an assumption in Venezuela, people are growing a lot of their own food now, because...

Stephan Livera: ... Because that's one of the cheaper ways to do it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah and actually when I was out in Cambodia, I remember one of my taxi drivers telling me he has a rice paddy, and every year they harvest their rice and they keep in the shed. They survive off that the whole year, and he said a lot of people do this. So I imagine a lot of people in Venezuela, again I could be completely wrong, but I imagine they grow their own food. So, I didn't see fruit or vegetable being sold. I saw toiletries, sanitary products, razors, like I said, toilet paper, biscuits...

Stephan Livera: All things that are hard to get in Venezuela, they are very in high demand and traded, and smuggled on the border, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that's all being bought and sold in these kind of stalls. Then we went past them, went right up to the border, and it's just a constant stream of people coming in and out, including people in school uniform, kids coming across and what I was told is that perhaps might be a slightly wealthier person who's sending their child across into Colombia to get an education.

Stephan Livera: They live in Venezuela, but then they cross the border every day for school?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Stephan Livera: Crazy stuff man!

Peter McCormack: There are probably 50,000 a day crossing, I don't know the exact number. Then when we got right up to where the border was, there was like a tunnel, like a manmade tunnel... Not a tunnel, like a covered area where all the immigration were checking your papers and people coming in and out and then there were the Maduro guards, and they started filming us filming them, which was kind of interesting.

Stephan Livera: So why were they filming?

Peter McCormack: Because we're people with cameras.

Stephan Livera: Just in case you're doing something nefarious.

Peter McCormack: These dictators, they have to hold onto power, and to hold onto power, they have to take control of institutions, the press, there's a lot of things they have to... Yeah, the messaging. I think ultimately they're suspicious of some people with some cameras, they were filming us and they looked menacing, they certainly looked menacing. But I said, "fuck it, we should film them" and they didn't have guns. Well I didn't see their guns, maybe they did. They probably did actually, I'm being naïve! So anyways, that was that. We saw people under the bridge running down and running through the smuggling routes, which was...

Stephan Livera: I'm curious, one more question around the smuggling. What was the currency of choice? I'm going to take a guess and say US dollar was the main kind of thing that everybody wants. Is that what they would kind of take as their currency?

Peter McCormack: So there's actually three primary currencies and there's five currencies in total in Venezuela. My fixer said on the way, "we're the only country with five currencies", and the five currencies are the bolivar, which is the local currency, which is 10% inflation every week. There's the dollar, which is, let's call it their stable note rather than their stable coin, because it's their stable currency. Everyone accepts the bolivar, not everyone accepts the dollar, but most people do, and they want it. The problem with the dollar is, you might be buying something that's five cents, 10 cents, so a dollar isn't useful if you can't get change or you might get your change in bolivar.

Stephan Livera: Ah, it's a divisibility problem.

Peter McCormack: Massive divisibility problem. The Colombian peso is a currency, the petro, the mother of all shitcoins and Bitcoin. So they're the five currencies. On the border, it is really the Colombian peso, the bolivar and the dollar. Now people will use any of them and accept any of them, but there is a need for the bolivar, because you have to have bolivar because everyone accepts it and you need that for change for the dollar. People want the dollar, but will also use the Colombian peso.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, interesting stuff. So I presume you didn't actually go through the border at that point, this was just visiting it and seeing it from one side?

Peter McCormack: Yeah and the ATM, we didn't see the ATM machine, I think that's been taken away for whatever reason. But it was just the case of, and it is crazy, it's a life changing experience seeing something like that. We're very fortunate to live the lives we live in places like Australia, UK, US, we can moan about it a lot, but this is a complete breakdown of society and you do see a mixture of sadness and happiness. It's really strange, but yeah, that was an experience. So from there, we flew back, we got the last flight back to Bogota and stayed the night, and then flew in to Caracas, and the start of that journey was being picked up by our fixer and being taken to our hotel.

Again, another strange experience. So I asked where to stay and I was recommended to stay at the Renaissance, which is in the safest part of the city and that is where all the politicians and the business people, that's where they all stay. It's the safest, it's the best hotel and Renaissance is a good brand, globally it's recognized as a very high standard hotel. But there were just some... It was a good hotel, but it felt a bit like a Hilton when you're in it, not like a Renaissance. Just little things really stood out. Then this was something I started noticing the whole time I was there, so when we got to Caracas airport and we got through customs, all the toilets were locked.

Why are the toilets locked? So eventually, one showed me one that was open, but imagining there's a limited number of staff to maintain the toilets. I didn't find a single toilet in Venezuela... Just before, if somebody listens to this, they might jump down my throat, and I'm just saying, I didn't soap in a single toilet.

Stephan Livera: Wow, so everyone's just washing hands with water and that's it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, my bathroom in the hotel had soap, but the toilet in Caracas didn't and the toilets in the restaurant I went into didn't. I don't know if soap is something that's hard to get hold of, or it's a luxury that they just don't spend the money.

Stephan Livera: Is it too expensive?

