You're listening to TIP.

You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network.

Now for your host, Preston Pish.

All right.

I want to start off by just allowing you the opportunity to just tell us a story that's just kind of kind of open our eyes to some of the stuff that you're seeing because the stuff that we're about to talk about today is just so wholesome and so exciting for a world that seems to be going awry.

And so lay a story on us that's kind of a current event maybe something that you've seen recently that is really going to capture everyone's attention.

Yeah, well, my mind was blown this morning when I was speaking to a young man from the Congo from the DRC and I wanted to start with his story because I just been so moved by all day and it's something that I think encapsulates a lot of way I think Bitcoin matters so much for freedom.

So I wanted to start a little bit with the history here it's inspirational but if you are to be inspired you have to start from someplace lower and unfortunately we have to go quite low about a hundred years ago there was something called the Congo free state he was telling me so from basically the late 1880s till 19 the later so the king of the Belgium king leopold he had free reign over this enormous territory of more than a million square miles where he basically worked the Congo these people to death to produce rubber.

So some 10 million Congolese perished in the service of king leopold as slaves now it's important to note that the rubber that they produced ended up fueling the car revolution I mean it helped attach cars to roads and helped power a lot of the advances that were happening in the industrial world and we'll continue to see that as we move for this story and in 1908 the world was like oh my god this is so horrible you should just do regular colonial

so after from 1908 to 1960 the Belgian just normal colonialism in the Congo which was which was still pretty bad and you know they had some of the largest gold mines in Africa so of course our reserve currency at the time a lot of it was coming from the Congo again a very important thing for the world.

And you know what was really interesting is as we started to edge towards world war two he was telling me something that was really fascinating was that apparently the Congo is what provided essentially almost all of the uranium for the Manhattan project so the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually had uranium in them that came from a place called chinkolo way in the Congo and the uranium there was such incredible quality it was called like a freak of nature essentially there was a re uranium in the Congo.

There was a root uranium elsewhere but the US government on the recommendation of Einstein really needed to stockpile to make these things and it up getting it from the Congo so again something that really changed our world fast forward a little bit to today something like 80% of the Colton in the world is mined by hand in the Congo for our smartphones 70% of the coal ball used for car batteries 40% of the tantalink that we used for electronics so you know this is a place where some of the world's most amazing riches I just beneath the surface and yet it has this history of the world.

It has this history of brutal colonialism in 1960 finally the Congolese people got independence and their democratically elected leader was assassinated within the year by the foreign powers that didn't like him very much and essentially we installed this guy Mabutu who ruled until 1997 he changed the name of the country desire and he ruled until then and of course they had to deal with some of the world's worst hyperinflation endless mass occurs and prison minutes torture etc.

Finally got done with Mabutu and then they entered into several wars which increasingly became about these real rare minerals now finally you know to get to today the guy I spoke to this morning is a youth activist in the Congo he had co founded something called lucha which is a big non violent movement to push for reform in the country and you know this is someone who's grown up his father his grandfather they've all grown up in a time where they didn't have control over anything whether it was the European colonialists or the European colonialists.

Or the local dictator or foreign corporations you know they were essentially just slaves to the moment or actual slaves and what's so amazing is that these people who have been really successful in building this non violent movement have started to understand Bitcoin and they started to realize how powerful it's going to be for them in the future because it really gives them like property rights like that they didn't have before the Congolese people had all this incredible stuff but it could just be taken from them by people with guns right or like you know with more guns.

And that's just the way it's sort of been for so many decades and you know until you get to that point you bring Bitcoin to the story and just last week lucha which is a very prominent on Twitter they have like a quarter million followers they started tweeting out that they're really excited to be to begin accepting Bitcoin and they're learning all about it and you know a bunch of the people in the movement are orange pilled it kind of is this like light at the end of the very very long dark tunnel for for a lot of people and I think that's what a lot of folks maybe who might be listening to your podcast.

To Americans or Europeans like they might not not grasp like what I've told you here so far is kind of like a more indicative story a more average story of a human on this planet over the last hundred years that then the lives that we've lived or that you know our families have been able to live and Bitcoin is like so transformative because it's going to allow these people to put their time and energy and value into something that they can control with math and they can they can control with a mobile phone which so many people in Congo have.

And I think that's just going to be a big shift in the balance of power from whether again whether it's foreign powers or the local authoritarian state to the individual.

Talk to us about that last part just a little bit more so I know when you were describing all of this to me I'm thinking how prevalent is a smartphone and over in the Congo or for really a lot of the different places we're going to be talking about for people to take immediate payment for something via QR code or you know however however they might go about doing it.

On average today about half the world has access to a smartphone about 50% so we're talking you know three point something billion people and you know that is increasing at a rapid pace so semestimates out of some of the smartphone manufacturers maybe take them with a grain of salt but by the end of 2022 close to 70% of the population will be connected in this way.

So you're talking in the very near future 70% of the world's population that will be able to control its own financial destiny and already half of course we know that that half is more about close to 100% of people in Belgium and more about 30% of people in a place like the Congo right but the key is that like the people who run these grassroots movements and communities and organizations.

They are connected right so and then the information the knowledge can sort of trickle down through their movements so we're in the beginning of something big it is clearly hit the developed world fastest obviously you know the majority of the world's Bitcoin mining infrastructure all the stuff is happening in the developed world but thing that makes me really moved basically is that these same opportunities are open for literally everybody anyone who can get access to the internet again is creeping is more about the world's population.

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