How Bitcoin can be used to preserve democracy and ensure fair and transparent elections? Rafa Cordon from Simple Proof, joins us to discuss his innovative solution that utilizes the Bitcoin timechain to verify election documents and prevent tampering. We delve into the various applications of this technology, including its potential in court rulings, evidence management, and intellectual property protection. Join us as we uncover the power of Bitcoin in safeguarding democracy and countering misinformation.
Rafa is an entrepreneur and technology consultant with more than 15 years experience advising governments and corporations on data platform strategy and innovation. He is the CEO and founder of Simple Proof (www.simpleproof.com), a startup that helps institutions uphold information integrity through immutable record-keeping and trustless verification. In 2023 he worked with the Guatemalan Supreme Elections Tribunal to safeguard all the election documents using the Bitcoin timechain.
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[00:00:33]
Unknown:
How can Bitcoin become a tool to preserve democracy? My guest on this episode, Rafa Kordan of Simple Proof, is working on that project right now as we speak, and he helped with the Guatemalan elections. So as we all know, fair and transparent elections are important to the democratic process. And after all of the mess that happened in the United States with our last election and, of course, many others all over the world that struggle with fairness, transparency, inclusion. Bitcoin is a tool that we can use to help with preserving democracy and creating transparent, fair elections. So if you care about freedom, if you care about democracy, you must not miss this episode. Thanks a lot. Tune in and send it to your friends.
Hey, Aloha, love tribe. Welcome to Bitcoin for Peace. I'm your host, DJ Valerie Belove. And I have someone here who is on a mission to have truth out there and have honest elections and honest data that we can confirm and verify using Bitcoin. Welcome, Rafa Corden, CEO of Simple Proof.
[00:01:46] Unknown:
Hi. Nice to be here, Valerie. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. For sure. So,
[00:01:52] Unknown:
you know, let's talk let's let everybody know who you are and what how on earth can we make honest elections using Bitcoin? What the heck is that all about?
[00:02:02] Unknown:
Yeah. So my name is Rafa Cordon. I've, been involved in Bitcoin projects since 2017, doing a lot of different things with startups. I was involved in lightning payments, And my new sort of venture or project is called Simple Proof. Simple Proof is a solution that helps institutions and companies uphold the truth, basically Mhmm. Through, permissionless, using a permissionless immutable storage like the Bitcoin blockchain, and enabling any person to verify that the information is true. We do this on Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain using a protocol, called open time stamps, which was developed by Peter Todd.
We've been doing this for about a year now. And, well, simple proof can be used to to, you know, safeguard any of of digital document. The first use case was, election documents, something that everybody Right. Cares about in a democracy.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
And then so how can you explain, like, how does this work, and what is how does it compare to, like, the legacy system of, you know, elections?
[00:03:30] Unknown:
This does not replace the the the election system. So how this works is basically a, any elections documents. We we work specifically in Guatemala. And so Guatemalan election, it uses a lot of paper, tally sheets. People go to a a voting table. They put in their votes, at a certain of the day, the voting polls are closed, and, the votes are tallied per each table within a voting center. And each table is run by 5 volunteer citizen. And so they count the votes also with, political party observers that are are, you know, watching each vote get counted. And those and that vote count goes into a tally sheet.
This document, which is sort of the input, that is used to calculate and determine who wins the election. So these tally sheets in order for you know, in in in modern times, you know, back, I don't know, 30 years, these tally sheets have been sort of transmitted to a centralized location that is in charge of tallying the votes and and providing what they call the preliminary result. So, you know, there's a paper process that that that that feeds the documents. You know, it it goes all the way up and and and and and, you know, determines who's the winner. But in parallel, there is a a vote, like, an a fast voting, vote counting system to public preliminary results.
And so, originally, the, the the first preliminary results system was a fax machine. So people would fax, so that would would, you know, take a tally sheet, put it in the fax. This fax was received received in a centralized place where there there were people counting the the, you know, the information that's coming in through a fax. Now these votes these tally sheets, these documents, and Guatemalan has called them document number 4 because of the order of documents, They go through a scanner. And so these documents are scanned, and then, there are people who are hired by the electoral tribunal, the institution that's in charge of organizing the elections. These people are hired for, like, data entry. So they're seeing the tally sheet on the screen and entering the numbers by hand.
And then this once this happens, though, that that gets published, on a on a preliminary results portal. And so this process has been going on for several years now. But back in the the previous election in 2019, it was a a a an a a movement, like a civil society movement to sort of audit the election and and know and the the this group of people, they wanted to how these documents were being transmitted and used to Hello?
[00:06:37] Unknown:
Hey there. You're breaking up just a bit.
[00:06:40] Unknown:
Oh, sorry. We're Gotcha. Really well.
[00:06:44] Unknown:
You said they were using the the fax system to transmit and tally the votes?
[00:06:49] Unknown:
Yeah. And so now they use scanners. And so the Okay. The the documents are scanned, and they go to a data entry, place where people manually enter the votes. So this group this group of the civils this group of civil society, you know, individuals, they wanna understand what was going on with these tally sheets, these scanned documents. Where were they going? So they were downloading in real time the documents as they were as soon as they were getting published by the electoral tribunal, and they started seeing the strange behavior where some tally sheets would go up, then they would be, removed, and then other documents would go up and then be removed. It was a sketchy behavior that, you know, it's with the with the elections, you with the trust the process. And so if if this kind of behavior is going on, then that undermines the trust in the process. And, of course, you know, in every democracy, the power of the govern is underpinned by the elections process.
So, anyway, this this civil society was happening. And so for the elections in 2023 last year, the electoral tribunal were open to seeing how they could solve this problem. And so what they did was that they used, simple proof and the and the Bitcoin blockchain to take the fingerprint, the hash of a document. When once that document was scanned, it goes through a scanner Mhmm. Take the hash or what we call the digital signature, and that hash you time stamps protocol gets included inside a Bitcoin transaction, and then and, you know, subsequently goes into a a Bitcoin block. So in that way, it makes this because nobody can come in and alter the Bitcoin blockchain.
[00:08:43] Unknown:
That was that's what the government did. And so I've got obviously, Tansen has a question. So what was the outcome
[00:08:51] Unknown:
of the election? Oh, the, well, the election of the party who won is a party called Semia, led by, the president. His name is his last name is Arevalo. What was a strange thing because he was are able this candidate is was sort of like a political activist. He was a member of congress, and nobody really expected him. And and so when and he was, like, a an anti corruption so sort of an anti corruption. And so when he won the election, this sort of startled a lot of people sort of governing pact, and it shocked the system quickly. And so the system reacted in many ways trying to sort of overturn the election results and and a lot of things. Yeah. So it wasn't pretty turbulent in the young Guatemalan democracy.
[00:09:52] Unknown:
And so who the were the incumbents trying to overturn this election? Who act implemented this new protocol, you know, procedure with the, you know, using Bitcoin and, simple proof?
[00:10:06] Unknown:
The so the the I think I'm not sure who is behind everything, but there was definitely an effort by people in the administration to try to, you know, stop the the president-elect from taking office. And so simple proof played a a a, I would say, a role in the process because, the it made it basically made, the election votes untamperable, I would say. I think that that that's sort of the word because nobody can can edit what's on the Bitcoin blockchain. So in that way, those those are are sort of immutable. And so the what what got time stamp is sort of tally sheets, which which you could save, like, the raw material or the input that's used to, you know, actually, you know, sum up everything and and determine who's the winner. And so I think it's a good as it sort of establishes a a a a a a a, you know, a level of truth.
Right? At least we have a level of truth of the information fed into the vote counting system. And what's also interesting is that tables other people, 3rd party observers or, you know, civil society movements to actually count the votes themselves and and check, you know, check that everything everything counts. So there were by, other people. For example, this this, movement called fiscal, which is a, a vote counting like, an independent vote counting. And so I think with elections, the thing is you need to be able to you know, with how we consume information now, we don't want 2 weeks to know who the president is. Right? Yeah. We wanna vote and then we want to know as soon as are coming in, you know, who's who's ahead, who's winning. And so the the the way that to consume information, you know, everyone how we're used to consume information, does not sort of, fit with a paper process.
I mean, it doesn't it's the paper process is not as fast as we need it to be. It's not as transparent, and, the the last thing is is that, there's no way to, you know, verify it. And so using using, like, open timestamps and and simple proof, which is just an interface to open timestamps, enables this sort of real time information to be consumed in a transparent manner, but still with sort of the Bitcoin mantra of don't trust, verify. So anybody can read the blockchain. Right? It's not some, you know, database in some system, you know, in in someone's basement or what you know, all these conspiracy theorists, you know, come up with all all sorts of things. But here, like, who can argue against Bitcoin. Right? Like there's there's no, like, globalist agenda or whatever. Right? It's it's a Yeah. It's a system with no ideology that basically for the first time in humanity, lets us store information, something that was not possible before.
[00:13:34] Unknown:
Yeah. And it just I mean, it seems like just when you said fax machine, it's just like it's just the fact that things are done on paper still is very odd. You know? And it's like, okay. I get it. Let's move, you know, to the the the future here. Obviously, we've got a huge issue here in the states, with the elections previous election and, oh, you know, Trump won, Biden won, whoever. Everyone's conflicting. I would love to see a solution like this to go into effect here in the United States. How you know, with with, you know, clogging up Bitcoin, you know, how does this does this solution cause any issues with the functionality of Bitcoin, especially people who are using, you know, needing to use it for transactions? Does it push fees up? Does it make take up too much space? Like, can you help us understand that?
[00:14:30] Unknown:
Sure. So so when you said so just back you mentioned, like, backing up a bit, you mentioned the paper process. I am a fan of paper. You are. Okay. Cool. Yes. Because what's good about paper is when counting the actual votes, anybody can verify paper. Right? That's true. Right. The leading thing about the plan, the voting tables, you have 5 volunteer citizens and, you know, between 3 and 4 political observers, plus plus, elect election observation missions from international society organizations. So you have maybe 10 people looking at every vote get counted and put into the tally sheet and counting it themselves as each vote is checked. So that part I is very powerful because it lets anyone verify. The thing is when you sum up, you know, 1,000,000 votes, you can't just count it by hand. It it becomes a very a very slow process.
So if we can take that initial paper count and store that, you know, write it in stone, then, you know, whatever happens afterwards, we have a way to to the original input and check that everything makes sense. I'm not a fan of of electronic voting because in that way, yeah, it's just a machine and you don't it it's not easy for any person to verify what's going on in the machine. I'm not saying there's, you know, you know, there's sketchy things going on with machines. I have no way of knowing. But
[00:16:00] Unknown:
But you're trusting somebody that, you know, has some type of code that you don't understand, but you can understand a piece of paper with some check marks on it and say, okay. Rafa got 10,000,000 votes here. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And I guess having the double the redundancy makes makes sense also. But I do like the idea, like you said, that anybody can do it. My kid can do it. You know? Not that they would let somebody under 18 do it, but it's it's simple that part people can participate in this process. Yeah. Have you like, so are there any other elections in places that you guys have used this this tech this technology?
[00:16:37] Unknown:
No. This was the time that it was used in in Guatemala. We are speaking with other, authorities in different, institutions, just to, you know, see there there is interest in other places to use this technology. And I have to say elections is just it's a very compelling use case, but it Yeah. It's the it's it's only one use case. So you can use this, for example, for, court rulings. For example, making sure that nobody can edit a court ruling, you know, making them immutable. You can use it for little evidence. For example, in a trial, someone submits digital files as evidence Mhmm. This time stamp in order to make sure that the digital evidence that was submitted not be modified by anyone.
Other cases, for example, intellectual property files, for example, filing trademarks or Yeah. Or, you know, you know, all all that stuff, patents and things like that. Freedom of information act requests. You know, when when an institution hands over digital information as part of a a freedom of information act request, that should get time stamped well to prove that that's the the the information that the the institution delivered to whoever made the request. So there's a a lot of different, use cases for this, particularly in the public sector where there are these documents that are produced by institution that a lot of people care about
[00:18:11] Unknown:
for people elect such as elections. Obviously elections. Right? I know I was just Mags was just on the show a little bit ago, and she was talking about, you know, her her father was an artist, and he had all these physical paintings. And back in Poland, you know, before World War 2, they had to lock their house up and escape. And then, of course, you know, when the war was over, her family went back, and all of the paintings were gone. And I was wondering I was like, would this be some kind of a use case to match up a physical you know, because she said that her father would be walking around, you know, the streets and see his art in someone else's cafe, you know, and this was back in, obviously, 1945, 46, and so we didn't have any kind of digital way to verify that this was his art.
