My Interview with the Head of El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC)
Stacy Herbert Expands on President Bukele's Bitcoin Vision for El Salvador
This week I spoke with Stacy Herbert, Director of The National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC) of the Office of the President of El Salvador.
While I’ve been critical of some of the things that Bukele, Herbert and Herbert’s partner, Max Keiser, have done in El Salvador, I’m also a proponent of many of the things they’ve done.
For instance, I love that they’ve helped facilitate Bitcoin education from kindergarten through university-level education in El Salvador. I love that the ONBTC is stacking one bitcoin per day to help the country get out of its debt to the IMF — one of the most evil institutions that exists on planet Earth today. And I appreciate that the ONBTC is/may be helping El Salvador to become Singapore 2.0 or Florence 2.0, as Herbert puts it.
(What does “Singapore 2.0” or “Florence 2.0” mean? Click on the image above and read the piece to find out.)
But there’s one particular thing that Herbert and Keiser (better known as Max and Stacy) did that I very much respect. And that is that they stuck with El Salvador through the depths of the bitcoin bear market of 2022 and part of 2023.
While the MSM piled on saying that El Salvador’s embrace of Bitcoin was a failure, they stayed and educated people about the difference between bitcoin and all other crypto assets.
While even Bitcoin enthusiasts made jokes about Herbert and Keiser getting hung because of their helping to push Bitcoin adoption further in El Salvador, they stayed and explained to the powers that be that the extreme downturn in bitcoin’s price was par for the course in terms of bitcoin price cycles.
And while much of the rest of the world wrote El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment off, they stayed and continued to help build what is now colloquially referred at as “Bitcoin country.”
Will El Salvador’s embrace of Bitcoin work out for the country in the long run?
I don’t know.
But I do give credit to everyone in El Salvador, including the incredible staff at Mi Primer Bitcoin, who are working with all of their heart to give Bitcoin a fighting chance in the country.
Not Mining Bitcoin Is Dangerous
Norway has recently begun to crack down on Bitcoin mining. And now its citizens are paying the price for doing so, as residents of Hadsel, a Norwegian municipality have seen a 20% increase in energy costs.
The local Bitcoin miner in that part of the country had been subsidizing power fees. In other words, it was using power from the region to mine bitcoin and that stream of revenue allowed it to charge residents of the region less for power.
Many jurisdictions in Africa have already learned how Bitcoin mining can subsidize electricity costs and have been capitalizing on it. Gridless has been at the forefront of this movement. For more on this, read the following articles:
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Markets
Bitcoin (BTC) continues to chop sideways.
It seems to be in a consolidation phase. I believe that the uptrend that started earlier this year will resume if The Fed announces that it will be cutting rates this week (a highly likely scenario).
As I mentioned weeks back, these have been decent levels for DCAing into bitcoin. And if you’re investing via US spot bitcoin ETFs, may I please urge you to look into investing via the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB).
That said, nothing in this newsletter is financial advice. Please do your own research. Your financial decisions are yours are yours alone.
That’s all for this week, everyone!
Thanks for reading, and here’s to a fruitful week ahead!
Best,
Frank
Currently reading: Would Mao Hold Bitcoin?: The Past, Present and Future of Bitcoin in Techno-Nationalist China, by Roger Huang
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