Peter McCormack: ... There was no soap, I don't know. So that stood out. We had a beer, our bottles of beer were just really small.

Stephan Livera: Okay, so like half the size of a standard beer or what are we talking?

Peter McCormack: Like 200ml. I think a standard beer bottle is like 330ml?

Stephan Livera: Yeah, something like that. They might like 350ml, but yeah, 200ml, it's shrinkflation, but just on another level.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the little bottles of water are about the same size. When we went for dinner, the restaurant in the hotel was empty. When we went for breakfast, and again this stands out, and this is going to sound kind of snobby and I don't mean it to come across like that, but as you travel and you have breakfast in hotels, you get used to a vast spread of breakfast like, here's your fruit, here's you veg, here's your cereal, here's your bacon, your sausage, your egg and you could tell they were taking a little more care not to be wasteful. The bowls of fruit just weren't as full, the plates of cheese were just a bit smaller, which is something I think actually everyone should do, we shouldn't be wasteful.

The sausages, were essentially, I would say canned frankfurters that had been fried. This all comes down to the import of goods, what they can get in and what they can't, how expensive things are, and it makes sense. I'm not criticizing! You just notice a lot of things like this as you're traveling around and I haven't noticed it anywhere and I've been to everywhere. I've travelled to a lot of South America, a lot of Asia, I've been to Vietnam, Cambodia, this was the first time I'd really experienced something like this, where I felt like you could see the impact of import controls or the cost of imports and other things like. This is the first time I felt like I was in a secret state and being watched the whole time, which I probably wasn't, but I felt like I was.

Stephan Livera: How did it feel when you were buying things? Did it feel like everything you bought was super cheap just because of the exchange rate and so on? Was it like that?

Peter McCormack: No. Again, it was mixed. We went to a restaurant on the second day, and I put a photo up on Twitter, and it was funny, because it was priced in bolivars, but in the menu all the bolivars were stickers. I knew what it was, was that they're having to change the prices so often that they're just re-sticking them on each time. That was very obvious. That was in East Caracas, and I think I paid for dinner for the four of us. I ended up paying in dollars and it was about $20, I don't think it was that cheap. Now I don't know also if they have a different price for westerners, some people do that.

Stephan Livera: Oh okay, they bump it up for the rich guy.

Peter McCormack: Yeah or just if you're in certain areas like when I was in Cambodia, you go for a cup of coffee on one of the main streets in Siem Reap, and you can pay $3 or $4 dollars for a cup of coffee. You can go three streets down and you can pay 50 cents. They just know the westerners don't look down there, and they can charge that much. So I don't know if it is that, but that was about $20. When I went to airport, I was kind of hungry and I was queuing up, and there was M&Ms, and I was like, "I'm going to have some M&Ms." $5 for a pack of M&Ms and in the UK, they're like, I think 80p which is about one dollar.

Stephan Livera: It's kind of like the cost of smuggling it in and taking it that far, it just bumps up the price for a lot of these foreign items.

Peter McCormack: Yes, so we asked her, she doesn't smuggle these in, she just imports them from Miami, but she's paying $3 a pack to bring them in from Miami, and then she's charging $5, which was expensive. But then you'd go to other places and things, it was a mix. Some places things were cheap, some places things were expensive. Some places were kind of normal, and that's to do with also the city. The city Caracas is a very strange city, because it essentially splits in two. It's so weird Stephan. So on our first morning, there was this weird coincidence that we flew into Caracas on the same day Guaidó flew in.

He'd been out drumming up support, and he flew back in, I think it was from the States, the same day, two hours before us and he was harassed and attacked in the airport, which a lot of people were saying and using as evidence saying, "anyone who wants to lead, look he's being attacked." It was very obvious that that was a setup. It's very easy if Maduro wants to, I'm not saying this happened, I can't conclusively confirm this, but it's very easy for him to block his supporters who were coming to receive him, and send a bunch of his own henchmen or own supporters to attack him. There's no way that's impartial.

But yes, we went in on the same day and I was due to interview one of his MPs on the first morning, and they were having a meeting of their Congress in this town square. We went down to East Caracas, and on the surface, East Caracas feels like almost any other cosmopolitan city. You have big billboards for jeans, for insurance, for Pepsi and it just felt like any other city. I drove past a car garage that had a Porsche in it, like a Porsche Cayenne.

That's not a cheap car, but they've got that there because there are people in Venezuela who can afford that and this is the area of the city which is essentially controlled by Guaidó. This is the supporters of Guaidó, this is the wealthier side. We left because we went out to one of the slums, but when you go to West Caracas, it changes very quickly. You've suddenly got propaganda on the walls, this Maduro stencil that you see everywhere, stencils of Hugo Chavez Junior, stencils of Maduro, different propaganda messages covering the walls and then you're suddenly in an area that feels a bit more dangerous, feels like a higher lever of poverty.

That was when our fixer said to us, "do the window up if you want to film." When you're making a film, you do this thing called B-roll, I don't know if you know, but that's all the stuff that sits between interviews. So he was like, "do up the windows" and I felt unsafe there. Yeah, it was a very strange experience!

