BTC216: Bitcoin Transforming Africa w/ Erik Hersman and Charlene Fadirepo (Bitcoin Podcast)
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Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals Podcast. On today's show, we have a fascinating topic covered by two brilliant entrepreneurs and builders in the space with Charlene Fadi-Rippo and Mr. Eric Herstmann. Although I've had guests like Alex Gladstein on the show in the past to talk about some of the things happening in Africa, Eric is the founder of Gridless and the person building and deploying modular Bitcoin mining into the African communities, and it

And additionally, we have Charlene with us to talk about her new book titled The Bitcoin Leap: How Bitcoin is Transforming Africa. Both of the guests just returned from a conference in Nairobi and are here to tell us about everything that's happening and how it's truly changing so much on the continent and bringing a ton of hope. This is an episode you will not want to miss, so get ready. Here's my chat with Charlene and Eric.

Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pysh.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Eric and Charlene. I'm really excited about this conversation because I think we're going to be able to take this in a bunch of different directions. So guys, welcome to the show. Eric Foner : Thanks so much, Preston. Preston Pysh : So recently, I think like what, two weeks ago, there was an ABC conference, Africa Bitcoin Conference.

I think it was in Kenya and you guys were both in attendance. Tell us about what this was like. Yeah, it feels like two weeks ago, but it was actually just last week. I mean, it was, yeah, I finished up, I think on Wednesday last week. So what's it been? Yeah. A week. It's been here in Kenya. So we had, I don't know, about 600 plus people attending. It was sold out and it was just full of really good people. I think they said, Charlene, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I heard like over 40 countries were represented there. Yeah, easily. And

I agree. So this was year three, right? So this is the third time we've had Africa Bitcoin Conference and it has gotten better and better every year. I think one of the highlights for me was just to see the number of entrepreneurs starting ventures. Just one story. I met a gentleman named Jodam. He is a Kenyan entrepreneur. I met him three years ago at Africa Bitcoin Conference in Ghana. He was a new developer, a new Bitcoin Core developer.

And today or last week in Nairobi, he launched a new venture called BitSaco. He's the founder of BitSaco, which is a Kenyan savings tool for people to save in Bitcoin. So in three years time, he was a student of Bitcoin and now he's a founder. And the pace of that innovation is what we actually saw at the Africa Bitcoin Conference. And it was phenomenal. Just phenomenal. Yeah. Eric. BitSaco real quick on that one too. Jordan, I

I think both Charlene and I saw Jotam come from just being a software engineer to building stuff. So Socko's here are savings companies, which are basically a group of people who come together, band together, and they share their savings with each other. And so it's a very African way of doing savings outside of banks and traditional lenders. But before he built that, he'd been working on Fetiment for the past couple of years. So he was very familiar with it. So he uses the Fetiment technology to...

to build Bisak on top of. And so it's kind of anybody can come on board and build their own little chama, that's what we call them here, and do something. But it was just one of really two cool new apps that launched at the event. The other one was Tondo. And Tondo is just a really easy way to pay any merchant in Kenya with Mpessa. So they have, you know, Mpessa here is our mobile payment system that's been around for, I don't know, I guess it's like almost 20 years, but everybody has it. And so if you want to pay with Bitcoin, you can.

And you just pull up the Tando app, you send money to the person in M-Pesa, so they don't even realize that you're paying with Bitcoin. But it's a really easy way to start getting people to understand that it's money. So that got a huge amount of usage this last week. Preston Pysh : This idea of community custody, I think is lost on a lot of people from, call it the US or Europe. Explain this in a lot more detail and how prevalent is this? If I went to Kenya for the ABC conference

And I was just talking to any random person off the street. Would this be an idea, this idea of community custody? Would this be something that most people intuitively understand or are used to? Help us just kind of understand the lay of the land and how common something like this is, I guess. Yeah, sure. So certainly feel free to dip in here too, but like all over Africa, it's

It's actually usually a lot of women's groups, at least in East Africa, that's where it started. We call them merry-go-rounds or sakos or chamas. So there's different terminology for it. The main idea is that a group of five, 10, 12 women might come together and each of them will put in 200 shillings each month. They'll meet every week or once a month or something like that. They'll each put their money and then one person gets to take that money.

and use it for whatever they want that month. And that's kind of where the idea started. It's of course evolved since then into different structures and it's used differently and there's different names for it, whether you're in Southern Africa or in West Africa versus East Africa, but it's really all over the place. So the idea of shared custody of savings has already been here and it's been here for decades.

The idea of doing this on Bitcoin is what's new. And I think that's what makes BitSaco so interesting and so exciting for so many of us who have grown up in Africa, have seen it used, and we can see the potential of getting people

sucked into that space and saving in Bitcoin and using in Bitcoin. And so what's so interesting is that not only is it in Africa, it's in the Caribbean, it's in Latin America. It's a very culturally steeped type practice. I have family members that have them, but it's called a SUSU, right? So this idea of kind of the collective savings, depending on other family members for some sort of a collective financial goal, it

It is a cultural practice that is very common around the world. And I think that's what is really great about BitSaco. They're building on practices that people already do, right? So they're not learning something new. They're not learning to trust each other. They're just, they're using Bitcoin as a fediments as a technology, but also saving in Bitcoin so that they have kind of a better, longer term financial result. And then the other thing I wanted to point out is that, so I'm a banker by trade. So when I was talking to Jodam about Saco's, I said,

That's just a credit union, right? It sounds crazy. There's an acronym for it, but it's literally just a credit union. It's a member-owned structure. And typically, in the United States, credit unions are known to be safer. They have better interest rates. They have more favorable terms. And they're a friendlier banking experience. And so that's what they're leaning on as they think about BitSaco. So I'm super excited about that. And I just think that whenever you can create a technology that's

that highlights cultural practices and traditions that are already in place, that and use technology to accelerate that, that's going to be a game changer. So I'm excited. And again, that's kind of what we saw at ABC, just culturally relevant innovation that was unique to the country, region, or space. Preston Pyshenko Love it. Hey, so I'm going to embarrass you a little bit, Charlene. So Charlene has a new book out and