Is that any kind of, you know, an IP use case that somebody could say, like, I physically this was done by me or I don't know. Just what what would be the use case for a creator?
[00:19:14] Unknown:
So using the open time stamps protocol, what you can do is prove in an irrefutable way that, a digital, you know, a piece of inform a digital piece of information existed, from a certain point of time onwards. So, you know, one of the the challenges that or the reasons that the Guatemala tribunal implemented this was, let's say after the election, someone come comes out with a an altered document and and, you know, accuses them of elections fraud. How prove that they used that the documents that they used were created during election night and were, you know, the the actual documents were that were used. So a a use case, I, like, I can't think of anything off the top of my head right now. But in in, like, art, maybe you can prove that a certain you know, if somebody copies your art, but you can prove that you created it, then it sort of sets this precedent. Of course, in order to defend your property right, have to go through the traditional, you know, property rights system, you know, intellectual property rights legal system. But you can prove that this piece of digital information existed, a certain time from now. Right? So if somebody you know, DJ Valerie b love appears in the future, you can prove you were there first.
[00:20:46] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. I remember when I was working on, like, a a TV series, you know, manuscript proposal kind of thing, and, you know, and I'm not in Hollywood. I don't know how this all this stuff works. And I was just sort of like, well, how do I how do I protect my idea when I wanna go pitch it to a producer or anything? And then the solution and this was, you know, years ago, they were like, well, take a copy of it, stick it in like a FedEx or, you know, something that would get stamped with a a time stamp through FedEx, send it to yourself, you know, and it's obviously sealed so that if you have any issues in the future that somebody's like, oh, I stole that character idea. It's like, No, I made up Bart Simpson. He's mine, you know, that you would have, that kind of proof in the form of a stamp from the post office or from, you know, FedEx, UPS, whatever. So Yep. Does this sound like something that could be useful for, for creators? And then, again, how much does it create any issues with clogging up, you know, the functionality of Bitcoin?
[00:21:55] Unknown:
No. No. So this protocol is basically, I would say, like, infinitely scalable Okay. Because what stored in so liquid transactions have a little free text space, I would say, called an op return function function. And in the op return function, you can put a little piece of arbitrary information. This is not an NFT or ordinal or anything. Little piece of a a little bit of text, couple bytes of text. But cool about the open time stamps protocol is you don't have to store one document per transaction. What's stored is actually the root of a Merkle tree. A Merkle tree, you, combine a lot of documents of hashes of documents, you know, document effect into a single root. And then what's included into the Bitcoin transaction is that route. So as as long as you have enough processing power on your computer, you can hash whatever amount of information and just include it in one single Bitcoin transaction.
And so I would, you know, I I say protocol is infinitely scalable. It is if you have enough computing power on the computer that that's gonna be, doing the hashing. But on the Bitcoin side, it's a single Bitcoin transaction. Of course, in our use case, we were willing to pay higher fees be because time was so important that, you know, when a document was created, we wanted it to get included in the next because it was very important for the for for the doc documents to come in, you know, as just possible to the time where they where they were generated. But it doesn't necessarily have to be the same, you know, for for for any other type of document. Right?
[00:23:42] Unknown:
And so so regardless if you've got, you know, 10 votes or 10,000,000 votes, you know, that you're documenting, it's still gonna take up the same little chunk of space in one transaction, in one block. I'm still learning. Like, I don't know how exactly how everything is form formed. So my my mind is still in I'm I'm always a student first, of course.
[00:24:05] Unknown:
Well, on the voting side, we it's a little bit different because we are sending Bitcoin transactions quicker just because we want, out of the vote counting process is not one single thing, but it it goes on for maybe 6 or 8 hours or, you know, tally sheets are coming in. So we need to keep sending them sort of in real time as soon, as they get they're gonna be, you know, merged into a Merkle tree and sent and sent it to the Bitcoin blockchain. Okay. Types of information. If you have, you know, a huge book or any other, you know, big piece of information or, you know, a video, you can just hash it and that'll get included in the same sort of Bitcoin transaction. It's very interesting when you mentioned about sort of using time stamping your ideas using the the the postal service.
[00:24:56] Unknown:
Yeah. I know. That's what they taught. That's what they were telling me because I was just like, I don't have a lot of money to go spend on lawyers on a a possible idea, you know, and they were like, this would cost you $10, you know, to go send it FedEx or whatever. So I think that's an interesting idea. And then can so anybody can go look at what's on those those, transactions. So you like, I could go in and look at whatever block and see, okay, there were this many votes put into this. No. I can't see that.
[00:25:26] Unknown:
You need the original file because what's stored inside the Bitcoin transaction is just a just a hash. Okay. So you can prove that the document exists. If you the original document and you hash it, you can check against the blockchain to that you have the real document. The actual information of the document is not stored inside Bit just the digital fingerprint. And back to your your your your what you were saying about the post office, it takes it costs $10. Maybe you have to go to the post office. With open time stamps, you can go to open time stamps.org and do this for free.
You don't even have to do the Bitcoin transaction. The the time stamps has has is is maintained by donations. You can just do it for free.
[00:26:14] Unknown:
Oh, wow. What have you seen? Like, have you I'm sure you've explored lots of things. Are you have you what have you seen that was like, oh, wow. People are doing this too with this? Have you seen anything unexpected that you're they're using this this process? Would you call it a protocol? What would you call open time stamps? Open time stamps. Timestamp protocol. Yeah. So what have you seen that's interesting on you know, that you're like, woah. Someone's doing it for that? Have you know, can you look and tell?
[00:26:41] Unknown:
So so I I've, I've spoken with Peter Todd Mhmm. The the guy who actually invented open time stamps. Uh-huh. And Peter, the open time stamps has he he he I think he released the first version in 2016 or 27. And so he's seen a lot of people use it for different things. He told me about, for example, people who are documenting human rights abuses in sort of authoritarian, regimes where they, they need to make they they need to prove that the document that whatever, you know, picture, photograph, or whatever of of a human rights is not a a deep fake or any fake information.
Mhmm. So I've I've seen it used for that. Yeah.
[00:27:30] Unknown:
That's oh my gosh. Oh, let's let's pull that thread right there. The the deep fakes. Right? That's a big deal. You know? Obviously, we're gonna be navigating, like, a a barrage of that coming, you know, on every election cycle in addition to just any other time. Right? But I think there's gonna be a lot of of problems there. So can this, oh, that's really exciting. Can this be a solution, like, at scale for so let's say I'm a campaign manager for Kennedy or whoever. Right? And I have whatever, a 100 pieces of content that I wanna use in my campaign and, okay, you know, how the at the end of a lot of these, you know, the commercials or whatever, like, I approve this message.
You know? Do you know what I'm talking about? Is that something that we could do in bulk and then at scale too for for these campaign managers?
[00:28:30] Unknown:
That that's really something that I'm very concerned with these fakes. Like, if we just see the state of deep fake and, like, generative AI now. Mhmm. You extrapolate that 10 years, it's gonna be like we can maybe having this conversation with me, and I could be an AI.
[00:28:48] Unknown:
Totally. Right. No way to okay. Right? I mean, I think we're all aliens anyway, so whatever. But, I mean, everyone's an alien because we're on a planet from outer space. You know? But but it's true, though. You're super right. And, I mean, with just like right now, we're looking the way that I look at the AI technology that's only been starting to kinda get able for mainstream us mainstream people to use, it's like Pong, you know, back in the day with, like, doink. You know, you have 1 pixel doing its thing, and I'm like, wow. Look at what we can do now, you know, 30 some years later, 40 years later. And I imagine how on earth are we gonna combat that in the future knowing, like, yeah, that's actually the president talking or, yes, that's actually whoever it is.
So this is a huge benefit. Who who knows about this here in the United States in the political realm? Is there anybody that you've brought it to their attention for the next elections? My I know there's a bunch of elections in many countries this year. There's, I I wanna say, 60, maybe. Yep. There's a lot of elections happening. And so, you know, that means a lot of potential for unrest and all the I I think because the precedent was set at the last, election here in the United States, it it's possibly gonna be that's the way that the behavior is gonna have to go, especially if we've got Trump on board with all of his, you know, shenanigans. And whatever the case, it's like maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but I think everyone's gonna start coming forward and being like, this wasn't fair, and this wasn't counted right, and he stole the election. So can we get this in front of, you know, the powers that be in in a timely fashion? You know?
[00:30:36] Unknown:
So it's already happening. If you saw the last election in Brazil, something very similar to what happened in the US, occurred where people where the the losing candidate said that this election was stolen. Mhmm. He had a there was a sort of an insurrection or or like a storm on congress. They destroyed a lot of things in the in the congress building in in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Mhmm. So, I mean, there's a president here, and it's just gonna keep growing. And and and plus the fact that social media, enables social media is, you know, there there's 2 sides, good and bad. I think the bad thing is that social media companies, algorithms that optimize only for engagement and not for the truth. Yeah. And so outrageous information gets more engagement and gets more people watching it than, you know, the boring truth.
And but but the other thing is that social media enables activists like happen like it happened in Guatemala to come out of the blue and compete in elections, you know, established traditional candidates with deep pockets. And that produces a shock. Nobody saw it coming and all of a sudden, you know, somebody got elected. And so how can you, you know, create trust around the elections process? Because like I said before, the elections process is really what underpins this legit the legitimacy of of power, in in a in a gov Right? If people don't trust the the the the elections process that undermines, you know, the the the legitimacy of the power of of, you know, the the the leader's power.
Mhmm. So in in the US so, we we partnered with a a foundation called Open Dialogue Foundation.
[00:32:29] Unknown:
Yes. Ludmila and everybody in Bota and Ludmila, they're the bomb. I love those guys.
[00:32:36] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. So we we partner with them, a small sort of awareness, campaign in the US. So we went to, Washington DC a couple weeks ago and had room meetings in in different senators' offices, to talk about this, about how bit can be used for good and for human rights and to, you know, uphold democracy and sort of, you know, counter that narrative that Bitcoin is only used by bad people and, you know, terrorists or money on ever.
[00:33:11] Unknown:
With the which is So what was your response? Like, I I know that there's a lot of, obviously, angles that we talk to the policymakers through, whether it's through the environmental lens, whether it's human rights. Now we've got transparent elections. Are they are they eager to learn more? Are they still having the resistance in the FUD? Are they like, yeah. We want this.
[00:33:32] Unknown:
They wanna learn more. Yeah. Especially on the democracy Mhmm. Side, I think the, like, people in the care about democracy. That's that's one of the the things that I I feel like United States is still like a golden standard in the world of democracy. And it's the and so people are interested in this use case. I've had a lot of good conversations with people in government that are interested in how this technology can be used to to basically protect these sort of safe, documents, in in elections.
[00:34:08] Unknown:
And, Nick, so, obviously, we're hearing about you know, I I just heard that Arizona is trying you know, possibly gonna be putting some of their is it their pension? Something on, you know, maybe some Bitcoin there. And then, obviously, we've got, oh, gosh, up in Wyoming, our wonderful senator Lummis Cynthia Lummis. You know? So are you guys approaching certain already Bitcoin friendly folks so that we can get a coalition to get them to push this through at scale for the federal and then hopefully the state elections?
[00:34:42] Unknown:
We've been approaching Bitcoin friendly and Bitcoin unfriendly people on both sides of the aisle. Nobody can I think this this election's use case, you can find a lot of people who are against it? Right?
[00:34:56] Unknown:
Good. And so so for those people who have been against it, if there are any, what have been their biggest objections at the policy level? Like, at the, you know, at the those the that Cryptos the crypto affinity is the scam thing.
[00:35:12] Unknown:
Right? Oh, how, you know, how many 1,000,000,000 of dollars in scams have happened in crypto. Mhmm. Yeah. Like, in some of the meeting, people would welcome and say, oh, you're the crypto guys. And so that's something that we
[00:35:29] Unknown:
And did they respond when you try to help them understand the difference between Bitcoin and crypto?
[00:35:35] Unknown:
Yeah. I I have to say some people were more interested than others, but but, you know, best effort to explain why Bitcoin and why not anything else.
[00:35:45] Unknown:
So, obviously, senator Warren has been a thorn in the side of Bitcoin. Just she doesn't seem to wanna meet with any of us. She doesn't wanna it doesn't seem like she's open to listen. Have you guys Got the bankers. Yeah. Have you tried to approach her on this lens? You know? Because she's all up in arms about the the, you know, thinking it's a scam and the environment boiling the oceans. I was like, well, here's another use case, senator. What do you think about this? Like, you would think she would want to have fair and transparent elections.
Has anybody gotten up in her grill about this?