Stephan Livera: So in the west Caracas area, is that more Maduro sympathetic?

Peter McCormack: Well let's say Maduro controlled. In terms of Maduro sympathetic, this is where it gets really complicated. So we're essentially, you and I, I'd say, we skirt between content creators and journalists. Sometimes people tell us we're a journalist when they have high expectations of us, and then when they don't like us, they say, you're not a journalist. So you're in that weird area. But I don't know if you've trained as a journalist, I haven't. I'm aware of some of the responsibilities, I don't always keep to them like I should, but let's just say we're content creators/amateur journalists.

I don't know how much you've run into this, I've run into it more with Defiance, but there's two side to every story becomes very complicated because there is so much information and misinformation. I've experienced, especially when I covered Eva Morales in Bolivia, when I started looking into the riots in Santiago, there is always these two sides. So let's say with Venezuela, the two sides are, and I'll get into the nuance as I understand it, and I'm fully aware there's a lot I don't understand and it's going to take time.

Let's just say there is the Maduro side, which is the socialist side, and then there is Guaidó side, which is the more capitalist side. Within the Maduro side, you would say the Maduro sympathizers now, you get told by people who support Guaidó, because we stumbled upon this big rally... Did you see the video of all the people marching?

Stephan Livera: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: It must have been 100,000 people, all dressed in red or wearing Chavez T-shirts or Maduro T-shirts singing about him. I was like, I don't believe that there is a single person in these 100,000 who supports Maduro, I don't believe it. What I was told by people who are supporters of Guaidó, they said, well these people rely on Maduro to survive. These are people who are being provided with education, they're being provided with jobs, or they're being provided with these... Apparently they get these food baskets that come every couple of weeks. If you are told to go and join this rally, you're going to go and join it, because you do not want to risk losing your education or your job, because the name of the game as I said is survival, and to have a job is lucky.

I was like "okay, fine." So each side, you've got to try and be objective and say, "are you just saying that because you are against Maduro, or are you saying it because it's the truth?" Now I veer towards certainly being in the more pro-Guaidó camp, but not fully supportive and there is clear evidence that Maduro is a dictator and he has control of the press. I think there are some very obvious things where you can see this person is a dictator. Is there a free press? Are there free and fair elections? The fact that when I went in, and I had to hide my job and equipment tells you about that country.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, for sure.

Peter McCormack: But there are certainly a group of people, the Chavezsters who are pro-Maduro because they're pro-Chavez, and when Chavez stepped down, he essentially elected and said to the people, "I want Maduro to follow me." My fixer said, "Chavez is the first Venezuelan to win an election when he dies with Maduro winning." Essentially Maduro winning is Chavez winning again.

Whatever you think of Chavez, he was popular and he was popular because he has populist ideas, because he came in and Venezuela had a lot of money, the price of a barrel of oil was $120 and he was able to spend a lot of money on social programs. He was able to say, "I can help you, I can help the poor" and whether you agree or not with socialism, I know obviously you don't, there are a lot of people who, I don't know about you Stephan, I almost think almost every country is socialist to some extent.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, that's right.

Peter McCormack: Every country is on a socialist spectrum from, you've got the kind of socialism that Bernie Sanders wants and Corbyn wanted in the UK, to kind of quite capitalist countries and a lot of the South American countries tend to swing wildly from socialist to capitalist. I don't think many of these people have ever even heard of libertarianism. But because of that, I think everyone has this expectation that the state should do something for you.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, of course.

Peter McCormack: Like almost everyone, it's built into you, right?

Stephan Livera: But I think the thing though is more like they might think, "oh I want one of those European so called socialist countries", and some of them don't necessarily think of themselves as being socialist, right?

Peter McCormack: No they don't.

Stephan Livera: So they might have thought, "I wanted to be like a Denmark" or whatever, even the Venezuelans didn't want to be in Venezuela.

Peter McCormack: Well nobody wants that. Some people want socialism and then they get it, and then they realize they don't want it. Also you've got to be very careful of the definition of socialism here because there are social policies, there are social safety nets, and then there is the controlling the means of production, which is where things certainly start to break down because the governments are fucking useless. So Venezuela has historically always had a lot of poor people anyway, even when it was the richest country in South America, there were a lot of poor people.

The slums, I've never seen slums like this because I have been visiting a lot of these countries, they go on for miles. So you've got a lot of poor people who were raised up by Chavez, and of course he'll be popular and if you have a lot of majority of people having some expectation of the state, the person who does more for you, you're going to like, right? It's only under Maduro that things have got really, really fucking desperate, that all these people have realized he's not the guy. So I imagine there are supporters who support him because they want to, because they're Chavezsters.

There are people who support him because maybe they don't really truly understand the extent of what he's doing or they believe the propaganda. There are people who support him because they're evil and they fundamentally know what he's doing, they know the impact on the people and they're just evil. Like the people on Twitter, this guy keeps messaging me on Twitter, and I'll end up blocking him. I fundamentally believe he's educated enough to know what's going on and he still supports Maduro, he's somebody whose evil. There are the conspiracy theorists who probably support him because they think this is just US imperialism trying to start another coup.

