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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast.

This is Donal, and I'm here today with Nathaniel Popper, New York Times journalist, and the author

of the book just out today, Digital Gold, Bitcoin, and the inside story of the misfits

and millionaires trying to reinvent money.

Welcome, Nathaniel.

Thank you for having me.

So I just wanted to kick off with an

article you wrote in the New York Times recently about what you describe as an experiment with

Bitcoin happening, playing out in Argentina, where people are trading pesos for Bitcoin and vice versa

instead of actually into other currencies. Could you talk a little bit about why you think that phenomenon is happening?

I mean, one of the things you comment on is that it's the only place where ordinary people,

that you think is the only place where ordinary people are using Bitcoin for real commercial transactions.

Yeah.

I mean, in the course of writing this book, I traveled to most of the places where

Bitcoin has caught on in any significant way. And I was always on the lookout for people actually

using Bitcoin, you know, people who weren't just speculating on the price of Bitcoin or working

on it for sort of political or technological reasons. I wanted to see people using it in

some ordinary way. And Argentina, as I mentioned, as you mentioned, is really the one place where

...