[00:36:21] Unknown:
Not anywhere. We we tried to reach out, but but they they, said they weren't available to to meet. Through a short stop or something, that's that's the excuse that I heard. Yeah. It's it's interesting with her. You know, I remember one of the hearings that she had with bankers, and she's saying, like, oh, this is the first time that I agree with the bankers and, like, being so happy with the bankers. I mean, and this this sort of I I draw a parallel here with the early days of voice over IP. So making the voice over IP, the ability to make phone calls over the Internet. Mhmm. Voice over IP came out in the late nineties, early 2000.
Mhmm. It was a new way of communicating. You know, being able to call people over the Internet was mind blowing at the time. And I know a guy who actually hosted a server in his basement, computer server, and had a website called free world dial up dot com. Okay. And this free dial up, his name is Jeff Pulver. And free world dial up dot dot com, basically, any person in the world call another person online Uh-huh. For free. But the techno like, so primitive that it worked only one way. So I would have to talk and then I would have to stop, and then you it was like a two way radio. Okay. And so this guy had it in his basement. It was a free thing.
And all of a sudden, all the big telecoms of the United States sued him. Him. Oh my gosh. This is for operating an unregulated telecommunications
[00:38:05] Unknown:
service. Oh my God.
[00:38:08] Unknown:
And what did the telecom that time, we're talking early 2000, this was before Skype. They were saying, oh, this was I have to say this was also right after 911. And so what were the telecom saying? Voice over IP, terrorists are gonna use Yeah. They're gonna get it. User. We need to regulate it. We need to stop people from using it. That was a new Internet protocol. Just like open time stamps is an Internet protocol, just like Bitcoin is an Internet protocol, voice over IP is an Internet protocol. So these people sued sued, this guy, and it went all the way up to the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission.
And the Federal Communications Commission, created something they called the Pulver order, where basically they ruled in favor of of Jeff Pulver saying that, voice over IP would not be considered regulated to the telecommunications service because this would stifle, innovation and United States on a back foot with the new developments that were going on in the Internet early 2000. Wow. The polar order just turned 20 years old a couple days ago. There was a bit, like, big celebration in in Washington DC because it was a landmark thing. Right now, you and I talking over voice over IP. You use Apple FaceTime, voice over IP, WhatsApp calls, signal, program, all those services are voice over IP.
Zoom call, Google Meet, everything. Right? So imagine if you had to get a license for, you know, setting up a Zoom call. You know, have to register with the government for setting setting up a Zoom call. It's ridiculous. And if you look at some of the draft wording on the this legislation that that senator Warren was trying to trying to make, one of the things one of the terms that they invented was unhosted wallet. Right. And so unhosted wallets need to register with the government.
[00:40:04] Unknown:
Right. I'm, like, if there's 12 words in my head, is that unhosted? Do I need to go register my my my menopause memory with you, senator Warren? You know? Like,
[00:40:14] Unknown:
no Are you gonna, like, are you ban dice? Like, I can create a a a a seed phrase throwing dice. Are dice gonna be banned? I have to register dice. It's ridiculous. It's like a first amendment thing. Right? A freedom of speech.
[00:40:27] Unknown:
Very much. And, I I I I'm glad that we have some of these precedent set that we can use them to start talking. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I I think it's so important. A lot of Bitcoiners I know are, you know, fighting the good fight. We just had the, what was it, the EIA? Was it the the energy information? Something where they were trying to get all the minors, like, within 10 days that they had to go, like, disclose all of your proprietary information and locations and all that and all of these wonderful, you know, cyber hornets and lawyers and the policy folks just were like, I don't think so.
So it's so necessary that we have all of these talented folks who understand how to deal with these big, you know, these governments and whatnot and agencies that don't understand Bitcoin. And they're so afraid and they're funded by the banks. And obviously, you know, nobody wants to get rid of the money printer if you're one of the button pushers of a money printer. So, you know, as much as I wanna be like, Yeah, we're just gonna go underground and go do everything, it's like we operate in a system. And I think, you know, we have to figure out how to intelligently navigate it, you know, and outsmart
[00:41:45] Unknown:
the people who are just they're behind the times. Right? And so Look at the telecoms. They saw the threat of voice over IP to the legacy business model. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Anytime And so what are they doing? Spending fun. Right? This is how we're gonna, you know, protect our legacy business model. Look at the banks. What are they doing this thing?
[00:42:05] Unknown:
FUD FUD FUDALicious. It's total Elmer FUD out there. And I I always you know, everybody says this, but it's like follow the money. You know, who's funding these these, you know, ridiculous bills and these ridiculous policies and, like, keep going and digging, digging, digging, digging down. And it's like, who's writing the check ultimately to the person who's writing that that proposal or these things? And so I think it it seems to boil down a lot to the banks. And, yeah, I get that they don't wanna lose that that that ability to go print money or, obviously, the telecom companies didn't wanna go lose any of their market share to this type of thing. But it's like charging by the minute. Right? They were charging for calls by the they were, you know, making a lot of money.
Totally. It's like I know it's like if that was my business, I'd be like, wait a minute. I don't want somebody to come and have some free thing or something easy that is gonna pull all these people away from what I'm selling. I get it as a business person. I I think as from a policy level, that bothers me, you know, because I think I hope and I always did since I, you know, was a kid. And then once I started getting older, I was always like, you know, I wanted to be a a supreme court justice and go save the world and go to law school and go, you know, be the good you know, help the good guys win and, you know, get rid of the bad stuff out there. And I wanna still believe that we have a system that there's some of those people in there that are creating policy that are for the public good and that aren't puppets on the strings of the banks or the companies or god knows dark money who's doing what. But, if if you go full circle,
[00:43:51] Unknown:
we need to protect democracy. Yeah. And we need to fight for democracy because that's the only way that people can affect change and regulations. It is democracy. They're a democratic process. And we're seeing, for example, you know, social media companies, now with algorithms and everything, they probably know you better than you know yourself.
[00:44:16] Unknown:
Oh, they totally. They're they're predictive models. Every little thing, and they're obviously listening to us all the time on our phones.
[00:44:23] Unknown:
You know? Like And so they can influence your behavior because it's, they if if know me better than I know myself, they can influence my behavior. Of course, these companies, they're there there's this Harvard professor. Her name is Shoshana Zuboff, and she talked about surveillance capitalism Yep. And how, social media companies, are go are are in a collision course against democracy because democracy is gonna try to regulate, for example, privacies. What information these companies can keep, who owns this this personal information. And so her predict is that in the future, these companies are gonna try to, you know, block, democratic processes or or influence and manipulate people's behavior against democracy in order to protect, their ability to, you know, harvest this information.
[00:45:20] Unknown:
Well, a couple things here. I wanna bring up 2 points with Tucker Carlson and, oh god, Russell Brand. And Tucker Carlson had somebody on, and I'm blanking on his name, but he was basically going over, you know, kind of like censorship as a service. And there's companies out there that, you know, that's their model, and that's what they were doing during these elections and trying to moderate, you know, the social media companies and telling them, like, oh, these are the bad guys, and you should start thinking about this and plugging these things in your algorithms. And then, of course, the election cycle would get over, and then now they've got, you know, 3 years ish, give or take, to go figure out what else to do with all that time. So they'd go figure out, well, what should we censor now? And then be competing for all of this, you know, they've gotta go you know, if you've got a hammer, they wanna go find a nail.
You know? And so that's it. I was just like, really? There's companies that do that? That's insane. And then watching a Russell Brand episode about you know, because he's been censored and all the stuff that's been going on with him and them trying to, you know, bring up just old stuff from the past that he's been very clear about, you know, with his addiction and sexual history and being a player and all this stuff, and they're trying to bring it up and make him look really awful and and really censor him. He started doing some very in-depth work on different censorship models and different manipulation models on the social media. So there's these different he did a real I I I should I'll find the link for that episode and I'll put it in the show notes. But, you know, he kept doing the connect the dots, connect the dots, connect the dots to, you know, the social media companies and to these censorship companies that go to the politics, that go to all the bank. It's just like, oh my god. Like, how can we ever even think you know, Noster, obviously, is really the only place I feel like I can get, you know, a fair opportunity that I'm gonna see my friends' posts or that, you know, obviously, there's no algorithm over there that I'm aware of on the pop you know, the the the apps that I'm using. But is there anywhere that we know that we can just have uncensored, unfiltered truth?
[00:47:47] Unknown:
Well, not so often.
[00:47:50] Unknown:
It's crazy. And, you know, and I think, Rafa, I think about our kids. Right? Like, I just saw something on the headlines that some the congress may have passed something to ban TikTok, which I'm fine with that. Ban that stupid app. But, I mean, sorry, TikTok. But our children are, you know, they're so malleable and their brains aren't even developed till they're 25. And if you give them a phone, they can go get in and they can hack the crap out of it. They're smarter than we are, you know, and they're just like, Yeah, I can do this workaround and put these apps on, mom, you know. Their little brains are completely at they're manipulated. They're not even their own thinkers, you know, because everything that they see from a young age has been manipulated by the platforms. It's manipulated by the ads and, you know, the people who are, you know, making the ads and God knows whatever else. And obviously, what we've seen with Google and their AI disaster that happened a couple weeks ago, you know, so it's like, what else is super manipulated out there? How can we ever even trust anything? It's like, go in nature and hug a frickin' tree and get rid of all this other stuff, Right? That's the only thing that's true and real.
[00:49:06] Unknown:
Yeah. So what do we do about elections? Right? How how how do we know what's true in terms at least I don't know what politicians say, like, whether they say the truth or not, but who won the election. Right? That's that's critical information.
[00:49:23] Unknown:
Have you thought about reaching out to to to Kennedy to talk to him about this and just getting this as a part of his platform to start pushing for transparent elections?
[00:49:36] Unknown:
I have not reached out to him. Initially, I would say I wanna I wanna stay away from politics
[00:49:46] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:49:47] Unknown:
Just because what we're doing is an is not a is not a partisan thing. It's just a technology to to to, you know, for truth. And so my initial reaction would be I don't wanna be sort of associated with a specific candidate, or I don't want this technology to be politicized. I like, the ideal my ideal would be to, you know, regular people asking for this, like the Bitcoin community or people who are, you know, not
[00:50:22] Unknown:
Not running. Right? Not running. Yeah. Not candidates. Yeah. I know. I think there's 2 sides. By the people. Right? For the people. Yeah. It is. I I agree. I agree with that, but I'd also consider, you know, obviously, these folks have big audiences, big voices. And if they can move this this protocol forward for truth, you know, and it doesn't have to be politicized. And if you just say, like, every single candidate, it's available to start pushing to to have that transparent, you know, counting of votes and and able to do this. I think that, you know, who knows? I'm just, you know, playing devil's advocate here to your point because we need to get this done. And we do have this big election coming up, and it's very impactful because if we go, you know, a certain direction, the environment might get impacted and more human rights might get pulled away from us, you know, in in here. And if we go another way, there could be a whole another shit show. I mean, there's a shit show anywhere you look at it. You know?
It's like there's no none of these candidates, in my opinion, are, you know, ultimately the I I'm not a big political person. I don't love politics, but but at least we could know that the people have spoken, and we can count that the people have spoken. So we don't have another Jan 6 and have just all that unrest. It's like we have bigger problems in our world than dealing with counting votes. Like, let's count the damn votes and get to work. You know what I mean? Like, that shouldn't be the biggest point of contention. If we have a solution, a technical solution that can solve this problem, let's get on to business, You know? Because think about all the time that has been completely wasted and and, productivity that has been lost on many fronts because of all of this. You know, the election was stolen, la la la. You know? And it's like, imagine if all of those resources of minutes and hours and weeks months years with all these people got redirected to solving the damn problems that we're supposed to be solving as, you know, these elected officials are doing you know, supposed to do. The way it works in the US is that elections are sort of organized and run
[00:52:36] Unknown:
by county clerks. Mhmm. So these are the people who who we would love to speak to. Right? The the the county clerks, the people who who are involved at the local level organizing elections. Not that, you know, presidential candidates or people like that, but more on the ground with with count at the county level, who are the people who actually organize election for their for the specific county, and they get, certain leeway on making decisions on, you know, how they wanna implement the election process.
[00:53:09] Unknown:
And so what's the you know, what's your strategy right now for reaching out to these people? Do you have a team? Do you need help? Do you want us Bitcoiners to help you? How can we make this real?
[00:53:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. We would, you know, it would be incredible to to to get help from Bitcoin. We are doing our best effort in reaching out to people and having, you know, interesting conversations around this. But, you know, any any people in any person in the Bitcoin world that, you know, is interested in this and or wants to talk to to people at the county level that that, you know, are in charge of running elect, we're happy to we'd be happy to have that conversation and see how this can be adopted.