What was then interesting was, there were a few people I asked privately, "do you support Maduro or Guaidó? Off record, off camera" and I did this in the slums and a few times people said neither and I thought that was really interesting. They don't want Maduro, but they don't think Guaidó is the answer. Guaidó also has lost support because he came in with these promises, "I'm going to change the country" and he hasn't managed to deliver. He hasn't managed to get the army onside because you need the men with guns, right? So that was something that I thought was pretty interesting. I think these situations are very complicated and there are a lot of different opinions, a lot of nuances which you don't always get. It isn't binary.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, tell us a little bit about the slums, exactly what was the situation like there? What kind of living scenario was it like? What was the safety and security situation there like?

Peter McCormack: So that was probably the scariest part of the trip because the way my fixer explained it, and he said, "if you went in on your own, you'd be an idiot. It's like an 80/20, you've got an 80% chance of getting in some kind of trouble, kidnapped, mugged, killed, whatever." He said the odds flip if you come with me, it's 80% chance of getting out. I said, "Well hold on, you're saying there's a 20% chance we might not get out?" He said "No, no, no, just broad numbers." So I was already nervous going in. The slums are what you would expect, and like a lot of South America, all the windows, all the doors are iron gates and iron bars, because there's a lot of theft.

So, I was nervous going in already, and we parked up and we had to walk from the car to this lady's house who I went to interview and we were to go down the side street and I was just kind of like, is this one of these scenarios where someone could just jump out and kidnap me or something can happen. Perhaps I was over nervous, but a lot of people have said to me when going to Venezuela, "be safe, do you really want to go there?" So I don't know if I was being naïve or over excited, I didn't know how to feel, but I felt nervous.

We went into this lady's house, I interviewed her, I talked about what is life like, she had her two children there, it's a small house, one bedroom, tiny little front room, no electricity, no TV, as you would expect a poor living. Her children were happy as anything, which was great, had a lovely conversation with her about what life was like. The most interesting thing I took from that was the petro, I saw she had the petro, the mother of all shit coins! I was like, "so you've got the petro?"

And she said, "Yes, I've got it. I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how I'm meant to use it." Because essentially everyone's got an airdrop to them and she didn't know what it was or how to use it. She has to earn a small amount of money because she has to survive and she has to feed her children, and also she has to pay a certain amount for their schooling. I think it might be for their books or something, I can't remember. But that was the most nervous I felt. Then it was after that we got pulled over by the police.

Stephan Livera: Why did they pull you over?

Peter McCormack: Just to question, because it was a car with blacked out windows coming out of the slums. So the initial suspicion is that this could criminal, it could be moving contraband, "who are you?" Blah, blah, blah and then they realized we were tourists and they wanted to know what we were doing, where we'd been, and our fixer explained we're tourists, we'd been to see the slum. He said, "but what's on the cameras? Is there any anti-government messages? If there are, you're going to be arrested and the cameras will be confiscated", blah, blah, blah. He was explaining to me at the same time, and then he managed to talk them out of doing it, and I was obviously scared. I wasn't scared about being arrested, because I assumed I'd just be deported.

I just didn't want to lose the footage, I really didn't want to lose the footage because it's important footage. But he talked them out of it, which was amazing and I was trying to talk to the policeman as well being translated, and I only got to ask him one question. I was like, "what's it like being a policeman in Caracas?" And he just said that it is very tough and it's a very tough job. But they let us go without checking the cameras, which I thought it was weird. Why ask the question, why not check the cameras? Perhaps they were too busy. Now there is a scenario where we probably could have bribed our way out of it, but the fixer said to me that the most likely scenarios is you can bribe your way out of this, it might be $500 whatever, but you can bribe your way out of it.

So I said okay, fair enough, so that was that day. We did go back to the slums again the next day, we went to another humanitarian project, which was a place which supports single mothers. So there are a lot of situations where people have children, get pregnant and the man just doesn't care and just leaves the woman to fend for herself. So you've got a lot of single mothers who have to feed their children, get them to school, and try and work, which is really tough. This is a place which can support I think up to 300 a day.

Again, we went and visited them, again I was kind of nervous going in, but that was a lovely experience actually. The kids were all really happy, the mothers were all really welcoming and I ended up spending quite a bit of time speaking to the lady who runs the place, whose an absolute saint. She goes there every day and the really interesting part of that is when I interviewed her, I've got this on camera, I'll share with you Stephan.

At the end, I can't remember the final question, I asked her something like, "what is needed? What's going on here?" And she was replying in Spanish and being translated, but she ended up bringing me kind of tears without me even understanding her words. Just by the sentiment of how she... I just want say about how she spoke, she became so impassioned and she became very emotional, and which in turn made me emotional, even though I couldn't understand what she was saying.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, you can sense it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Again, obviously a desperate situation and another place that's relying hugely on donations from people to survive. Very, very desperate, and that's where I got a lot of my reality about how can Bitcoin help Venezuela.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, I was going to get to this topic as well because we've spoken a little bit about your experience going through Venezuela and the border town and then we juxtaposed that against a typical, "Bitcoin fixes this, everyone can use Lightning", and "what about Bitcoin mining" and "what about people who are just using Bitcoin." What was the reality on the ground?