And I just happened to be on Twitter, kind of scrolling around, and I see this tweet of Charlene there with Jack Dorsey. He's looking at your book, How Fun Is This? And I just shared it. For people that are watching the video version of this, I just showed the tweet. And there, Eric has the book, The Bitcoin Leap, How Bitcoin is Transforming Africa. And I've gone through the book, Charlene. It's

Fantastic. I want to talk about a couple of different things throughout the show, but talk to us about writing this book because this is not an easy endeavor to write a book and then to market the book and all that other stuff that goes with it. It's fantastic. It's fantastic. What's your key takeaway with the book?

Give us the so what. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate you mentioned that. So to me, this book is a celebration of African innovation. I mean, hands down, the stories that you hear in this book highlight the incredible transformational change that Bitcoin is having in Africa. And I felt like, so there's so many amazing Bitcoin books and I love them all, but there is not one Bitcoin book that focuses on the Africa Bitcoin story. And this was very important to me. And I started off as a Bitcoin educator and I

And I always struggled because, you know, it was easy to tell the story to make Bitcoin relevant for people in the West. Yeah. But when I told my friends in Nigeria, they're like, well, what about us? You know, although Nigeria is one of the African countries that was on Bitcoin well before certain pockets of the United States. And so I felt like the space, the Bitcoin ecosystem needed a collection of stories, a canon, a piece of literature that

that actually highlighted the incredible entrepreneurs that were building on Bitcoin in Africa that actually talked about the practical utility of Bitcoin, right? The broad and practical utility, and then focused on the social good.

So that's why I wrote the book. And I'm very thankful that it has been well-received. I did have a chance to talk to Jack Dorsey about the book. Yeah. What did Jack say? He was excited. So I met him. I met him the first Africa Bitcoin conference and interviewed him. We had a great conversation and I'd like to think we stayed in touch, but no, but he, I think has always been, he would like retweet some of my tweets every now and then, because I think even three years ago,

we were very much aligned in the thought that Africa was the most compelling use case for Bitcoin. That was kind of my hypothesis three years ago. So reconnecting with him and Nairobi, it was wonderful because it was a full circle moment. I gave him the book. He said, I'll read it. And I said, let me know what you think. He said he would. So yeah, it was great. Preston Pysheniko And he has put his, I mean, he's put his money where his mouth is, standing up the Btrust nonprofit that's over there and investing in startups and

He's on record saying he believes Africa is the future and where everything's going to be moving here in the coming decades. So yeah, very, very interesting and awesome that you were able to get in front of him and you got the book out there. One of the chapters in the book is titled Bitcoin Mining, Africa's Ultimate Problem Solver. And here we have Eric, who is on the ground literally doing this. And so I want to get into this idea. I think this is super important for the listeners.

Talk to us about Gridless. Talk to us about, when I look at what you're doing, Eric, you're solving the chicken and egg problem in Africa with getting communities powered, but there has to be some buyer of last resort to consume this energy. And so you're solving this chicken and egg problem. At least that's how I'm describing it, but take it away. Tell us in your own words how you view the problem that you're solving there and how Bitcoin really is this ultimate problem solver in Africa. Eric Foner :

Yeah. Well, before we get into that, though, I mean, we should talk about how a year and a bit ago we had that first Africa Bitcoin mining summit where we're trying to get together the African Bitcoin miners from across the continent. We learn from each other, make connections, help with everything from suppliers to how to fix things, tricks and tips that we know so that we can share them with each other and people get better at what they do. And along comes this, you know, well put together lady from West Africa, a

who is all of a sudden interviewing all of us about what's going on with Bitcoin mining. And I'm like, Charlene, what are you doing here? I mean, do you mind? Well, I play with miners a little bit. I think all to tell the story. And she did a small video on her trip here, did a bunch of interviews with different people. And Eric, she's an electrical engineer from Virginia. Yeah.

She's got an MBA from Duke. Like she doesn't tell anybody this kind of stuff, but yeah, she comes in and she's like interviewing people on minors, I'm sure. And just like smarter than keep going. Sorry to interrupt. But these are the things that would never be said. And the rest of us actually do the mining, right? Yeah.

And so we get there and she gets there. She's running around doing all this stuff. And I'm like, what's she doing all this for? Maybe it's for the podcast. Maybe it's for this little film she's doing. I had no idea that at least at that point that she was writing the book. And so it was cool that when I finally got the book, like two days ago, I looked into it. I went straight to the mining section, of course. And, you know, just read up on the different situations.

stuff and i was like you know i think she got a lot of this you know as she came and met the people at the conference so yeah yeah shoot and mining just generally speaking has gone a long way so like last year in september at the african bitcoin mining summit there's like call it like seven or eight miners there from across the continent this year we had it a year later in ethiopia and you know at the point we had it in nairobi in 2023 i'd say there's

a couple of megawatts under use, right? Definitely under 50 megawatts under use in most of the continent. And by the time it had passed one year, we were at 600 megawatts in just Ethiopia had been added, not counting what had been added in Nigeria and in Kenya and in other places. So we're seeing a massive increase in energy being used and monetized by Bitcoin mining. And I think we're

we're just at the beginning of it. If I look at kind of broad space, I see the demand for energy increasing in Europe and the US and other kind of more advanced countries in the world. And what I think that's going to do is it's going to increase the price for energy. And that means that Bitcoin mining will go to places like Africa. And I think we're going to have a larger and larger footprint of that Bitcoin mining globally as the years progress. Yeah. So real quick on Gridless, it's like we've been, you know, I think a number of people have heard of what we do in the past now.

which is we've been looking for people who built stranded power, which basically means you're running in some off-grid energy site. Maybe it's biomass, maybe it's hydro or geothermal. Solar tends to not be very good, by the way, for mining, but the others are great. And they built it, but the community around that site only uses 30% of the power.