[00:53:46] Unknown:
And is there a playbook for talking to the people? Like, you know what I mean? Like, if you're like, cool. I just got Bitcoin rocks. Somehow, I got something in the mail, and I'm sure I signed up for it. But, I I can't I don't remember a lot of things lately because I'm getting old. But, they have a cool little pamphlet that you give to businesses to, like, you know, orange pill of business, and here you go. This is what you can do. Is there something like that that you guys have that is, you know, if these folks start calling you or reaching out to you that you'd be like, yeah. This is, you know, 5 steps to talk to your, you know, local election official.
[00:54:21] Unknown:
There is a documentary of Okay. Immutable Democracy. Okay. Immutable Democracy is a documentary about what happened, how Bitcoin was used, to safeguard elections documents in the Guatemalan elections. And so it describes the process from different perspectives, from volunteers, that are that are running the the the table, to, to to every every person that that was sort of involved in the elections process that yeah. You can go to simpleproof.com, and that's where that's where you can see the the documentary. That describes the process and how, using opens open time stamps, we can safeguard this information.
So, yeah, check out that I would recommend people who are interested, go into simpleproof.com and checking out the the documentary called the Mutable Democracy. Definitely, it's it's a good 15 minutes, investment into into understanding how this works.
[00:55:28] Unknown:
Amazing. And then so, basically, this is how it works. A simple process to safeguard documents you receive and fingerprint. You get the documents. You time stamp in the store, and then you verify through simple proof, and it's on your note. Like so this is amazing, and I'm so excited that you guys are doing this because we obviously need this, in in the the workflow of democracy not getting annihilated because we don't want that. And so okay. So where's the best place for people to you know, who are interested in participating and supporting you? Is it your website? Is it Twitter? Where can everybody go? Simpleproof.com. Okay. Cool. So then and then there's an email or some way to contact you there?
[00:56:16] Unknown:
[email protected].
[00:56:17] Unknown:
Yeah. Amazing. And do you have, like, a team? Is it volunteers, like, people you have a team of volunteers that are helping you, or is it something people would get, you know I'm just curious. Is it a job? They're they're I I don't have jobs.
[00:56:31] Unknown:
Right now. We're, a bootstrapped, startups still. We haven't received any VC investment.
[00:56:37] Unknown:
Are you on Geyser? Do you have a Geyser fund?
[00:56:41] Unknown:
It's Geyser.
[00:56:42] Unknown:
You don't know what Geyser is? Oh, dude. No. So geyser dot fund is, you know, it's kinda like a a a GoFundMe page, and you know what GoFundMe is? Mhmm. Right. So it's GoFundMe for Bitcoin. And so, like, any kind of project, so they have, like, you know, I have a Bitcoin for Peace thing up there that I don't promote. So by the way, everybody go donate to Bitcoin for Peace because we're gonna be making a book series, like, kinda chicken soup for the soul with a bunch of before and after stories for Bitcoin and, you know, people, planet, prosperity, kids, domestic violence, all this stuff. So we wanna document stories and use cases about why you know, the before and after of Bitcoin and how it changes people's lives in the world. But you can put anything up there. Like, some people just have it for, you know, a film that they're working on or a book that they're working on or a business project that they're working on. So it's one way that you can start promoting and people can give you, you know, 10 SATs or 10,000,000 SATs, whatever.
But it's geyser.fund. So that could maybe help you get this out there, you know, and cover some costs for for getting this into the right hands.
[00:57:51] Unknown:
I don't know. Is Yeah. So we're looking for volunteers. Yeah. We're definitely looking for volunteers who wanna, you know, get the word out and do some advocacy, and and, you know, bringing this into to attention of of people who are in positions to make decisions around elections. Definitely.
[00:58:10] Unknown:
I love it. I'm just as you said, volunteers, like, you know, we've got, like, Bitcoin or Jobs. We've got, the Bitcoin talent company. We've got, Martel's Lair For Talent where people can put up and say, hey. You know, here's a job or here's a, I want a job. Do we have anything for volunteers?
[00:58:30] Unknown:
Not yet. No. That would be interesting. Just,
[00:58:35] Unknown:
also You think about, like, all of the and all the different projects around the world, and I think about Bitcoiners who, you know, maybe I just have an hour and I wanna contribute to something in a music project, or I wanna contribute to an after school program teaching kids about Bitcoin or whatever it might be, but just kind of a volunteer matchmaking service that could be similar to a Fiverr, but on you know, for Bitcoin projects. That's an interesting layer that maybe these other 3 organizations can put up in their on their websites. Because then you could put something up and say, we need some volunteers to get the word out, and these are what we need. And then people could click and go get it, so like a volunteer marketplace I can't stop thinking about trying to find solutions for Bitcoin. They just and love and making the world better. Like, we need this, you know? Like, all these angles of solving the problems, I think, are very, very important.
What do you so what's gonna happen next? Like, what do you what do you have on your your your to do list for the next few months here?
[00:59:38] Unknown:
Just, talking to more people, going to conferences, discussing this with with people, you know, decision makers in the election space. That's sort of where we're focused on right now. But we're also talk people who are not in the in the election space, but are in in areas where you where where truth is very important for public documents. Mhmm. So, you know, mostly in the public sector, that's where we're we're involved and and having good conversations. Yeah.
[01:00:11] Unknown:
Are you seeing any use case for, like, somebody's, like, will or, you know, an estate plan and just, like, just so the kids don't fight over something and then try to get their you know what I mean? I don't know. I'm just thinking, like Yes. Is that something that people are using this for?
[01:00:25] Unknown:
No. No. That's an interesting use case. But when you mentioned, right, the, will who cares about the will? Only the peep you know, the family of the deceased person. Whereas we're looking for use cases that are huge impact, right, for Yeah. Like, elections. Right? How many people care about elections? You know? All the citizens of the country. Right? In the case of Guatemala, it's 17,000,000 people. Right. So those are the the types of use cases, at least, that we wanna invest our time into, like, these things that can have a huge impact. Right? Totally. And so what's the business model, though, for you guys? So, like, let's say,
[01:01:06] Unknown:
whatever, a state or a country wants to adopt this, would they just pay you a fee to help implement it? Or how what's the business model here? So it's just a fee to you? It's not a per transaction? It would just be like a a fee to set it for a month? Fee because the documents are stored in our cloud.
[01:01:22] Unknown:
Got it. So it it it has, like, a doc a per document fee. But at the end of the day, it's the customer's choice whether they wanna, you know, be in our cloud or keep it, in their own space. When it when it's stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, it's stored forever. Right? So the digital fingerprint is stored forever. The actual digital meant that's where you need to decide where you wanna where you wanna, you know, store it.
[01:01:47] Unknown:
Cool. Okay. Awesome. Well, any, any last thoughts? Like, what are your I wanna hear wanna hear from you, Rafa. What are your hopes and dreams for democracy on planet Earth? Do you believe we can really truly have fair and open elections and democracy, and can we grow it? Because it seems like authoritarianism and dictatorships are growing versus shrinking, and it seems like democracy is obviously at at at a big risk.
[01:02:16] Unknown:
I'm very concerned for democracy. I'm, I'm I see that in the future, these social media companies and these these algorithm companies are gonna be in a collision course with democracy. Yeah. And so we need to establish the tools, right now before that moment. So when when that happens, people can go out and vote and, you know, vote for for what they believe in. Scared of this whole manipulation thing and how and how it's gonna, you know, get worse all the time. Yeah. And so I think we need right now, it's it's a it's a couple years that we have for
[01:03:01] Unknown:
you won't be able to tell what's real and what what isn't, at least in the digital world. And I think there's a lot of apathy with young voters. You know, I have apathy, and I'm an old voter. Right? And I feel like, am I is it really getting counted? Does it matter? And certainly in the United States with the electoral college, which I think should be completely abolished, like, one person, one vote. Why are we not at this I don't I don't even understand the freaking electoral college. It's always just just it's not intelligent to me. But but, like, what would you say to a young person right now who might be listening to this who's just like, I'm not gonna vote. Screw that. It's not gonna matter anyway.
[01:03:42] Unknown:
For democracy because democracy is just as much about electing new leaders as being able to remove leaders that you don't want anymore. And if you don't protect democracy, then you you may lose that power forever. And, you know, being a in a sort of authoritarian regime. So it's very important to protect the democratic process. It's basically the only way that people can effect change in government without a violent, you know, without a revolution. Right?
[01:04:22] Unknown:
Yeah. And and I think Bitcoin is a tool for peace. It's a peaceful revolution. It's this peaceful tool to create, you know, power shifts in these in these institutions and and whatnot. So I I think For peace. Yeah. I love this angle. You know, I love this angle for Bitcoin and voting, and I wanna learn more about it. Are there any you know, have you run across any Bitcoiners or any conversations where people are like, this is gonna this is not a good, you know, way to use Bitcoin, and this is bad. Like, have you run into objections from Bitcoiners about this process, or has everybody been like, high five, bro. This is great, Rafa. No. Some people are concerned
[01:04:58] Unknown:
about this being misused as a way to legitimize election fraud, for example. And, you know, if somebody's committing election fraud? Right. If somebody, you know, may uses this and just says, oh, it's on the blockchain, so there was no fraud. Right?
[01:05:17] Unknown:
So they just kind of just they they just because it's on the blockchain, it must be true. So but is that what you're saying? Because, obviously, when you're saying that people are counting by paper, you can still manipulate that to some degree if, you know, you pay off guys those 5 guys who are watching or whatever it is, the observers or however it might work. Mhmm. So just because it's on the blockchain doesn't mean that it is true. Is that which Yes. What you think? Yes. So so people are concerned in, like, authoritarian
[01:05:46] Unknown:
regimes using this as a way to sort of say that there was a elect election electoral fraud. In the case of Mhmm. 2 100,000 people are mobilized for the election. Wow. And so yeah. Imagine it must be hard keeping a conspiracy between 5 people, but between 200,000 people, I mean, somebody has to face something. Nobody's come forward yet, so I don't think there's a conspiracy there.
[01:06:16] Unknown:
Yeah. That's a good point. I I know. I like that. This is definitely a form of decentralization, like, not having everything be reliant on a software program to just count the votes. It's like, yeah, I really like that. It opened my eyes a lot to the value of paper, you know, and the value of humans doing this because who knows with AI and all the other things of how things can get manipulated and make it look really, really good. So I I think that's really great. So I appreciate you opening opening my eyes to paper again. But, yeah, I think it's like for all of us listening and it's like, obviously, there's different countries and different places that don't even have the opportunity for you to cast a vote and especially if you're a woman. You know?
And so here, we're in any place where you do have this opportunity, you might as well, you know, you might as well participate even if you're a skeptic, even if you're apathetic, even if you don't like the candidate candidates, you know, choose the lesser of 2 evils or 5 evils or however many there are, but it you know, we do have to participate. And I know, like, in our local elections here where I live let let me ask you this. If you've ever heard of this, and I don't I forget the name of what they called this, but I thought it was it was absurd.
They needed a certain percentage for the vote for the mayor. Like, we had a mayor of our city. And and whatever it was, it was too you know, there's, I don't know, 5 candidates for the mayor. And the the winner didn't achieve whatever the the threshold was for you know, I don't know if it needed to be 50%, 40%, whatever it was. But the winner did not receive it, but they won by a substantial amount over the 2nd place person. So it was, like, you know, whatever, 25,000 votes to 20,000 votes and clear winner, super clear winner. But because those 25,000 votes, for example, didn't meet that threshold, they did this whole other thing where they took the second vote, like your second choice, and then they accumulated that. And then the person who was in second actually won because a bunch of people used their alternative vote things and voted for this person.
And I was just like, what? It it it was bizarre, and I couldn't believe that this is happening. And this is in Boulder, Colorado. And so now we've got a second place winner with the 2nd place votes who won. And I'm like, why doesn't the winner just get to win? That's, to me, democracy. It's like, I don't care if you have 2 candidates or 20 candidates. Like, may the best person win, and guts get to work. I don't get it. Have you ever heard of any, like, places doing that?
[01:09:06] Unknown:
No. No. This is the first time I I hear this. If it it I would be concerned if there was just an arbitrary thing that that they said, okay. Let's just do it this way. Or if there's some, like, you know, procedure or law or rule to do this. And if if if that's the case, then, that should be changed, then democracy is the way to change it. Right? But I guess so, but it was voted in.