Peter McCormack: So I can't say exactly what's happening because I was there for two days. I didn't go to every single possible place to see if they accept Bitcoin, to see how people are using Bitcoin. So my starting point was common sense. So common sense says to me that Bitcoin is useful for the majority of people because they don't all have mobile phones, they don't all have data services. In the provinces, you do have blackouts, they keep the power going in Caracas pretty well, but you do have blackouts, and if you're living on $5 a month, the last thing you need is another volatile currency.

The reason they have the dollar is because the bolivar is volatile. So the last thing you need is another volatile currency, and you don't want to be paying exchange fees. If you're living on $5 a month, Bitcoin is almost certainly useless to you, completely useless.

Stephan Livera: Right, and as I take from what you're saying, essentially, very, very few people are in a position to use Bitcoin as a savings technology as you're saying, because they're living hand to mouth.

Peter McCormack: Hand to mouth, and they don't have a savings culture. There was a question I asked CryptoBastardo, Javier, and he said, "we don't have a culture of saving here, so people won't be using to save." Also my fixer said, quite interestingly, "we've probably got one of the most digitized financial systems in the world", they've got an equivalent of a Venmo for bolivars, because if you keep having to reprint the money every time because of inflation, you need a new denomination, you need a billion dollar note or a trillion dollar note, it gets expensive reprinting again the money to circulation, you might as well digitize it.

So they do this kind of Venmo style app, which a lot of people use. But the bolivar is a hot potato, you've got to spend it before it loses its value. So for the majority of people, if their average salaries are $5 a month, Bitcoin really isn't useful for people there, and this is where I took issue with the Dash folks, because the way I see it is DashCore is fundamentally a business. If DashCore is fundamentally a business, I don't know how it works, but essentially they have to get their funding from Dash, from the master... I don't know how it works because I didn't care that much.

But I've seen the marketing videos that Dash have done, which show people ripping up money in banks and such and such and it gives you the impression that Dash is a really great solution, but Dash isn't useful. I say Bitcoin as well, like from a few people, I got some negative reactions to this, "oh, he's just a maximalist" and I'm saying that Bitcoin isn't a solution too! There are examples of remittance, so anybody can come back at me and say, "you're wrong, Bitcoin is being used.

 Yes, I agree it is being used. But it can't solve the problem and the usage is limited. I'll come to the use and why it's limited, but Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange unless you're using Lightning network. But even then, we still know a lot of people aren't really using as a medium of exchange, it is a store of value or a remittance tool. That isn't going to serve hardly anyone a purpose in Venezuela right now, there's very small number of people who have that...

It's not so much even have the need, who are just using it. So if it's not a medium of exchange, then Dash is completely useless and Dash isn't a store of value. You look at the charts, it's not like Bitcoin where Bitcoin is volatile, but the long-term trajectory is up. Dash isn't. Dash is like every other shit coin, it had that spike and then it...

Stephan Livera: Starts going down, versus Bitcoin or versus the US dollar potentially.

Peter McCormack: Exactly and I got an open letter written to me by the DashCore CEO, and all his arguments for Dash, they're sound arguments. "We can't get change, so the divisibility is useful." All the arguments they came up with were valid arguments, but he's post rationalizing the need, the reality is very different. Yes, they might have a handful of users, yes they might have some wallets created, yes they might solve some use cases, but to say and to push this as a useful currency for the people of Venezuela, it isn't. It might be useful for a few niche people in East Caracas, but it is not a useful and it's massively disingenuous.

This just comes back to the traditional behaviour of a shit coiner where it's about marketing, and none of them ever want to admit they're wrong and that's why I think sometimes Bitcoin differ, as you're willing to admit you're wrong. I went there thinking Bitcoin would be great for Venezuelans, and it could be, but ultimately, I went there saying "I was wrong about Bitcoin in Venezuela. The name of the game is survival, get me bolivars and dollar and let me eat.

I don't fucking need Bitcoin right now", and I very rarely hear that from a shit coiner, "okay you know what, we were wrong, we got this totally wrong" and they're not going to change their minds. If they hear this and if they listen to this, they're going to argue back with me and they're going to tweet about me and they're going to say stupid things like, "you were only there for two days, what do you know?"

You see a lot in two days and common sense kicks in. You only have to look at the facts of the average salary, go to a slum and see what the lives are like for people to know another volatile cryptocurrency is not what is required. It's not going to help the Venezuelans.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, and you spoke to people who are living there day to day, so they had the experience as well, right?