So you build 100 kilowatts and 30 kilowatts is used. That means there's 70 kilowatts left over. And so we'll bump along into that little community. We'll talk to the energy guy who built it and we'll say, so what are you doing with the rest of that power?

And he's like, "Well, nothing." And we say, "Well, how about we take it off you?" And he's like, "Okay, well, I want to charge seven cents for this." We're like, "Well, we can't pay for it directly, but we can do something like a revenue share. Can we tell you about Bitcoin?" And they've never heard about Bitcoin. Or they've heard about it, but they really don't know what it is. Then we'll walk around the site, we'll look at it, and we'll come back to the room that they're in and we'll say, "Okay, so what

what do you think? You know, we can take, we can bring a mining container here or maybe just a couple of shelves of miners. We can put them in there. We can monetize this energy. And when your community turns on a new maze mill or they turn on their lights in the evening, we'll power down miners automatically. It's this perfect kind of demand response. It's like, Oh, that sounds amazing. Amazing. Will you pay five cents? And we're like, what? No, no, we don't. We can't pay you cash for this, but you can make, you know, you can make a revenue share. You'll earn part of this Bitcoin and that gets paid to you every day.

And they're like, well, how much is that Bitcoin worth? Well, it changes. Now that you know, you've got all these complications, you've got to use. And at the end, I say, listen, how much are you getting paid today? It was nothing. Would you like something more than nothing? And they like, yeah. Okay, well, let's just try it. We often show up and we say, let's just set something up for a few months. Yeah. And I'm going to see how it goes. And we set up, we, you know, we've got a mining container there. It's on in three days and all of a sudden they're earning money and they're like, oh man, this is amazing. And then we

We usually tell them to sit on it, but this is the beginning of the orange pilling of that energy producer. And we've now gone on to where there's one of our partners we've done two sites with now, and we're looking at a couple more with them. So it's worked so well as coming in as a buyer of last resort that they want to bring us on as they build new sites so that we'd be an anchor tenant from the beginning. And then there's two new sites down in Malawi that we're looking at that will also be coming in with a partner that we've already had before. So

So yeah, that's what we do. GoodList comes in and helps kind of make off-grid energy profitable with Bitcoin mining. The thing that's so exciting for me... Oh, I'm sorry, Charlene, go ahead. I was just going to add, I mean, Eric kind of blew through this, but Eric spearheaded the start of the organization called Gamma, and that literally seeded other Bitcoin mining companies in Africa. And they didn't have to do that, but they literally have allowed other Bitcoin miners to start up, giving them...

So definitely tips and trips, but just kind of giving them a playbook to actually start their businesses. And I think that's really significant because like I, in the book, I talk about that selfless leadership and I give Gridless credit because not only did you guys start Gamma, you also open source the blueprints to your mining container. That's significant. Again, other companies would have kind of held

held that information close to the vest and built in secret. But in true, like open source Bitcoin-esque form, you guys are really focused on the collective and making sure that the ecosystem grows. And I think that's to Gridless's credit. Yeah. I'll tell you a funny story about that, Charlene. We were sitting there. So Bari, who I think you've met, is our mechanical engineer. And he's worked with me for like over a decade in past businesses. He's really good. Yeah.

And he had designed our Bitcoin mining container. We'd gone through a couple iterations. And just before the Africa Bitcoin Mining Summit in last year, I said, okay, hey, I need all the designs because I'm just going to publish them to everybody so that they can get them too. So they don't have to start from scratch because most people won't have a mechanical engineer in their back pocket that they can put to work on designing a container. And he's like, Eric, are you sure? I mean, why don't we just sell the plants? I was like, you know, listen...

It's just not how we make our money, right? You know, like it's just, it doesn't actually matter. So how about, you know, how about we have a license for agreement with them? You know, he's like, I'm coming up with all these things. Like, buddy, I understand why you're saying this, but you know, the reason that I love Bitcoin mining is I have no sales. I have no marketing and I have no customer service. I don't want any of those things. So let's just open source this and we'll make our money off mining like we normally do. And much to his chagrin, he, you know, we, we went ahead and did it.

Now he's on call with different miners who are trying to use those same designs to build stuff in Nigeria and Ghana and elsewhere. So it's been kind of fun to see. But the reality is that we don't make our money off of that. Why should we focus on that? And we're open source kind of guys anyway. So we like it when more people can do more stuff. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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All right, back to the show. Preston Pysh : Eric, when I hear what you guys are doing, the thing that I find so exciting is you have, going back to this idea of the chicken and egg problem with energy and powering and just competition. So community doesn't have access to just energy abundance. How can you possibly think that that community can compete with others? We'll just take it to an extreme.

Not only are they powered, but they have access to AI and all these other things. Your ability to leapfrog and just do more with way less starts with energy. It starts with having a powered community and the ability to power tools, whether the tool is AI or some type of jackhammer or whatever, just generic, right? And so when we look at what you're providing, that buyer of last resort is

is saying, "Hey, you can come into this community, that community, you name it community, and we can build infrastructure now. And we know there's going to be a buyer that's interested in consuming this electricity. Even if we built this today and only 10% of it was being used naturally without any Bitcoin miners,

Now, all of a sudden, we can build any size power plant and as long as we can produce the energy for a pretty cheap price, which my understanding in Africa is pretty much the case all around, and there's tons of natural resources to tap into, whether it's hydro or whatever. And so now you're really kind of changing the competitive landscape because of Bitcoin mining. And nothing, to my knowledge, has ever existed in history.

that could provide such a service to allow this issue of the chicken and egg to disappear. It seems though that, based on what you said, it seems that today and the start, which I would call this prototyping versus where I think this is all going in 10 or 20 years from now, is there

There's energy infrastructure that's already been built that is producing way in excess of what the local community is demanding. And you're coming in and demonstrating how you can consume all of this. It seems like that's where it's at today. It doesn't seem like you've had power producers come in and build because they know that the Bitcoin miners can consume the additional electricity. Is that a fair statement?