[01:09:34] Unknown:
Apparently, the you know, somehow, whenever it it was, this was, like, on the ballot, and it was voted that this is the new way that we should do the voting. And I'm like Okay. This is not the way that we should do voting. Who thought of the this is a stupid idea. Sorry. I mean, I don't get it. It's just like and I don't even get the electoral college. Like, why don't we just have one vote for a person and then see who won? Why do we have to have all this nonsense?
[01:10:03] Unknown:
In Guatemala, it's 1 person, 1 vote.
[01:10:06] Unknown:
That seems pretty logical. Guatemala
[01:10:10] Unknown:
has 30 years of democracy, 40 years of democracy. So it's a very young democracy compared to the United States. I I wouldn't be able to say what people thought when they created the the electoral college. I don't exactly agree with it, but, I mean, what can I say? I'm not not a fan, but
[01:10:33] Unknown:
I that's I was gonna ask you that. I understand, you know, if you knew about other you know, I don't know, all the election processes in all the other countries. And are we the only country that has an electoral college, or is, is that common in other places?
[01:10:47] Unknown:
That I've heard of United States
[01:10:50] Unknown:
that that I know of, but I I, you know, I don't know of others. We're just like everyone's on the metric system, but we're on this other ridiculous system. So
[01:10:59] Unknown:
What's concerning is somebody can try to use that, electoral college process who try to, you know, nullify the will of the people. Old fake elector thing. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's very
[01:11:17] Unknown:
scary. It is. I just it's like, can't we just go back to common sense governance? You know? That would be such a treat, if we've even never had it. I mean, probably not in my lifetime we've had it, and I don't know. I I just anyway, la la la. Well, cool. Am I gonna see you at any conferences coming up? Do you have any any plans to travel and go what are you doing for the having?
[01:11:47] Unknown:
No plans.
[01:11:48] Unknown:
Plans just I don't know. I know I need to be with Bitcoiners for sure. I don't know exactly where I'm gonna be, but Peter told me I should come to London. So, maybe I'll talk with him about spinning some tunes and talking about Bitcoin for peace over there with those wonderful London folks. So, that would be cool. Or, I don't know where he's doing it, but that would be really neat. Anything for the rest of the year? You're gonna go back to El Salvador? You're gonna go what do you got going on? Yeah. Maybe maybe, go to El Salvador.
[01:12:15] Unknown:
No plans, really. I'm just, you know, on this, simple proof. We're doing we're, you know, develop still developing more software, more easy to understand for people. So now you can just create a visual tree and see how a document is actually linked to a Bitcoin transaction. Like, see it visual manner, not just trust the code. So we're we're working on that. I'm, like, pretty busy on I'm a I'm a computer nerd, so
[01:12:46] Unknown:
let's just stay in my awesome computer nerd, Rafa. I love you. So, hey, everybody who's listening or watching, you guys, go check out rapha_cordon, c o r d o n, and get ahold of him. And if you guys wanna start volunteering and getting this tool into your local election official's office so that you guys can have fair elections that are transparent. So, Rafa, you I know I'm not like Peter or Natalie or certainly not a Joe Rogan, but I'm hoping that anybody listening might wanna help and, you know, support democracy using your tool, and I think it could be cool. Like, what another neat way another neat story that we can tell about how Bitcoin is helping change the world. You know?
I love it so much. So yeah. Any final thoughts for the audience before we rock and roll?
[01:13:33] Unknown:
No. Just, check out simpleproof.com. Check out the the documentary, and remember that democracy is something that we need to defend. Nobody defends democracy. We may lose that power and never get it back.
[01:13:49] Unknown:
Yeah. I I know. It's like extinction. Right? You don't wanna have any species go extinct, and we don't want our democracy to go extinct because, you know, dark ages do last for quite a while before we can get our freedoms back. So especially now with the surveillance state and all of these other tools that they're trying to control us with. So I do believe we can't take this lightly. This is not, you know, oh, maybe we'll do this. It's like our freedom and our our privacy is hugely at risk, you know, and technology is obviously our friend. And it can be our foe when it's put in the hands of people who only care about their own power. And I think it's very important work that you're doing, Rafa, and I hope that everybody here follows you and checks you out and, you know, stands up for freedom where they are. So, yeah, this is awesome.
And, yeah, I really appreciate you, and I look forward to seeing you in person again. And everybody's listening. Thanks again for tuning in. And my name is DJ Valerie Belove, and this is a Bitcoin for Peace podcast. So peace, love, and warm aloha. Right on. Alright.
How can Bitcoin become a tool to preserve democracy? My guest on this episode, Rafa Kordan of Simple Proof, is working on that project right now as we speak, and he helped with the Guatemalan elections. So as we all know, fair and transparent elections are important to the democratic process. And after all of the mess that happened in the United States with our last election and, of course, many others all over the world that struggle with fairness, transparency, inclusion. Bitcoin is a tool that we can use to help with preserving democracy and creating transparent, fair elections. So if you care about freedom, if you care about democracy, you must not miss this episode. Thanks a lot. Tune in and send it to your friends.
Hey, Aloha, love tribe. Welcome to Bitcoin for Peace. I'm your host, DJ Valerie Belove. And I have someone here who is on a mission to have truth out there and have honest elections and honest data that we can confirm and verify using Bitcoin. Welcome, Rafa Corden, CEO of Simple Proof.
[00:01:46] Unknown:
Hi. Nice to be here, Valerie. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. For sure. So,
[00:01:52] Unknown:
you know, let's talk let's let everybody know who you are and what how on earth can we make honest elections using Bitcoin? What the heck is that all about?
[00:02:02] Unknown:
Yeah. So my name is Rafa Cordon. I've, been involved in Bitcoin projects since 2017, doing a lot of different things with startups. I was involved in lightning payments, And my new sort of venture or project is called Simple Proof. Simple Proof is a solution that helps institutions and companies uphold the truth, basically Mhmm. Through, permissionless, using a permissionless immutable storage like the Bitcoin blockchain, and enabling any person to verify that the information is true. We do this on Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain using a protocol, called open time stamps, which was developed by Peter Todd.
We've been doing this for about a year now. And, well, simple proof can be used to to, you know, safeguard any of of digital document. The first use case was, election documents, something that everybody Right. Cares about in a democracy.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
And then so how can you explain, like, how does this work, and what is how does it compare to, like, the legacy system of, you know, elections?
[00:03:30] Unknown:
This does not replace the the the election system. So how this works is basically a, any elections documents. We we work specifically in Guatemala. And so Guatemalan election, it uses a lot of paper, tally sheets. People go to a a voting table. They put in their votes, at a certain of the day, the voting polls are closed, and, the votes are tallied per each table within a voting center. And each table is run by 5 volunteer citizen. And so they count the votes also with, political party observers that are are, you know, watching each vote get counted. And those and that vote count goes into a tally sheet.
This document, which is sort of the input, that is used to calculate and determine who wins the election. So these tally sheets in order for you know, in in in modern times, you know, back, I don't know, 30 years, these tally sheets have been sort of transmitted to a centralized location that is in charge of tallying the votes and and providing what they call the preliminary result. So, you know, there's a paper process that that that that feeds the documents. You know, it it goes all the way up and and and and and, you know, determines who's the winner. But in parallel, there is a a vote, like, an a fast voting, vote counting system to public preliminary results.
And so, originally, the, the the first preliminary results system was a fax machine. So people would fax, so that would would, you know, take a tally sheet, put it in the fax. This fax was received received in a centralized place where there there were people counting the the, you know, the information that's coming in through a fax. Now these votes these tally sheets, these documents, and Guatemalan has called them document number 4 because of the order of documents, They go through a scanner. And so these documents are scanned, and then, there are people who are hired by the electoral tribunal, the institution that's in charge of organizing the elections. These people are hired for, like, data entry. So they're seeing the tally sheet on the screen and entering the numbers by hand.
And then this once this happens, though, that that gets published, on a on a preliminary results portal. And so this process has been going on for several years now. But back in the the previous election in 2019, it was a a a an a a movement, like a civil society movement to sort of audit the election and and know and the the this group of people, they wanted to how these documents were being transmitted and used to Hello?
[00:06:37] Unknown:
Hey there. You're breaking up just a bit.
[00:06:40] Unknown:
Oh, sorry. We're Gotcha. Really well.
[00:06:44] Unknown:
You said they were using the the fax system to transmit and tally the votes?
[00:06:49] Unknown:
Yeah. And so now they use scanners. And so the Okay. The the documents are scanned, and they go to a data entry, place where people manually enter the votes. So this group this group of the civils this group of civil society, you know, individuals, they wanna understand what was going on with these tally sheets, these scanned documents. Where were they going? So they were downloading in real time the documents as they were as soon as they were getting published by the electoral tribunal, and they started seeing the strange behavior where some tally sheets would go up, then they would be, removed, and then other documents would go up and then be removed. It was a sketchy behavior that, you know, it's with the with the elections, you with the trust the process. And so if if this kind of behavior is going on, then that undermines the trust in the process. And, of course, you know, in every democracy, the power of the govern is underpinned by the elections process.
So, anyway, this this civil society was happening. And so for the elections in 2023 last year, the electoral tribunal were open to seeing how they could solve this problem. And so what they did was that they used, simple proof and the and the Bitcoin blockchain to take the fingerprint, the hash of a document. When once that document was scanned, it goes through a scanner Mhmm. Take the hash or what we call the digital signature, and that hash you time stamps protocol gets included inside a Bitcoin transaction, and then and, you know, subsequently goes into a a Bitcoin block. So in that way, it makes this because nobody can come in and alter the Bitcoin blockchain.
[00:08:43] Unknown:
That was that's what the government did. And so I've got obviously, Tansen has a question. So what was the outcome
[00:08:51] Unknown:
of the election? Oh, the, well, the election of the party who won is a party called Semia, led by, the president. His name is his last name is Arevalo. What was a strange thing because he was are able this candidate is was sort of like a political activist. He was a member of congress, and nobody really expected him. And and so when and he was, like, a an anti corruption so sort of an anti corruption. And so when he won the election, this sort of startled a lot of people sort of governing pact, and it shocked the system quickly. And so the system reacted in many ways trying to sort of overturn the election results and and a lot of things. Yeah. So it wasn't pretty turbulent in the young Guatemalan democracy.
[00:09:52] Unknown:
And so who the were the incumbents trying to overturn this election? Who act implemented this new protocol, you know, procedure with the, you know, using Bitcoin and, simple proof?
[00:10:06] Unknown:
The so the the I think I'm not sure who is behind everything, but there was definitely an effort by people in the administration to try to, you know, stop the the president-elect from taking office. And so simple proof played a a a, I would say, a role in the process because, the it made it basically made, the election votes untamperable, I would say. I think that that that's sort of the word because nobody can can edit what's on the Bitcoin blockchain. So in that way, those those are are sort of immutable. And so the what what got time stamp is sort of tally sheets, which which you could save, like, the raw material or the input that's used to, you know, actually, you know, sum up everything and and determine who's the winner. And so I think it's a good as it sort of establishes a a a a a a a, you know, a level of truth.
Right? At least we have a level of truth of the information fed into the vote counting system. And what's also interesting is that tables other people, 3rd party observers or, you know, civil society movements to actually count the votes themselves and and check, you know, check that everything everything counts. So there were by, other people. For example, this this, movement called fiscal, which is a, a vote counting like, an independent vote counting. And so I think with elections, the thing is you need to be able to you know, with how we consume information now, we don't want 2 weeks to know who the president is. Right? Yeah. We wanna vote and then we want to know as soon as are coming in, you know, who's who's ahead, who's winning. And so the the the way that to consume information, you know, everyone how we're used to consume information, does not sort of, fit with a paper process.
I mean, it doesn't it's the paper process is not as fast as we need it to be. It's not as transparent, and, the the last thing is is that, there's no way to, you know, verify it. And so using using, like, open timestamps and and simple proof, which is just an interface to open timestamps, enables this sort of real time information to be consumed in a transparent manner, but still with sort of the Bitcoin mantra of don't trust, verify. So anybody can read the blockchain. Right? It's not some, you know, database in some system, you know, in in someone's basement or what you know, all these conspiracy theorists, you know, come up with all all sorts of things. But here, like, who can argue against Bitcoin. Right? Like there's there's no, like, globalist agenda or whatever. Right? It's it's a Yeah. It's a system with no ideology that basically for the first time in humanity, lets us store information, something that was not possible before.