Peter McCormack: You have to be honest with yourself. If I came back and said, "Bitcoin is this great opportunity for the people of Venezuela", I am spreading propaganda in a situation which is already suffering from propaganda, it's disingenuous. Now, let's go to the reality of where Bitcoin is being used, and it does have a purpose. It's very useful for the educated and the relatively more wealthy. So I went to visit Cryptobastardo, I saw some mining rigs, I saw their setup and if you can get mining equipment into Venezuela and you can mine, your electricity is $10 a month.

Stephan Livera: Basically free or cheap!

Peter McCormack: Basically free. Outside of the cost of the equipment, you're essentially mining for free. So that is kind of free money and the small amount of Bitcoin you might mine, in bolivar terms it's very high. That is a use case. Trading, if you are trading out there and you know how to trade, that is a use case because you can make good money trading if you know what you're doing. If you are supporting either end of the remittance and taking a fee, you can make money.

But the main use case of which the majority of people of Venezuela can't use, but someone like Cryptobastardo can or somebody else, is if they can hold Bitcoin and every week they withdraw the amount of bolivar they need from their Bitcoin, and they use that to survive. Now, that is a use case we've known about to avoid the effects of hyperinflation, we knew that existed. But that is not going to be used by somebody in the slum who earns $5 a month. What are they going to do, save a dollar and then convert 50 cents worth into bolivar and pay 20 cents fee? It's not going to happen.

All right, let's get them onto a Lightning network, let's get them on Breez or something. It's just... We're getting into the realms of ludicrous here, we've got to be practical. If you are in East Caracas or I don't know if there are any other provinces where there's perhaps a mid or an upper class, but if you're surviving on more than $5, say $100, $200, $300 a month, first you've got a good standard of living, but it makes sense for you then to have $300 of Bitcoin, because even if Bitcoin drops 20% in a month...

Stephan Livera: It's still doing better than inflation.

Peter McCormack: Exactly! And every time you withdraw that 25 cents, I don't know what the fees are. What are the fees right now? What are people paying?

Stephan Livera: Bitcoin fees? A lot of them are still going through it like one sat per buy right now. Obviously we anticipate that will rise.

Peter McCormack: But it's usable for you. If you're earning $10 over the next month or $20 or $50, you can ignore that fee, whereas the person on $1 can't. So the way to summarize it is, if you just say there's no use for Bitcoin in Venezuela, that's a lie, of course there is. But if you can say it's for the majority of people, again, that's also a lie because it isn't, because there's practical problems.

It really is a tool of the wealthy and the educated, it's not a tool of the poor or the common man who really is thinking, "how do I eat today? How do I survive today?" Getting this message out has been really interesting because I have received a lot of criticism, but I have also received a number of people going, "no, that's absolutely honest, what Pete is saying is the absolute truth."

Stephan Livera: I think it's one of those things where maybe elsewhere in South America, there maybe more of a reason and more people who are, let's say, in a position to usefully benefit from Bitcoin, whether they mine it, whether they have access to smartphones and electricity and they can have Phoenix Wallet and do these Lightning transactions and whatever.

But I think to your point, when we're considering Venezuela, we might summarize that in saying, in very marginal or certain scenarios, if you can mine Bitcoin, of if you are let's say a tech savvy trader type who is on the border kind of taking advantage of that remittance corridor and the smuggling and so on, maybe there's a case there. But it would be exaggerating to say that the common man, the every man in Venezuela has realistically access to Bitcoin and uses Bitcoin. Most people are living hand to mouth scenario where they are not able to effectively make use of savings technology.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think you said it perfectly, in a position. Everyone can benefit from Bitcoin, but are you in the position? Do you have the infrastructure, do you have the technology? Do you have the skills?

Stephan Livera: Education.

Peter McCormack: Education, do you have the ability? Almost certainly the majority don't have all those factors in place. But whereas if you go to somewhere like Argentina, it has a long history of inflation problems, the Corralito where essentially all the savings were wiped out, they might be heading to another one, they get it.

But the country is in a much better position than Venezuela, everyone probably has a mobile phone and a data plan, they're used to their money being wiped out, but they would understand it better and they're more in a position, they have the infrastructure. Chile the same. I haven't been to Colombia, again the same. So I think in a position, you've worded it perfectly, I would say you nailed it there.

Stephan Livera: Awesome. So look, how do you think people should... Let's say you're a Bitcoin person listening, how would you think of it? What should they say when they're telling people about say Venezuela versus South America from a Bitcoin point of view?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, really good question. So in terms of Venezuela, I'm still educating myself and I'm really trying to understand the political side of things at the moment because it feels like there is this binary choice. Either you support a dictator or you're supporting an American coup. Right now, America has a history of failed coups. I'm not sure if a coup would be the worse situation in the world, if it is a coup and also, is it a coup or is it somebody seeking support from America? Is it that America just only wants to support Venezuela because they want access to the oil reserves? I understand all those suspicions and I understand why people think that.

At the same time, we have a government there which is a dictatorship, which is essentially a Narco state, which does not have free and fair elections, which doesn't have an open economy, where people are living in very desperate situations that have extermination squads, whether or not they are only killing the criminals and improving safety, they have extermination squads going out and murdering people.