And if so, do you see that shifting anytime soon based on what you've demonstrated through a lot of this prototyping? Can I actually share something with you on screen? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So this is a slide I like to use to talk to people about things. So the global access to electricity today is 800 million. 600 million of them are in Africa, right? Those are people who do not have any access to electricity. But if you look at this research paper that was done this year, 14 years ago in 2010, we

We had 1.4 billion people without electricity across the world. And that number has dropped to the 800 million that we see today. But look at the bottom. Sub-Saharan Africa has remained exactly the same at 600 million, right? Why? Why would we still not have enough electricity in Africa? That's the kind of thing that bothered me when we started this whole process of gridless. I understood Bitcoin mining. We went in there, we started doing it. But it just made me start wondering, why is it that we don't have...

enough electricity for everybody. What's going on here? And so I had to do a ton of reading to understand what was setting this problem up. And the thing that was bothering me was like, there's this problem of lack of energy across Africa and everybody knows it. Okay, so why are we not building more electricity? And the answer really quickly came down to this, was that for the national power grid in utilities, they built about as far as they can to get a return on investment. They won't get a return on investment by...

punching power into these very far away communities that are distributed over large amounts of space. So they don't. So the only answer then is that mini grids have to be built in these rural areas. It turns out that Africa is one of the places with the best off-grid energy resources. So you have hydro, you have solar, you have geothermal if you have the capital to develop it, you have wind, all these kinds of things that actually make it really easy to bring in off-grid energy.

And so why are investors not investing in off-grid energy if there's a buyer there, right? And the answer for that is it's a stupid investment. It just doesn't make any sense because there's not enough people who can pay for it. So if I'm a poor rural African, how am I going to pay enough money to pay back a $2 million investment in energy? It just takes too long, right? And so I can buy an LED light bulb or I can charge my phone, sure, but that doesn't use very much power.

And so if I'm an energy investor, I basically enter this willful delusion with the energy developer that will someday in 30 years get paid back on this energy. But that just doesn't happen. It never has. Right. So along comes Bitcoin mining and says, oh, by the way, we can make this profitable for you now. Yeah. And it does. And it's like this magical thing. But here's the crazy bit. Who's actually financing these things to date?

It's concessionary financers. So this is your Rockefeller Foundations. It's your USAIDs. It's all these African Development Bank, maybe the European Development Bank. It might come as a surprise to you, but they're not all big fans of Bitcoin. And so even though we came out and showed this model, we actually had at least one of our energy partners who had gotten debt financing from one of them get pushed back and told that they couldn't receive the Bitcoin. So-

What's the hang up there? Why is that? So I was on the phone with that funder and I explained to them what was going on and where they anchor tenant on that site. In fact, if we're not on that site, that energy site is not self-sustaining and goes bankrupt. So our existence on it makes it possible for that whole community to get power. We're talking thousands of families have electricity in their homes. People

People have built maze mills so the women don't have to walk 10 kilometers now to get their maze milled. There's cell phone towers that have power in them. And they want that to go away because they would rather we not pay the energy partner, Bitcoin, as their revenue stream. It's one of those things that it's a perception problem and a regulator problem in Europe that is infecting the development of energy in Africa.

So that then led us to think, okay, well, if that's the case in the financers, if we know that the symptom that we've been solving for is that is making energy profitable, the disease is actually, we're not building enough energy. All right. So how do we build more energy? Well, if we go back to look at the traditional financing of it so far, you realize that it just will never move forward. Is there a new way to think about financing more energy? Yeah.

And as Bitcoiners, we were challenged by the likes of Jeff Booth, Elise from Stillmark, and Obi, all of us, either friends or investors in Gridless. And they said, listen, you're thinking of this with a fiat mindset. Why don't you look at this as a Bitcoiner and think about how you could do that? And by the way, do you know you could get loans against Bitcoin? We were like, what? We had no idea you could do that. So what we did is we sat down and reran the numbers. And we're like, if you do Bitcoin financing of new energy, do you

you could actually build much more energy than you could if you spend it with dollars anyway. And maybe there's a way around this kind of broken model of energy investment in Africa, and Bitcoin is the method for that too. And to kind of give you an example of what I mean by this, the capital efficiency is really just unmatched. So if I take $20 million and I put that into Runner River Hydro in Africa, I can build 10 megawatts. So in 30 years, unless I go raise more money, I'm still just going to have 10 megawatts. However,

However, if I take that same $20 million, put that into a Bitcoin treasury, and then I leverage that Bitcoin treasury against a Swiss bank, that would give me a 50% LTV, right? At an 8% interest rate.

I can build one to four gigawatts in 30 years. That's the difference. Wow. That's 148x capital efficiency. Wow. So there's a new way to think about this. We see the likes of Saylor using it for microstrategy as a really interesting way to make more money, make more dollars. But there's a way to both make more Bitcoin and more energy with it too. Man.

That is so powerful. Wow. I just threw a lot at you guys. No, that's amazing. That's what's on my mind these days.