[00:13:34] Unknown:
Yeah. And it just I mean, it seems like just when you said fax machine, it's just like it's just the fact that things are done on paper still is very odd. You know? And it's like, okay. I get it. Let's move, you know, to the the the future here. Obviously, we've got a huge issue here in the states, with the elections previous election and, oh, you know, Trump won, Biden won, whoever. Everyone's conflicting. I would love to see a solution like this to go into effect here in the United States. How you know, with with, you know, clogging up Bitcoin, you know, how does this does this solution cause any issues with the functionality of Bitcoin, especially people who are using, you know, needing to use it for transactions? Does it push fees up? Does it make take up too much space? Like, can you help us understand that?
[00:14:30] Unknown:
Sure. So so when you said so just back you mentioned, like, backing up a bit, you mentioned the paper process. I am a fan of paper. You are. Okay. Cool. Yes. Because what's good about paper is when counting the actual votes, anybody can verify paper. Right? That's true. Right. The leading thing about the plan, the voting tables, you have 5 volunteer citizens and, you know, between 3 and 4 political observers, plus plus, elect election observation missions from international society organizations. So you have maybe 10 people looking at every vote get counted and put into the tally sheet and counting it themselves as each vote is checked. So that part I is very powerful because it lets anyone verify. The thing is when you sum up, you know, 1,000,000 votes, you can't just count it by hand. It it becomes a very a very slow process.
So if we can take that initial paper count and store that, you know, write it in stone, then, you know, whatever happens afterwards, we have a way to to the original input and check that everything makes sense. I'm not a fan of of electronic voting because in that way, yeah, it's just a machine and you don't it it's not easy for any person to verify what's going on in the machine. I'm not saying there's, you know, you know, there's sketchy things going on with machines. I have no way of knowing. But
[00:16:00] Unknown:
But you're trusting somebody that, you know, has some type of code that you don't understand, but you can understand a piece of paper with some check marks on it and say, okay. Rafa got 10,000,000 votes here. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And I guess having the double the redundancy makes makes sense also. But I do like the idea, like you said, that anybody can do it. My kid can do it. You know? Not that they would let somebody under 18 do it, but it's it's simple that part people can participate in this process. Yeah. Have you like, so are there any other elections in places that you guys have used this this tech this technology?
[00:16:37] Unknown:
No. This was the time that it was used in in Guatemala. We are speaking with other, authorities in different, institutions, just to, you know, see there there is interest in other places to use this technology. And I have to say elections is just it's a very compelling use case, but it Yeah. It's the it's it's only one use case. So you can use this, for example, for, court rulings. For example, making sure that nobody can edit a court ruling, you know, making them immutable. You can use it for little evidence. For example, in a trial, someone submits digital files as evidence Mhmm. This time stamp in order to make sure that the digital evidence that was submitted not be modified by anyone.
Other cases, for example, intellectual property files, for example, filing trademarks or Yeah. Or, you know, you know, all all that stuff, patents and things like that. Freedom of information act requests. You know, when when an institution hands over digital information as part of a a freedom of information act request, that should get time stamped well to prove that that's the the the information that the the institution delivered to whoever made the request. So there's a a lot of different, use cases for this, particularly in the public sector where there are these documents that are produced by institution that a lot of people care about
[00:18:11] Unknown:
for people elect such as elections. Obviously elections. Right? I know I was just Mags was just on the show a little bit ago, and she was talking about, you know, her her father was an artist, and he had all these physical paintings. And back in Poland, you know, before World War 2, they had to lock their house up and escape. And then, of course, you know, when the war was over, her family went back, and all of the paintings were gone. And I was wondering I was like, would this be some kind of a use case to match up a physical you know, because she said that her father would be walking around, you know, the streets and see his art in someone else's cafe, you know, and this was back in, obviously, 1945, 46, and so we didn't have any kind of digital way to verify that this was his art.
Is that any kind of, you know, an IP use case that somebody could say, like, I physically this was done by me or I don't know. Just what what would be the use case for a creator?
[00:19:14] Unknown:
So using the open time stamps protocol, what you can do is prove in an irrefutable way that, a digital, you know, a piece of inform a digital piece of information existed, from a certain point of time onwards. So, you know, one of the the challenges that or the reasons that the Guatemala tribunal implemented this was, let's say after the election, someone come comes out with a an altered document and and, you know, accuses them of elections fraud. How prove that they used that the documents that they used were created during election night and were, you know, the the actual documents were that were used. So a a use case, I, like, I can't think of anything off the top of my head right now. But in in, like, art, maybe you can prove that a certain you know, if somebody copies your art, but you can prove that you created it, then it sort of sets this precedent. Of course, in order to defend your property right, have to go through the traditional, you know, property rights system, you know, intellectual property rights legal system. But you can prove that this piece of digital information existed, a certain time from now. Right? So if somebody you know, DJ Valerie b love appears in the future, you can prove you were there first.
[00:20:46] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. I remember when I was working on, like, a a TV series, you know, manuscript proposal kind of thing, and, you know, and I'm not in Hollywood. I don't know how this all this stuff works. And I was just sort of like, well, how do I how do I protect my idea when I wanna go pitch it to a producer or anything? And then the solution and this was, you know, years ago, they were like, well, take a copy of it, stick it in like a FedEx or, you know, something that would get stamped with a a time stamp through FedEx, send it to yourself, you know, and it's obviously sealed so that if you have any issues in the future that somebody's like, oh, I stole that character idea. It's like, No, I made up Bart Simpson. He's mine, you know, that you would have, that kind of proof in the form of a stamp from the post office or from, you know, FedEx, UPS, whatever. So Yep. Does this sound like something that could be useful for, for creators? And then, again, how much does it create any issues with clogging up, you know, the functionality of Bitcoin?
[00:21:55] Unknown:
No. No. So this protocol is basically, I would say, like, infinitely scalable Okay. Because what stored in so liquid transactions have a little free text space, I would say, called an op return function function. And in the op return function, you can put a little piece of arbitrary information. This is not an NFT or ordinal or anything. Little piece of a a little bit of text, couple bytes of text. But cool about the open time stamps protocol is you don't have to store one document per transaction. What's stored is actually the root of a Merkle tree. A Merkle tree, you, combine a lot of documents of hashes of documents, you know, document effect into a single root. And then what's included into the Bitcoin transaction is that route. So as as long as you have enough processing power on your computer, you can hash whatever amount of information and just include it in one single Bitcoin transaction.
And so I would, you know, I I say protocol is infinitely scalable. It is if you have enough computing power on the computer that that's gonna be, doing the hashing. But on the Bitcoin side, it's a single Bitcoin transaction. Of course, in our use case, we were willing to pay higher fees be because time was so important that, you know, when a document was created, we wanted it to get included in the next because it was very important for the for for the doc documents to come in, you know, as just possible to the time where they where they were generated. But it doesn't necessarily have to be the same, you know, for for for any other type of document. Right?
[00:23:42] Unknown:
And so so regardless if you've got, you know, 10 votes or 10,000,000 votes, you know, that you're documenting, it's still gonna take up the same little chunk of space in one transaction, in one block. I'm still learning. Like, I don't know how exactly how everything is form formed. So my my mind is still in I'm I'm always a student first, of course.
[00:24:05] Unknown:
Well, on the voting side, we it's a little bit different because we are sending Bitcoin transactions quicker just because we want, out of the vote counting process is not one single thing, but it it goes on for maybe 6 or 8 hours or, you know, tally sheets are coming in. So we need to keep sending them sort of in real time as soon, as they get they're gonna be, you know, merged into a Merkle tree and sent and sent it to the Bitcoin blockchain. Okay. Types of information. If you have, you know, a huge book or any other, you know, big piece of information or, you know, a video, you can just hash it and that'll get included in the same sort of Bitcoin transaction. It's very interesting when you mentioned about sort of using time stamping your ideas using the the the postal service.
[00:24:56] Unknown:
Yeah. I know. That's what they taught. That's what they were telling me because I was just like, I don't have a lot of money to go spend on lawyers on a a possible idea, you know, and they were like, this would cost you $10, you know, to go send it FedEx or whatever. So I think that's an interesting idea. And then can so anybody can go look at what's on those those, transactions. So you like, I could go in and look at whatever block and see, okay, there were this many votes put into this. No. I can't see that.
[00:25:26] Unknown:
You need the original file because what's stored inside the Bitcoin transaction is just a just a hash. Okay. So you can prove that the document exists. If you the original document and you hash it, you can check against the blockchain to that you have the real document. The actual information of the document is not stored inside Bit just the digital fingerprint. And back to your your your your what you were saying about the post office, it takes it costs $10. Maybe you have to go to the post office. With open time stamps, you can go to open time stamps.org and do this for free.
You don't even have to do the Bitcoin transaction. The the time stamps has has is is maintained by donations. You can just do it for free.
[00:26:14] Unknown:
Oh, wow. What have you seen? Like, have you I'm sure you've explored lots of things. Are you have you what have you seen that was like, oh, wow. People are doing this too with this? Have you seen anything unexpected that you're they're using this this process? Would you call it a protocol? What would you call open time stamps? Open time stamps. Timestamp protocol. Yeah. So what have you seen that's interesting on you know, that you're like, woah. Someone's doing it for that? Have you know, can you look and tell?
[00:26:41] Unknown:
So so I I've, I've spoken with Peter Todd Mhmm. The the guy who actually invented open time stamps. Uh-huh. And Peter, the open time stamps has he he he I think he released the first version in 2016 or 27. And so he's seen a lot of people use it for different things. He told me about, for example, people who are documenting human rights abuses in sort of authoritarian, regimes where they, they need to make they they need to prove that the document that whatever, you know, picture, photograph, or whatever of of a human rights is not a a deep fake or any fake information.
Mhmm. So I've I've seen it used for that. Yeah.
[00:27:30] Unknown:
That's oh my gosh. Oh, let's let's pull that thread right there. The the deep fakes. Right? That's a big deal. You know? Obviously, we're gonna be navigating, like, a a barrage of that coming, you know, on every election cycle in addition to just any other time. Right? But I think there's gonna be a lot of of problems there. So can this, oh, that's really exciting. Can this be a solution, like, at scale for so let's say I'm a campaign manager for Kennedy or whoever. Right? And I have whatever, a 100 pieces of content that I wanna use in my campaign and, okay, you know, how the at the end of a lot of these, you know, the commercials or whatever, like, I approve this message.
You know? Do you know what I'm talking about? Is that something that we could do in bulk and then at scale too for for these campaign managers?
[00:28:30] Unknown:
That that's really something that I'm very concerned with these fakes. Like, if we just see the state of deep fake and, like, generative AI now. Mhmm. You extrapolate that 10 years, it's gonna be like we can maybe having this conversation with me, and I could be an AI.
[00:28:48] Unknown:
Totally. Right. No way to okay. Right? I mean, I think we're all aliens anyway, so whatever. But, I mean, everyone's an alien because we're on a planet from outer space. You know? But but it's true, though. You're super right. And, I mean, with just like right now, we're looking the way that I look at the AI technology that's only been starting to kinda get able for mainstream us mainstream people to use, it's like Pong, you know, back in the day with, like, doink. You know, you have 1 pixel doing its thing, and I'm like, wow. Look at what we can do now, you know, 30 some years later, 40 years later. And I imagine how on earth are we gonna combat that in the future knowing, like, yeah, that's actually the president talking or, yes, that's actually whoever it is.
So this is a huge benefit. Who who knows about this here in the United States in the political realm? Is there anybody that you've brought it to their attention for the next elections? My I know there's a bunch of elections in many countries this year. There's, I I wanna say, 60, maybe. Yep. There's a lot of elections happening. And so, you know, that means a lot of potential for unrest and all the I I think because the precedent was set at the last, election here in the United States, it it's possibly gonna be that's the way that the behavior is gonna have to go, especially if we've got Trump on board with all of his, you know, shenanigans. And whatever the case, it's like maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but I think everyone's gonna start coming forward and being like, this wasn't fair, and this wasn't counted right, and he stole the election. So can we get this in front of, you know, the powers that be in in a timely fashion? You know?
[00:30:36] Unknown:
So it's already happening. If you saw the last election in Brazil, something very similar to what happened in the US, occurred where people where the the losing candidate said that this election was stolen. Mhmm. He had a there was a sort of an insurrection or or like a storm on congress. They destroyed a lot of things in the in the congress building in in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Mhmm. So, I mean, there's a president here, and it's just gonna keep growing. And and and plus the fact that social media, enables social media is, you know, there there's 2 sides, good and bad. I think the bad thing is that social media companies, algorithms that optimize only for engagement and not for the truth. Yeah. And so outrageous information gets more engagement and gets more people watching it than, you know, the boring truth.
