BTC255: Bitcoin Is For Everyone w/ Natalie Brunell (Bitcoin Podcast)

Natalie Brunell: I think a lot of people feel frustrated with capitalism because they associate it with the greed that they think they see in corporations and the wealth concentration, but we really haven't had capitalism because capitalism means that risk is borne by those who take it and it's not socialized to us... But you have to start with capital. And when the capital is essentially government IOUs from an issuer that's $38 trillion in debt, that's not a system that you can really build upon and trust... It protects the incumbents, it protects those at the top at the core of that system at the expense of everyone else. It privatizes the gains and socializes all the losses and the average person is left holding the bag, just like my parents were. And it's like, this is not capitalism.

Natalie Brunell: The years of 2010 to 2020 saw an average of less than 2% inflation. And yet all of these things became so much more expensive in that decade. The cost of homes, stock valuations went crazy, you know, healthcare costs, healthcare premiums, insurance. And it's like, wait, what happened here? Because you're telling me that inflation is around 2%, but my cost of living went up 40, 50%. There's a disconnect here... You can see how stocks have just skyrocketed, homes have skyrocketed, but paychecks haven't. And so we need to recognize that disconnect and then dig into what's actually happening because this is why the average person can't save for the future.

Natalie Brunell: Bitcoin is tied to energy and it is the one thing that nobody can print. You cannot create it, you cannot destroy it... one of the things I share in that chapter is not only does Bitcoin not even use that much energy, especially when you compare it to other industries, and I show the pie chart of different industries, but also the way that it uses it actually moves us into a world where we can have more abundance of resources of energy, be able to deploy electricity in even remote places, capture things like stranded or wasted energy, like moves us into a more energy abundant world.

Natalie Brunell: Two of my favorites are in the book, Farida and Roya. I loved their stories. They're such passionate fighters for freedom and empowerment. Roya... was the first female tech CEO in Afghanistan and paid her female workers in Bitcoin and even guaranteed that they would not lose money on the Bitcoin that they earned if the price was volatile. That has allowed many of them to not just achieve financial freedom, but also just achieve freedom in the sense that they aren't tied to a banking system that requires for a man to open an account for them. They were able to use it, some of them in order to flee when the Taliban took over again. Like it truly is a freedom technology. And that's how Farida positions it as well. She's from Togo... she talks about how the government it's still a kind of a relic of colonialism really what they've done with the money there in the the CFA Franc where the French treasury actually controls the currency in many countries in Africa and they can devalue people's savings by 50 100% overnight and that's people's times that just evaporates like you can't get it back.