It's so exciting. I think your average Bitcoiner is thinking the same thing. We have all of this Bitcoin. We don't want to sell it. We don't want to pay capital gains. Can we lend against it? It's the same model. And the retail level, it's just, hey, I don't want to pay taxes. At the corporate level, it's, you know, how can I make my money work for me? I mean, it makes sense. I think I think Saylor is pricking the consciousness of everyone and saying, are you, you know, is this a Bitcoin first approach? You know, are you really being a good steward with your resources? So it makes a lot of sense. I

I'm just excited for where this goes because when you show that comparison of the numbers, all of a sudden, you're highly incentivized to act in this manner and to build out the energy in these locations. And I can't even imagine the unlock from a talent standpoint of what happens when you start doing this over the next decade.

decade or two. It's going to be mind-blowing. Yeah, go ahead, Charlie. I just want to tell a story because I think you have kind of the large, you have Marathon that's playing in Africa, you have Bridless, and then you have some of the smaller players. And I just want to tell a quick story about a smaller player. The

The marketplace is open for everyone to win. And so in 2022, I met Yasar Syambola and I give him credit. He was the first person. He's a Nigerian Bitcoin miner. He is the person that explained Bitcoin mining to me. I met him on Twitter and he was like, I'm mining Bitcoin in Africa. And I'm like, what? Are you serious? He had 12 Bitcoin miners.

And he said, you know, Charlene. And so his story is incredible. He was, I think he studied agriculture undergrad. He was fixing solar bikes and he wasn't able to make a living fixing solar bikes. He clearly has an engineering ability. So he switched to Bitcoin mining, was running 12 machines and making about 60 US dollars a month, which again, not a ton in the US, but in Nigeria, not bad for an income stream. That was a couple of years ago.

him in Nairobi, he's running more than three sites and has almost a thousand miners in his company. Wow. He's a key explosion mining company. He's running a 500 megawatt facility in Nigeria. He probably is the largest Bitcoin or one of the largest Bitcoin miners in Nigeria.

He's probably about 28 years old. He has employed his brother, many of his friends. He literally has used Bitcoin mining to uplift his entire community. He tells me that he has friends that were doing some dubious things. They have stopped that and he's trained them in Bitcoin mining and he's literally become a leader in his community. And then the last piece is

he learned to fix Bitcoin miners and he taught himself. So this is a kid, I mean, you know, a CEO, but just really literally he had the engineering prowess, he had the intellectual curiosity and he had the talent to create an entire mining company by himself with his buddies. And he's doing extremely well. And now he's one of the folks that Eric's worked with to kind of give people insight into how to mine in Nigeria. Right.

And that's incredible. And so I think it's important to say that like small scale, large scale, that innovation is happening at every level. And Africa is the place for it. I love it. You know, it's good. What's funny about the symbol real quick person is that we were just sitting down talking this last week and he set up energy blooms. New site. My care has a new site and it's a gas flaring site in Nigeria.

But he called on Cianbola, who's one of the Gamma members in Nigeria. So Cianbola and Sambo shoot down there. They get waylaid by pirates on the way. And he loses his very cool merch from the African Bitcoin mining center that he's the most sad about. But they set up this new site and then they make their way back and he doesn't get mugged on the way back the other way. But that's the kind of craziness that goes on here. Yeah.

So you have a community of people who are coming together to learn about things and teach each other. And then other people reach out to them instead of saying, oh, let me go take the energy contract from you because now I know where it could be. He says, yeah, sure. Pay me to help you set this up. But then it's your site. Here's your 500 kilowatts, one megawatt, whatever it is. And I think it's not always going to be those kind of relationships, right? There is going to be some cunt throat going at it for energy contracts, but you're

But you see this kind of work within the continent thus far, and we've been trying to build a community that works together rather than one that is not with each other. Preston Pyshenko That's the power of ABC too. You're getting people together. You're showing the team effort, right? Charlene, this story you just told reminds me of some of the coaching that I find in your book. So this idea of innovation, let me read this quote here. The start of chapter three, it's

It says, "Creativity is thinking new things. Innovation is doing new things." And you go into this leap framework. So for people listening very, very simply, this is for people to really kind of harness this idea of innovation to transform themselves. And you just provided an amazing story of somebody who literally just did this. And so somebody might be seeing that or hearing that and saying, "I need to innovate myself. I need to have some type of breakthrough like the story that you just provided."

And so you have, it's a four-step process. I'm going to very generically cover this, but she goes into a lot of detail in the book on how a person can do this. You start off, love the unknown, then embrace the fear, align with your goals, and then power up your skills are the four things that she talks about in this LEAP framework. Talk to us about what you're trying to accomplish with this in the book.

Yeah. And so and thank you for bringing this up, because I don't think I've spoken a lot about this part of the book. You know, I meet Bitcoiners from all around the world. And so what happens is that you learn about Bitcoin, then you're excited.

And then you don't know what to do. And I literally wanted to create a chapter to help guide a new Bitcoiners thinking to figure out how to take their place in the Bitcoin space. It's not enough to huddle. It is not enough to hold. We need all kinds of talent building and creating. And so I actually tried to think about my journey and created this framework so people can figure out how to plant the seeds of innovation in their own lives.

And so I really hope that people use this chapter to inspire themselves to build in the ecosystem and don't be compelled. You don't have to be a developer. You don't have to be a miner. You literally could be a content creator and make an incredible impact on this ecosystem. I just...

I just would like people to read the book and then take action. So yeah, this is probably one of the most fun chapters. And, you know, particularly women, you know, sometimes women can be intimidated in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And so I really hope that if women who read the book, I really hope that they decide, okay, well,

I'm going to figure out how to lead. I'm going to take Charlene's framework, apply it to what I can do and really make an impact in the ecosystem. I love it. Well, speaking about women, too, I mean, you've been doing some stuff with the women in the community with events around AVZ and stuff.