So I'm doing my best to really educate and understand the situation myself and I think that's what most people should do, is really trying to understand the situation. In terms of pushing the Venezuelan Bitcoin narrative, is that the people who need it the most are the ones who can't get it and can't afford it. So it isn't the great use case that people think. I think we need to stop perpetuating this narrative. It's maybe trying to be a little more responsible with the things I say, and even in some of my tweets, sometimes I'm having to think, am I being responsible here? Is this objective? Am I being fair?

Have I seen the whole side of this? But there are people who can benefit from it, but they're a scale down version of the people who can benefit in a lot of countries. I think if you want to help Venezuela now and you want to use your Bitcoin, then send some Bitcoin to an NGO. If you want to help Venezuela now, then try and support the movement towards democracy. I know in your world democracy is soft socialism, but that to me is one step better than the dictatorship, and I think the country needs free and fair elections. I don't just think, I know it, I've seen it with my own eyes.

I would also say to people be very, very careful of the propaganda and the misinformation you might see in retweet. Again, when I went into Venezuela and I explained the situation, there are a lot of people who weren't Maduro propagandist, people who are Bitcoiners or people who follow me on Twitter, who started retweeting the footage of Guaidó at the airport being attacked and saying, "oh this isn't somebody who is supported by the Venezuelan people."

You have to be very aware there's a high chance, whilst I can't prove it, that that is a staged situation, that is the creation of propaganda to make Guaidó look like he's not liked. I think that that's something you have to be very, very careful about. I've retweeted things at times and people come back to me and said, "well you haven't considered this" and I realize I've retweeted something without actually realizing what I'm retweeting and I think that's important. But I think if you want to help Venezuela really, they need financial support and being charitable is probably the most important thing people could do right now.

Stephan Livera: Whether that's USD or Bitcoin, right?

Peter McCormack: Whatever it is!

Stephan Livera: And your message is basically, be weary that you can be manipulated, your confirmation bias can cause you to basically boost and retweet things that align with your views that are not necessarily the truth or not necessarily like an objective reality and you sort of have to be a bit clever about how you sort the wheat from the chaff and understand what's going on. I suppose the last question I would have for you on this topic is...

Peter McCormack: Can I just throw in there, I went in there with my own bias. I went in anti-Maduro, pro-Guaidó, and I went in thinking Guaidó is the rightful president of Venezuela. Whilst I like and still favour Guaidó, I guess I came out thinking there is more support for Maduro than I expected, and less support for Guaidó than I expected. Now I just think the country needs open, free and fair elections more than anything and I went in with my own bias and I'm trying to learn myself to be as objective as possible.

Stephan Livera: Right, it's difficult to say because it could also be the fact that, let's say Maduro has the state in his favour and the propaganda is in his favour, so all these people believe in him, when he's actually not the best situation or the best choice for them as well. It's a complicated question.

Peter McCormack: Dude, navigating all this stuff and all the misinformation, the articles online, the tweets, whether the sources are correct, it is really, really hard journalism. I don't consider myself a professional journalist, but journalism is very, very hard now and it comes with a lot of pressure and a lot of accusations and it's a tough job.

Stephan Livera: So my last question on this whole thing is, would you go back and would you do an update tour in future?

Peter McCormack: Yes, that's a really good last question. I'll tell you why I don't know if I should go. I want to go back, I loved the country, I thought the people were amazing, the food was incredible, I'd like to see a prosperous Venezuela, I'd like to see Venezuela without all this bullshit. But I don't know if I've put myself on a list or whether I'm overthinking how important I am. I don't think I'm important, but I just don't know... What I'm trying to say is, I don't know at what point you put yourself on a list. I don't know if they have a list there at immigration that says, this person can't come in, or if this person comes, let's arrest him straight away. That could be anybody, I just don't know.

I don't know if I have a high enough profile, that that matters. I don't think I do, I'm not saying I'm some high profile person that matters, I just don't know if low level people like me still get added to a list. That I don't know. I don't know if it would be now dangerous for me to go, because I've left Venezuela making accusations about Maduro, calling it a Narco state. Probably it would be irresponsible for me to go back, probably.

At the same time, I kind of want to go back. I think there's more of a story to tell, I would like to go to the border town inside Venezuela, I'd like to go to the provinces, I just don't know if that's too risky now. You have to have a certain amount of responsibility, especially with children, they were nervous about me going and to go back might be too risky. So I genuinely don't know, I would like to though.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, maybe it's a question of time, right? Maybe you won't do it in one year, but say five years have gone and now it's time to go back and maybe there's been a real change, and now maybe there is a reason for people to use Lightning or something else has changed about the scenario that maybe it makes more sense.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you what, I'll throw in one last thing Stephan as well. I've learned so much about Bitcoin by going to places and seeing how people are using it and seeing the reality there, El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia. Going to these places and really doing that first, somebody else told me to do this, but getting a taxi driver and asking about the local money, how it works and then trying to understand how socially people interact with each other, try and understand the technology people have, then seeing them use it.