And but but the other thing is that social media enables activists like happen like it happened in Guatemala to come out of the blue and compete in elections, you know, established traditional candidates with deep pockets. And that produces a shock. Nobody saw it coming and all of a sudden, you know, somebody got elected. And so how can you, you know, create trust around the elections process? Because like I said before, the elections process is really what underpins this legit the legitimacy of of power, in in a in a gov Right? If people don't trust the the the the elections process that undermines, you know, the the the legitimacy of the power of of, you know, the the the leader's power.
Mhmm. So in in the US so, we we partnered with a a foundation called Open Dialogue Foundation.
[00:32:29] Unknown:
Yes. Ludmila and everybody in Bota and Ludmila, they're the bomb. I love those guys.
[00:32:36] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. So we we partner with them, a small sort of awareness, campaign in the US. So we went to, Washington DC a couple weeks ago and had room meetings in in different senators' offices, to talk about this, about how bit can be used for good and for human rights and to, you know, uphold democracy and sort of, you know, counter that narrative that Bitcoin is only used by bad people and, you know, terrorists or money on ever.
[00:33:11] Unknown:
With the which is So what was your response? Like, I I know that there's a lot of, obviously, angles that we talk to the policymakers through, whether it's through the environmental lens, whether it's human rights. Now we've got transparent elections. Are they are they eager to learn more? Are they still having the resistance in the FUD? Are they like, yeah. We want this.
[00:33:32] Unknown:
They wanna learn more. Yeah. Especially on the democracy Mhmm. Side, I think the, like, people in the care about democracy. That's that's one of the the things that I I feel like United States is still like a golden standard in the world of democracy. And it's the and so people are interested in this use case. I've had a lot of good conversations with people in government that are interested in how this technology can be used to to basically protect these sort of safe, documents, in in elections.
[00:34:08] Unknown:
And, Nick, so, obviously, we're hearing about you know, I I just heard that Arizona is trying you know, possibly gonna be putting some of their is it their pension? Something on, you know, maybe some Bitcoin there. And then, obviously, we've got, oh, gosh, up in Wyoming, our wonderful senator Lummis Cynthia Lummis. You know? So are you guys approaching certain already Bitcoin friendly folks so that we can get a coalition to get them to push this through at scale for the federal and then hopefully the state elections?
[00:34:42] Unknown:
We've been approaching Bitcoin friendly and Bitcoin unfriendly people on both sides of the aisle. Nobody can I think this this election's use case, you can find a lot of people who are against it? Right?
[00:34:56] Unknown:
Good. And so so for those people who have been against it, if there are any, what have been their biggest objections at the policy level? Like, at the, you know, at the those the that Cryptos the crypto affinity is the scam thing.
[00:35:12] Unknown:
Right? Oh, how, you know, how many 1,000,000,000 of dollars in scams have happened in crypto. Mhmm. Yeah. Like, in some of the meeting, people would welcome and say, oh, you're the crypto guys. And so that's something that we
[00:35:29] Unknown:
And did they respond when you try to help them understand the difference between Bitcoin and crypto?
[00:35:35] Unknown:
Yeah. I I have to say some people were more interested than others, but but, you know, best effort to explain why Bitcoin and why not anything else.
[00:35:45] Unknown:
So, obviously, senator Warren has been a thorn in the side of Bitcoin. Just she doesn't seem to wanna meet with any of us. She doesn't wanna it doesn't seem like she's open to listen. Have you guys Got the bankers. Yeah. Have you tried to approach her on this lens? You know? Because she's all up in arms about the the, you know, thinking it's a scam and the environment boiling the oceans. I was like, well, here's another use case, senator. What do you think about this? Like, you would think she would want to have fair and transparent elections.
Has anybody gotten up in her grill about this?
[00:36:21] Unknown:
Not anywhere. We we tried to reach out, but but they they, said they weren't available to to meet. Through a short stop or something, that's that's the excuse that I heard. Yeah. It's it's interesting with her. You know, I remember one of the hearings that she had with bankers, and she's saying, like, oh, this is the first time that I agree with the bankers and, like, being so happy with the bankers. I mean, and this this sort of I I draw a parallel here with the early days of voice over IP. So making the voice over IP, the ability to make phone calls over the Internet. Mhmm. Voice over IP came out in the late nineties, early 2000.
Mhmm. It was a new way of communicating. You know, being able to call people over the Internet was mind blowing at the time. And I know a guy who actually hosted a server in his basement, computer server, and had a website called free world dial up dot com. Okay. And this free dial up, his name is Jeff Pulver. And free world dial up dot dot com, basically, any person in the world call another person online Uh-huh. For free. But the techno like, so primitive that it worked only one way. So I would have to talk and then I would have to stop, and then you it was like a two way radio. Okay. And so this guy had it in his basement. It was a free thing.
And all of a sudden, all the big telecoms of the United States sued him. Him. Oh my gosh. This is for operating an unregulated telecommunications
[00:38:05] Unknown:
service. Oh my God.
[00:38:08] Unknown:
And what did the telecom that time, we're talking early 2000, this was before Skype. They were saying, oh, this was I have to say this was also right after 911. And so what were the telecom saying? Voice over IP, terrorists are gonna use Yeah. They're gonna get it. User. We need to regulate it. We need to stop people from using it. That was a new Internet protocol. Just like open time stamps is an Internet protocol, just like Bitcoin is an Internet protocol, voice over IP is an Internet protocol. So these people sued sued, this guy, and it went all the way up to the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission.
And the Federal Communications Commission, created something they called the Pulver order, where basically they ruled in favor of of Jeff Pulver saying that, voice over IP would not be considered regulated to the telecommunications service because this would stifle, innovation and United States on a back foot with the new developments that were going on in the Internet early 2000. Wow. The polar order just turned 20 years old a couple days ago. There was a bit, like, big celebration in in Washington DC because it was a landmark thing. Right now, you and I talking over voice over IP. You use Apple FaceTime, voice over IP, WhatsApp calls, signal, program, all those services are voice over IP.
Zoom call, Google Meet, everything. Right? So imagine if you had to get a license for, you know, setting up a Zoom call. You know, have to register with the government for setting setting up a Zoom call. It's ridiculous. And if you look at some of the draft wording on the this legislation that that senator Warren was trying to trying to make, one of the things one of the terms that they invented was unhosted wallet. Right. And so unhosted wallets need to register with the government.
[00:40:04] Unknown:
Right. I'm, like, if there's 12 words in my head, is that unhosted? Do I need to go register my my my menopause memory with you, senator Warren? You know? Like,
[00:40:14] Unknown:
no Are you gonna, like, are you ban dice? Like, I can create a a a a seed phrase throwing dice. Are dice gonna be banned? I have to register dice. It's ridiculous. It's like a first amendment thing. Right? A freedom of speech.
[00:40:27] Unknown:
Very much. And, I I I I'm glad that we have some of these precedent set that we can use them to start talking. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I I think it's so important. A lot of Bitcoiners I know are, you know, fighting the good fight. We just had the, what was it, the EIA? Was it the the energy information? Something where they were trying to get all the minors, like, within 10 days that they had to go, like, disclose all of your proprietary information and locations and all that and all of these wonderful, you know, cyber hornets and lawyers and the policy folks just were like, I don't think so.
So it's so necessary that we have all of these talented folks who understand how to deal with these big, you know, these governments and whatnot and agencies that don't understand Bitcoin. And they're so afraid and they're funded by the banks. And obviously, you know, nobody wants to get rid of the money printer if you're one of the button pushers of a money printer. So, you know, as much as I wanna be like, Yeah, we're just gonna go underground and go do everything, it's like we operate in a system. And I think, you know, we have to figure out how to intelligently navigate it, you know, and outsmart
[00:41:45] Unknown:
the people who are just they're behind the times. Right? And so Look at the telecoms. They saw the threat of voice over IP to the legacy business model. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Anytime And so what are they doing? Spending fun. Right? This is how we're gonna, you know, protect our legacy business model. Look at the banks. What are they doing this thing?
[00:42:05] Unknown:
FUD FUD FUDALicious. It's total Elmer FUD out there. And I I always you know, everybody says this, but it's like follow the money. You know, who's funding these these, you know, ridiculous bills and these ridiculous policies and, like, keep going and digging, digging, digging, digging down. And it's like, who's writing the check ultimately to the person who's writing that that proposal or these things? And so I think it it seems to boil down a lot to the banks. And, yeah, I get that they don't wanna lose that that that ability to go print money or, obviously, the telecom companies didn't wanna go lose any of their market share to this type of thing. But it's like charging by the minute. Right? They were charging for calls by the they were, you know, making a lot of money.
Totally. It's like I know it's like if that was my business, I'd be like, wait a minute. I don't want somebody to come and have some free thing or something easy that is gonna pull all these people away from what I'm selling. I get it as a business person. I I think as from a policy level, that bothers me, you know, because I think I hope and I always did since I, you know, was a kid. And then once I started getting older, I was always like, you know, I wanted to be a a supreme court justice and go save the world and go to law school and go, you know, be the good you know, help the good guys win and, you know, get rid of the bad stuff out there. And I wanna still believe that we have a system that there's some of those people in there that are creating policy that are for the public good and that aren't puppets on the strings of the banks or the companies or god knows dark money who's doing what. But, if if you go full circle,
[00:43:51] Unknown:
we need to protect democracy. Yeah. And we need to fight for democracy because that's the only way that people can affect change and regulations. It is democracy. They're a democratic process. And we're seeing, for example, you know, social media companies, now with algorithms and everything, they probably know you better than you know yourself.
[00:44:16] Unknown:
Oh, they totally. They're they're predictive models. Every little thing, and they're obviously listening to us all the time on our phones.
[00:44:23] Unknown:
You know? Like And so they can influence your behavior because it's, they if if know me better than I know myself, they can influence my behavior. Of course, these companies, they're there there's this Harvard professor. Her name is Shoshana Zuboff, and she talked about surveillance capitalism Yep. And how, social media companies, are go are are in a collision course against democracy because democracy is gonna try to regulate, for example, privacies. What information these companies can keep, who owns this this personal information. And so her predict is that in the future, these companies are gonna try to, you know, block, democratic processes or or influence and manipulate people's behavior against democracy in order to protect, their ability to, you know, harvest this information.
[00:45:20] Unknown:
Well, a couple things here. I wanna bring up 2 points with Tucker Carlson and, oh god, Russell Brand. And Tucker Carlson had somebody on, and I'm blanking on his name, but he was basically going over, you know, kind of like censorship as a service. And there's companies out there that, you know, that's their model, and that's what they were doing during these elections and trying to moderate, you know, the social media companies and telling them, like, oh, these are the bad guys, and you should start thinking about this and plugging these things in your algorithms. And then, of course, the election cycle would get over, and then now they've got, you know, 3 years ish, give or take, to go figure out what else to do with all that time. So they'd go figure out, well, what should we censor now? And then be competing for all of this, you know, they've gotta go you know, if you've got a hammer, they wanna go find a nail.
You know? And so that's it. I was just like, really? There's companies that do that? That's insane. And then watching a Russell Brand episode about you know, because he's been censored and all the stuff that's been going on with him and them trying to, you know, bring up just old stuff from the past that he's been very clear about, you know, with his addiction and sexual history and being a player and all this stuff, and they're trying to bring it up and make him look really awful and and really censor him. He started doing some very in-depth work on different censorship models and different manipulation models on the social media. So there's these different he did a real I I I should I'll find the link for that episode and I'll put it in the show notes. But, you know, he kept doing the connect the dots, connect the dots, connect the dots to, you know, the social media companies and to these censorship companies that go to the politics, that go to all the bank. It's just like, oh my god. Like, how can we ever even think you know, Noster, obviously, is really the only place I feel like I can get, you know, a fair opportunity that I'm gonna see my friends' posts or that, you know, obviously, there's no algorithm over there that I'm aware of on the pop you know, the the the apps that I'm using. But is there anywhere that we know that we can just have uncensored, unfiltered truth?
[00:47:47] Unknown:
Well, not so often.
[00:47:50] Unknown:
It's crazy. And, you know, and I think, Rafa, I think about our kids. Right? Like, I just saw something on the headlines that some the congress may have passed something to ban TikTok, which I'm fine with that. Ban that stupid app. But, I mean, sorry, TikTok. But our children are, you know, they're so malleable and their brains aren't even developed till they're 25. And if you give them a phone, they can go get in and they can hack the crap out of it. They're smarter than we are, you know, and they're just like, Yeah, I can do this workaround and put these apps on, mom, you know. Their little brains are completely at they're manipulated. They're not even their own thinkers, you know, because everything that they see from a young age has been manipulated by the platforms. It's manipulated by the ads and, you know, the people who are, you know, making the ads and God knows whatever else. And obviously, what we've seen with Google and their AI disaster that happened a couple weeks ago, you know, so it's like, what else is super manipulated out there? How can we ever even trust anything? It's like, go in nature and hug a frickin' tree and get rid of all this other stuff, Right? That's the only thing that's true and real.