Oh, yeah, that's right. So two years ago, I started something tiny called the Satoshi Sister Circle. And so it was an idea. I'll give Natalie Brunel credit. I'm a huge fan of Natalie. She's a good friend of mine. Natalie has done amazing work creating a space for women in the larger Bitcoin magazine conference. And I spoke at one of her first events and I said,

And it was incredible. We had 200 women from all around the world. It was in Miami. And I was like, this is amazing. Can we create something like this for ABC? And so that same year, I went to Ghana and said, can we just have a women's brunch? I really would like to bring women together in the space so that we can start to think about how we want to make an impact. It was a small brunch, but it was great. And so many women came up to me and said, we need this.

And so from that point on, you know, we had another women's Satoshi Sister Circle brunch that was in Nairobi and Gridless was a sponsor. So thank you, Gridless. Betty was a sponsor. Thank you, Betty.

And it has developed into a global empowerment network for women in the ecosystem. We are starting a mentoring program, which I'm super excited about. And we would really like to grow women in the space. If they want to be employees at fantastic Bitcoin companies, great. If they want to be entrepreneurs, we want to support them in that. Or if they just want to be creators. But we want to move people from this spectator view of Bitcoin to an action-oriented view. And so hopefully the Satoshi Sister Circle...

organization will enable that. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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All right, back to the show. Guys, I got to tell you a funny story that happened to me. I normally don't like to talk during the shows. I want to showcase my guests, but this is too funny. You're talking about Natalie Burnell and women in Bitcoin. And this story is hilarious. So, all right. So, we're in Miami. This is probably, I don't know, maybe two years ago or something like that.

And Natalie was putting on her Women in Bitcoin. And my wife was with me in Miami. And Natalie kept telling me, Preston, you got to make sure your wife comes to this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I tell my wife and you guys got to realize, my wife really doesn't, she's not really interested in Bitcoin at all. It's hilarious. It works great for us. Because I do the show and it's like, after I'm done, we don't talk about that kind of stuff. But anyway, she's there with me in Miami. And when

And when she's with me and we're walking around, it almost always turns into these hardcore finance. And she's not a math person either. I'm a hardcore math person. So I think in her mind, anytime we have a Bitcoin conversation, it's math and financial terminology and blah, blah, blah. And she's just like, get me out of here. I don't really... So anyway, long story short, Natalie's like...

Preston, make sure Demi comes over to the thing. So I'm telling my wife, she's like, okay, I guess I'll go. Like, I'm going to go there and sit and listen to all this engineering math, blah, blah, blah. She goes, she has the best time ever. Cause my wife, she runs a nonprofit and,

And so she's very like nonprofit oriented and whatever. So she goes to this and they're showcasing a lot of these amazing stories of like how Bitcoin's impacting people and whatnot. So she comes back. I didn't go. Greg Foss went. There's a picture of Greg Foss. He was the only guy at this event. But anyway, she comes back and she was like, she was thrilled. So this is the funny part of the story. It was like the next day or whatever.

I'm not trying to name drop, I'm not trying to do anything, because this story is hilarious. So we both got asked to have dinner with Michael Saylor. And we're at his house and there was probably 10 people, 12 people or something like that at the dinner table. And Michael runs these dinners in the way Michael operates. And he starts off the dinner and he says, "All right, I want everybody to go around the table and say the one thing that you're thankful for before we start having a conversation."

So it goes around the table and my wife and I are sitting there at the very end of the table. We're like the last ones to go. It goes around the table. This is so ridiculous. So it gets to my wife and she has to say what she's thankful for. And doesn't she say, she goes, well, I am thankful for Natalie Brunel because for the first time, I feel like I actually understand Bitcoin.

and the whole table the whole table just erupts laughing and they're all looking at me like preston you idiot like how in the world is your wife saying that she never understood bitcoin until she met natalie brunel so sometimes you have to hear it from a woman right so exactly just to i guess why these spaces are important that's why it's important and you know i i guess it's you know it also but you know what

That's an amazing story. And that's just how the world works. You know, you need a lot of voices in Bitcoin because sometimes the same message is just not heard from the wrong person. So there you go. I was definitely the wrong person, right? But hopefully she's coming to more events. She has come to some more events. And she just, I think, honestly, though, like ever since this brunch that Natalie threw,

My wife has looked at it very differently than she ever looked at it before. So I guess I have Natalie to thank as well. But yeah, women in Bitcoin, right? Women in Bitcoin. Sorry, that was a really long story. I hate to take time out of the show for personal stories. But okay, let's see here. I'm a little lost and embarrassed myself. Okay, I know where I want to go. Eric, so during the ABC event, you took some people out to a mining site.

I'm curious, what were some of the comments that surprised people the most when they got on the ground and they actually saw the physical hardware and what it was that you were doing? What's some of the comments that you heard people say? Oh, like, oh, we didn't realize it was this easy. Or you make money doing this. No, I'm just kidding. They didn't say that. But it's interesting. When you get people on the ground…

Even fellow Kenyans, right? They look around, they're like, Bitcoin has always been an esoteric thing for most people, where it's this digital currency, you don't touch or see it. But for the first time, they get to see something physical that's a part of Bitcoin, and they can actually touch it. And they can hear the fans going, and they can feel the heat. And all of a sudden, they're like, okay, this is...

is where new Bitcoin gets created. This is where transactions happen. So even with Bitcoiners from Africa, it becomes real, right? I think that's the thing that gets always gratifying to see is that people kind of can put a point on it. You know, we took people to three different sites this ABC actually. So we took them to our biomass, we took them to our hydro and we took them to geothermal. And so different groups went to different places. You know, there's something kind of magical about each of those types, right?

It was turning agricultural waste into energy, taking steam from two kilometers deep in the earth to make energy, watching the river and just seeing the turbines spinning. And, you know, each of these things, again, it kind of brings it to the fore. And I see that in Charlene would remember this from my talk. I talked actually a lot about how, well, energy, human progress is a story of energy.