In El Salvador, where people are living in mud huts and I'm expecting them to have a BillFodl buried in the mud in their hut. It's ridiculous! But we talk about in the West and in Australia, UK, US, Bitcoin is a savings tool and it's a speculative tool. We talk about the real use cases of censorship resistance, seizure resistance which tend to be poorer countries or countries which tend to be under authoritarian rule. But by going there and seeing it, the reality is a bit different, and that understanding of how people can use it or how they should use it, or the level of education.

You find out a lot more in these places and I think a lot of Bitcoiners have a real blind spot to the reality in these countries, and I think that's a really important thing that more of us visit, more of us experience it, more of us try and learn because being self-sovereign in a dangerous, violent poor country is very different from a New York apartment. It's going to be a very different experience, and I don't think we have the education, the infrastructure or the empathy for how these people will use, right?

Stephan Livera: Right, but at the same time, I guess here I'm thinking, let's call this an Alex Gladstein point, he makes the point that there are billions of people on this earth who live under an authoritarian government. Now they may not have the education, the wealth, the tool set, the scenario, but over time, we should anticipate that more of them will use Bitcoin. So maybe not today, but it'll come.

Peter McCormack: Yeah certainly, I think we do and I think that we can get this message to these people and we can teach them, we can educate, but I think we need to just have some understanding about some of the practicalities. So perhaps we can provide tools like, if you live in a mud hut, how are you going to backup your private keys? What if you lose your private key or? Is there some kind of multi-sig solution which is really easy to use that suits them?

What are the scenarios whereby, if you have hyperbitcoinization in a poor area and if all the local criminals or gangsters realize that everyone's money is on their phone, does that mean everyone is going to have a gun to their head every day asking for their Bitcoin? They're some of the things that just need thinking about. I think there's a wider debate, and I'd like to open up this conversation, these shows, I started just tagging them on my website as "Bitcoin Around the World", but these shows have a lower than average download for me.

You know what it's like, if you get Tuur Demeester or Saifedean, you're going to get a lot of downloads, and if you get somebody you haven't heard of, you get a lower level of downloads. Going to these locations, you've got people you've not heard of, so I know my downloads are going to suffer, I'm going to pay more money, spend more money, and my downloads are going to suffer, covering these locations, but I think it's important.

So I'm going to do a bit more of this, because I think that if you only care about number go up, then you should care about this because we're talking about billions of people who could use this and if you don't care about number gap, you care about the use case and how this can change peoples’ lives, you should still care about these people and how they use it. So I think these use cases are really important, I'm going to spend more time on it.

Stephan Livera: Certainly interesting stories, just early.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, very early! But I appreciate you doing this.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, no worries, of course! So yeah, I guess that's basically it in terms of the questions I had.

Peter McCormack: You know what's going to happen now, the people are going to say, "Stephan should host the show every week. Pete, you should fuck off."

Stephan Livera: Introducing the new host of What Bitcoin Did, Stephan Livera!

Peter McCormack: Stephan Livera yeah! Firstly, I appreciate you as a colleague and a friend. People probably don't know this, but we chat quite regularly in the background, I'm always picking your brain.

Stephan Livera: Yeah, we compare notes and share ideas on things.

Peter McCormack: No, but I appreciate having you there as a helpful hand and doing this. I'm a big fun of your work, but just thank you for doing this because I wanted to get this out, I wanted to explain it. We've done an hour and a half now, I think we were meant to do an hour. I couldn't tell this in a tweet. I could have written it out as a post, but I felt it needed telling and explaining away. Was it useful for you?

Stephan Livera: Yeah I think so. I think it's useful even for me, I consider myself a Bitcoin advocate, and it's useful that we tell the right story, right? We're not overselling and we're not underselling. We're pitching it down the middle in terms of here's a precise or accurate version of what's going on and where are the real opportunities and I think today we have done that and hopefully it has been interesting for the listeners.

Peter McCormack: Well you should tell people how to find you because I've got a lot of new listeners now with this beginners guide, and once they've got through the beginners guide, they're probably going to want the more advanced and technical and educated stuff, and the next natural place to go is a Stephan Livera podcast. So Stephan, tell people how they can find you.

Stephan Livera: Of course, well thank you. So stephanlivera.com is the website. You can find me on all the major podcaster apps if you search Stephan Livera podcast, @stephanlivera on Twitter, and I've also got one more resource which is ministryofnodes.com.au. So that is an educational website that me and my co-founder Ketan, we teach people how to do Bitcoin. How do you hold your keys, how do you run your nodes etc. So we run webinars, we provide private coaching over Zoom calls or sessions if people would like that, and we just write articles as well. So basically you can find me online if you type Stephan Livera.

Peter McCormack: Awesome man, I appreciate you doing this. Have a great weekend now coming up. Have a great weekend and I'll see you soon. I'll see you at Bitcoin 2020, as long as Coronavirus doesn't prevent our travel!

Stephan Livera: That's right, before Coronavirus gets us all. Thank you!