We have distanced ourselves so much from what energy actually is, from the electricity in our homes to the hospital being open at night to all these normal things that we just take for granted. We forget what energy actually is and how much people power is behind everything we do. And so when you get to see energy being made and you get to see it then powering this base financial commodity called Bitcoin, you really realize there's something here, right?

I think that's the gratifying part is like, you know, some guys geek out over the technical parts of it and they're looking at it. They're like saying, oh, so this machine is really that dumb? Yeah, it's really that dumb. It's really that poorly made, right? They're really not great machines. And you're like, okay, well, if you can do that with that, imagine what you could do with this. And they start thinking about, well, near my village is a river that nobody's putting the hydro on. And could we do something there? The visitors who come in are

are always enthralled by just talking to community members. You know, they'll talk to somebody who lives nearby and say, well, how has electricity changed your life? And, you know, from Bitcoin Honey Badger was here and she went to the Hydra site with me and she ended up talking alongside, I think, Joe Nakamoto, you know, to some of the local community members. And she was very silent on the way back, right? As she was thinking about how much of an impact

she could see this energy had on everyday lives of people in the community. And, you know, it's heavy, right? We've been distanced from those of us who live in the city. And when you get out into the rural area, you realize how much of a base commodity energy is. Charlene, did you go to any of the sites when you were there on the tours? I was fortunate enough to visit the Gatugu site a couple, on the first Africa Bitcoin Mining Summit. And, you know, I think you realize...

So I agree with everything that Eric said. But then you realize that when you go to one site, there's so many areas of rural Africa that do not have electricity. I mean, the sight line of just gorgeous trees and they call it the bush, but it is the most fertile and beautiful place that you've ever seen. So the bush sometimes has a negative connotation. I think of

I think of it as the Garden of Eden because there's rolling blankets of lush, lush grass and trees and everything, just pristine beauty of beautiful earth where there are people that just live there and they're kind of doing the best with what they have. And in many cases, they don't have a lot of access to resources. So, yeah.

You just kind of get, it is a reminder of definitely how, you know, gratitude is really important in this space, but also how much work we have to do. There's so much work. And I think that the encouraging part for me is that there's so many areas in Africa that can...

very easily benefit from a mini grid, you know, and just like that, you can change lives immediately. You know, you don't have to wait for the World Bank. You don't have to wait for the government. You don't you literally don't have to wait for anybody. You just need you don't even need a ton of money. You could just get started and the community will support you. And that's what I think is beautiful. It's that, you know, we have such interesting, unique problems in Africa. And I

Again, just incredible innovation to solve them. What's one of the biggest hangups? Can I share one more image of something? Yeah, go ahead. So this is the site that was built in Zambia. It's a 700 kilowatt site in very, very rural Zambia that powers, when we started a year ago there, it powered 1,000 families and about 200 businesses. Now it powers 1,500 families and 250 businesses.

Charlene was dead on on this. This site was actually built with some concessionary financing, but it was built by the community. So all of that civil works you see on the side there, there was no heavy equipment used. It was built by members of the community

who came together and laid those stones stone by stone, cemented it. Of course, the turbine and the pipes were brought in from afar, but the rocks were all local. It's on the Zambezi River. It's a beautiful place. But what I think is interesting about this is that there's sites like this all over Africa. The things I talked to is this slide, which is this map shows all of the hydro available across the continent, sub-Saharan Africa. And there's 400 gigawatts

gigawatts of energy available. 40 gigawatts have been built, right? And you can see from this that there's actually very small sites as well as large sites on this map in the red and blue dots. There's so much more to be developed. And Charlene's right. We don't need concessionary financing to build this. We don't need a bunch of aid money to do this. This can be done as Bitcoiners, as investors, just with Bitcoin mining being a part of it. That completely changes the dynamics of what we have in front of us.

And realizing that we're in the place that has some of the best inputs for energy in the world, into the place that has the least amount of energy for the people, we realize that you're actually sitting in a perfect storm where Bitcoin mining can solve a major humanitarian need at the same time as making real money. Wow. What would you guys say is one of the main things that are...

preventing growth or preventing Bitcoin from really kind of taking hold? Is it policy? Is it, I mean... I think there's two sides to that. I'm not probably best versed at the first one, which is maybe Charlene. I think there's two sides. There's the use of Bitcoin, which is by everyday people just in their daily lives, saving, spending, whatever it is. And

and then there's the generation of Bitcoin around energy. So those two sides of the spectrum. I'll let Charlene speak to the first one now. Charlene Shepard : Yeah. So the use of Bitcoin, I mean, that's leaning into this idea of policy. It's a patchwork of policy across Africa, some very restrictive, some very favorable. And sadly, in places like Nigeria, where you have arguably the largest P2P volume, or at one point the largest P2P volume,

the Central Bank of Nigeria, the SEC, which is their regulatory body, they have been very aggressive in a very negative way against Bitcoin and crypto because a couple of years ago, they actually blamed it for the devaluation of the Naira. Well, we know that's not the case. Sadly, the currency in Nigeria has been troubled for the past 60 years. It had nothing to do with Bitcoin. In fact,

because of the economic decay of the currency in Nigeria. That is why you saw that peer to peer volume going to Bitcoin in Nigeria, because Nigerians were like, wait, we need better purchasing power. We need a better store of value. We need sound money.

And again, not because the government said so, not because a company said so or a foreign body said so, but literally there was a clear and present need for better money. And so I think the regulation is catching up. It's getting better. It's not the best. South Africa is better than others in South Africa. There are businesses that have registered crypto licenses. And so they can...

businesses can allow for the payment and the sale of Bitcoin and the payment of employees in Bitcoin. So that's great. But regulation has never led. I'm a banker, and you know this, Preston. Regulation has always chased innovation. But I think Bitcoin mining changes the model. And when there's money to be made, somehow regulators get it together. And I think that when you start to make that economic case, it's good business to

to be a miner and it's a good business to be involved in the Bitcoin, then all of a sudden people start to be flexible. And so I'm very hopeful that as we experience these all-time highs, as Bitcoin is a conversation all around the world, the central banks in Africa will take a second and third look to start thinking about how Bitcoin can be a part of their national strategy. Robert Leonard

Love that. Eric, anything else to add? I think you're right on the last bit. I mean, I've had conversations with three different government representatives in the last week from different countries in Africa who this usually happens as the price goes up. All of a sudden they hear about Bitcoin mining. They realize they have stranded power. Gridless is the one they've heard about. So they contact us. Even though we don't do big power, at least we can give them some insights into why it's worth doing.

I think on the regulatory side for mining, though, it's not the same problem. Energy development is energy development. It's been going on for decades anyway, and the regulations are there. And if you're doing it unusually, in Kenya, it's under one megawatt, in Zambia, it's under five megawatts. There's a lot less red tape to just build energy. To do Bitcoin mining, it's just data center laws. So the same data center laws that you use for building a large Google or Facebook type data center...

are now the same things that we follow, right? So we get type approved on the importation of the Bitcoin miner itself, and then it's just the basic paperwork. So the regulation isn't the problem, especially when you're dealing with independent power producers. When you're dealing with government to do the mining, then you have to deal with the internal bureaucracies, but it's not as big of a deal when you're building your own energy or you're building on other people's independent power production. Preston Pyshenko If a person's hearing this and they want to have an impact,

in Africa. I know the B-Trust Foundation. I don't know, do they take donations or is that just kind of Jack and Jay-Z's own... Do you know if they take donations at B-Trust?

I think they would be open to, I know the folks there, they would be open. You know, and I, can I just say like, well, we mentioned at the ABC, they had their first Beatrice developer day and they hosted 250 Bitcoin core developers. Yeah. So they're training these folks up to hopefully go run Bitcoin companies or contribute to Bitcoin core. So, you know, I would venture to say that they would be very open to taking donations because they are a grant making body, but also a training facility. Okay. Yeah.

I think just to bring it back to what we started at the beginning is, you know, we're seeing like the Tando's and the BitSaco's launching this time. But a lot of that generation of Bitcoin software engineering talent has been driven by Btrust on the continent. You know, Kala was soaked up and became Btrust builders. We're seeing a few other initiatives. But the main thing is that they've put a few years now into and a lot of money into getting Btrust.

grants to these young entrepreneurial software engineers. Some of them get jobs at other Bitcoin companies and some of them end up building their own apps and services. And so we're starting to see the fruit of that labor. So I think what B-Trust has done and the seeds they've planted will continue to bear fruit for the coming years. Preston Pyshenko And I see there's a website, btrust.tech. We'll have a link to that in the show notes.

Guys, thank you so much for making time. This was such an exciting conversation. And I think it's just, I don't know, I'm just so excited about this. And I think it's going to be massive in the coming decade or two.

I mean, you guys are spearheading so much of this and being able to come on and just kind of illustrate some of these examples is just so illuminating to myself and I'm sure to the people listening. So give people a hand off to your, I know you guys are both active on X, but also give people a hand off. I know Charlene, your book or anything else that you guys want to highlight. Charlene, go first.

Sure. Please feel free to follow me on Twitter at Sharif Adaripo. You can also follow the Satoshi Sister Circle. If you're a woman that's starting their journey in Bitcoin, we welcome you. We'd love to support your journey. So we're at, at Sat Circle. I think it's at Sat Circle. If you follow me, you can follow Satoshi Sister Circle. And then of course, if you feel so inclined, check out my book, The Bitcoin Leap. It is available on amazon.com. I think

I think it'd be a great Christmas gift for anyone that's just starting their Bitcoin learning and they want to understand the real impact of Bitcoin. Thanks. Eric? Yeah, well, Preston, first, I'm not going to let you off the hook. If you said you're this excited about Africa and Bitcoin, then are you going to come next year to the Africa Bitcoin Conference? I need to come. I need to come. I think that's a yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's going to need you to come. That's not a commitment yet, but we'll work on you. So here's my challenge. My New Year's resolution is I'm going to

like dial back the yeses that i gave in 2024 that's why uh i traveled so much in 2020 you say that every year though i know we all say that every year i know and then listen we're not asking you to travel to a lot of places we're just trying to ask you to travel to our place honestly this would be my priority this would be like one of my priorities for the year to be quite honest with you of anything i've been asked to this is a priority yeah

All right. We'll press and we'll, we'll consider that as we need to do more work to convince you. Okay. No, that's a yes. Okay. Awesome. So, yeah, so I guess for, for gridless, it's just, we're at gridless compute on Twitter. That's our one and only public channel. So when we talk about things, that's where you find them out. And then there's a gamma site as well. It's gamma underscore Alliance. That's where you can find news about some of the other members from, you know,

We've got Sebastian in the Congo. We've got Symbol in Nigeria. I got Nemo up in Ethiopia. We've got two new groups, one gas flaring in Nigeria, one doing hydro in Ethiopia. We've got Sid down in Zambia. So they're all in Gamma Alliance.

And I'm personally, I'm just that white African on Twitter. So if you want to find me there, you can. All right. I'm in. Is it in December next year? When is it? Yes. Probably November, December. It hasn't been officially set, but yeah. Okay. Okay. I haven't set the location too. So the question could be someplace really fun. Oh, I can't wait. All right. Just tell me the dates. I'll get it on the calendar and I will be there, sir. Oh, okay. Got it. All right.

Okay. That's a commitment. It is. Thanks, Preston. We're going to hold you to it now. Guys, I really enjoyed this and I'm just so excited about all of this. For the listener, we'll have all those links and things that they talked about in the show notes. Guys, thanks for making time. Thanks for having us, Preston. Thanks for having us. Take care.

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