[00:49:06] Unknown:
Yeah. So what do we do about elections? Right? How how how do we know what's true in terms at least I don't know what politicians say, like, whether they say the truth or not, but who won the election. Right? That's that's critical information.
[00:49:23] Unknown:
Have you thought about reaching out to to to Kennedy to talk to him about this and just getting this as a part of his platform to start pushing for transparent elections?
[00:49:36] Unknown:
I have not reached out to him. Initially, I would say I wanna I wanna stay away from politics
[00:49:46] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:49:47] Unknown:
Just because what we're doing is an is not a is not a partisan thing. It's just a technology to to to, you know, for truth. And so my initial reaction would be I don't wanna be sort of associated with a specific candidate, or I don't want this technology to be politicized. I like, the ideal my ideal would be to, you know, regular people asking for this, like the Bitcoin community or people who are, you know, not
[00:50:22] Unknown:
Not running. Right? Not running. Yeah. Not candidates. Yeah. I know. I think there's 2 sides. By the people. Right? For the people. Yeah. It is. I I agree. I agree with that, but I'd also consider, you know, obviously, these folks have big audiences, big voices. And if they can move this this protocol forward for truth, you know, and it doesn't have to be politicized. And if you just say, like, every single candidate, it's available to start pushing to to have that transparent, you know, counting of votes and and able to do this. I think that, you know, who knows? I'm just, you know, playing devil's advocate here to your point because we need to get this done. And we do have this big election coming up, and it's very impactful because if we go, you know, a certain direction, the environment might get impacted and more human rights might get pulled away from us, you know, in in here. And if we go another way, there could be a whole another shit show. I mean, there's a shit show anywhere you look at it. You know?
It's like there's no none of these candidates, in my opinion, are, you know, ultimately the I I'm not a big political person. I don't love politics, but but at least we could know that the people have spoken, and we can count that the people have spoken. So we don't have another Jan 6 and have just all that unrest. It's like we have bigger problems in our world than dealing with counting votes. Like, let's count the damn votes and get to work. You know what I mean? Like, that shouldn't be the biggest point of contention. If we have a solution, a technical solution that can solve this problem, let's get on to business, You know? Because think about all the time that has been completely wasted and and, productivity that has been lost on many fronts because of all of this. You know, the election was stolen, la la la. You know? And it's like, imagine if all of those resources of minutes and hours and weeks months years with all these people got redirected to solving the damn problems that we're supposed to be solving as, you know, these elected officials are doing you know, supposed to do. The way it works in the US is that elections are sort of organized and run
[00:52:36] Unknown:
by county clerks. Mhmm. So these are the people who who we would love to speak to. Right? The the the county clerks, the people who who are involved at the local level organizing elections. Not that, you know, presidential candidates or people like that, but more on the ground with with count at the county level, who are the people who actually organize election for their for the specific county, and they get, certain leeway on making decisions on, you know, how they wanna implement the election process.
[00:53:09] Unknown:
And so what's the you know, what's your strategy right now for reaching out to these people? Do you have a team? Do you need help? Do you want us Bitcoiners to help you? How can we make this real?
[00:53:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. We would, you know, it would be incredible to to to get help from Bitcoin. We are doing our best effort in reaching out to people and having, you know, interesting conversations around this. But, you know, any any people in any person in the Bitcoin world that, you know, is interested in this and or wants to talk to to people at the county level that that, you know, are in charge of running elect, we're happy to we'd be happy to have that conversation and see how this can be adopted.
[00:53:46] Unknown:
And is there a playbook for talking to the people? Like, you know what I mean? Like, if you're like, cool. I just got Bitcoin rocks. Somehow, I got something in the mail, and I'm sure I signed up for it. But, I I can't I don't remember a lot of things lately because I'm getting old. But, they have a cool little pamphlet that you give to businesses to, like, you know, orange pill of business, and here you go. This is what you can do. Is there something like that that you guys have that is, you know, if these folks start calling you or reaching out to you that you'd be like, yeah. This is, you know, 5 steps to talk to your, you know, local election official.
[00:54:21] Unknown:
There is a documentary of Okay. Immutable Democracy. Okay. Immutable Democracy is a documentary about what happened, how Bitcoin was used, to safeguard elections documents in the Guatemalan elections. And so it describes the process from different perspectives, from volunteers, that are that are running the the the table, to, to to every every person that that was sort of involved in the elections process that yeah. You can go to simpleproof.com, and that's where that's where you can see the the documentary. That describes the process and how, using opens open time stamps, we can safeguard this information.
So, yeah, check out that I would recommend people who are interested, go into simpleproof.com and checking out the the documentary called the Mutable Democracy. Definitely, it's it's a good 15 minutes, investment into into understanding how this works.
[00:55:28] Unknown:
Amazing. And then so, basically, this is how it works. A simple process to safeguard documents you receive and fingerprint. You get the documents. You time stamp in the store, and then you verify through simple proof, and it's on your note. Like so this is amazing, and I'm so excited that you guys are doing this because we obviously need this, in in the the workflow of democracy not getting annihilated because we don't want that. And so okay. So where's the best place for people to you know, who are interested in participating and supporting you? Is it your website? Is it Twitter? Where can everybody go? Simpleproof.com. Okay. Cool. So then and then there's an email or some way to contact you there?
[00:56:16] Unknown:
[email protected].
[00:56:17] Unknown:
Yeah. Amazing. And do you have, like, a team? Is it volunteers, like, people you have a team of volunteers that are helping you, or is it something people would get, you know I'm just curious. Is it a job? They're they're I I don't have jobs.
[00:56:31] Unknown:
Right now. We're, a bootstrapped, startups still. We haven't received any VC investment.
[00:56:37] Unknown:
Are you on Geyser? Do you have a Geyser fund?
[00:56:41] Unknown:
It's Geyser.
[00:56:42] Unknown:
You don't know what Geyser is? Oh, dude. No. So geyser dot fund is, you know, it's kinda like a a a GoFundMe page, and you know what GoFundMe is? Mhmm. Right. So it's GoFundMe for Bitcoin. And so, like, any kind of project, so they have, like, you know, I have a Bitcoin for Peace thing up there that I don't promote. So by the way, everybody go donate to Bitcoin for Peace because we're gonna be making a book series, like, kinda chicken soup for the soul with a bunch of before and after stories for Bitcoin and, you know, people, planet, prosperity, kids, domestic violence, all this stuff. So we wanna document stories and use cases about why you know, the before and after of Bitcoin and how it changes people's lives in the world. But you can put anything up there. Like, some people just have it for, you know, a film that they're working on or a book that they're working on or a business project that they're working on. So it's one way that you can start promoting and people can give you, you know, 10 SATs or 10,000,000 SATs, whatever.
But it's geyser.fund. So that could maybe help you get this out there, you know, and cover some costs for for getting this into the right hands.
[00:57:51] Unknown:
I don't know. Is Yeah. So we're looking for volunteers. Yeah. We're definitely looking for volunteers who wanna, you know, get the word out and do some advocacy, and and, you know, bringing this into to attention of of people who are in positions to make decisions around elections. Definitely.
[00:58:10] Unknown:
I love it. I'm just as you said, volunteers, like, you know, we've got, like, Bitcoin or Jobs. We've got, the Bitcoin talent company. We've got, Martel's Lair For Talent where people can put up and say, hey. You know, here's a job or here's a, I want a job. Do we have anything for volunteers?
[00:58:30] Unknown:
Not yet. No. That would be interesting. Just,
[00:58:35] Unknown:
also You think about, like, all of the and all the different projects around the world, and I think about Bitcoiners who, you know, maybe I just have an hour and I wanna contribute to something in a music project, or I wanna contribute to an after school program teaching kids about Bitcoin or whatever it might be, but just kind of a volunteer matchmaking service that could be similar to a Fiverr, but on you know, for Bitcoin projects. That's an interesting layer that maybe these other 3 organizations can put up in their on their websites. Because then you could put something up and say, we need some volunteers to get the word out, and these are what we need. And then people could click and go get it, so like a volunteer marketplace I can't stop thinking about trying to find solutions for Bitcoin. They just and love and making the world better. Like, we need this, you know? Like, all these angles of solving the problems, I think, are very, very important.
What do you so what's gonna happen next? Like, what do you what do you have on your your your to do list for the next few months here?
[00:59:38] Unknown:
Just, talking to more people, going to conferences, discussing this with with people, you know, decision makers in the election space. That's sort of where we're focused on right now. But we're also talk people who are not in the in the election space, but are in in areas where you where where truth is very important for public documents. Mhmm. So, you know, mostly in the public sector, that's where we're we're involved and and having good conversations. Yeah.
[01:00:11] Unknown:
Are you seeing any use case for, like, somebody's, like, will or, you know, an estate plan and just, like, just so the kids don't fight over something and then try to get their you know what I mean? I don't know. I'm just thinking, like Yes. Is that something that people are using this for?
[01:00:25] Unknown:
No. No. That's an interesting use case. But when you mentioned, right, the, will who cares about the will? Only the peep you know, the family of the deceased person. Whereas we're looking for use cases that are huge impact, right, for Yeah. Like, elections. Right? How many people care about elections? You know? All the citizens of the country. Right? In the case of Guatemala, it's 17,000,000 people. Right. So those are the the types of use cases, at least, that we wanna invest our time into, like, these things that can have a huge impact. Right? Totally. And so what's the business model, though, for you guys? So, like, let's say,
[01:01:06] Unknown:
whatever, a state or a country wants to adopt this, would they just pay you a fee to help implement it? Or how what's the business model here? So it's just a fee to you? It's not a per transaction? It would just be like a a fee to set it for a month? Fee because the documents are stored in our cloud.
[01:01:22] Unknown:
Got it. So it it it has, like, a doc a per document fee. But at the end of the day, it's the customer's choice whether they wanna, you know, be in our cloud or keep it, in their own space. When it when it's stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, it's stored forever. Right? So the digital fingerprint is stored forever. The actual digital meant that's where you need to decide where you wanna where you wanna, you know, store it.
[01:01:47] Unknown:
Cool. Okay. Awesome. Well, any, any last thoughts? Like, what are your I wanna hear wanna hear from you, Rafa. What are your hopes and dreams for democracy on planet Earth? Do you believe we can really truly have fair and open elections and democracy, and can we grow it? Because it seems like authoritarianism and dictatorships are growing versus shrinking, and it seems like democracy is obviously at at at a big risk.
[01:02:16] Unknown:
I'm very concerned for democracy. I'm, I'm I see that in the future, these social media companies and these these algorithm companies are gonna be in a collision course with democracy. Yeah. And so we need to establish the tools, right now before that moment. So when when that happens, people can go out and vote and, you know, vote for for what they believe in. Scared of this whole manipulation thing and how and how it's gonna, you know, get worse all the time. Yeah. And so I think we need right now, it's it's a it's a couple years that we have for
[01:03:01] Unknown:
you won't be able to tell what's real and what what isn't, at least in the digital world. And I think there's a lot of apathy with young voters. You know, I have apathy, and I'm an old voter. Right? And I feel like, am I is it really getting counted? Does it matter? And certainly in the United States with the electoral college, which I think should be completely abolished, like, one person, one vote. Why are we not at this I don't I don't even understand the freaking electoral college. It's always just just it's not intelligent to me. But but, like, what would you say to a young person right now who might be listening to this who's just like, I'm not gonna vote. Screw that. It's not gonna matter anyway.
[01:03:42] Unknown:
For democracy because democracy is just as much about electing new leaders as being able to remove leaders that you don't want anymore. And if you don't protect democracy, then you you may lose that power forever. And, you know, being a in a sort of authoritarian regime. So it's very important to protect the democratic process. It's basically the only way that people can effect change in government without a violent, you know, without a revolution. Right?
[01:04:22] Unknown:
Yeah. And and I think Bitcoin is a tool for peace. It's a peaceful revolution. It's this peaceful tool to create, you know, power shifts in these in these institutions and and whatnot. So I I think For peace. Yeah. I love this angle. You know, I love this angle for Bitcoin and voting, and I wanna learn more about it. Are there any you know, have you run across any Bitcoiners or any conversations where people are like, this is gonna this is not a good, you know, way to use Bitcoin, and this is bad. Like, have you run into objections from Bitcoiners about this process, or has everybody been like, high five, bro. This is great, Rafa. No. Some people are concerned
[01:04:58] Unknown:
about this being misused as a way to legitimize election fraud, for example. And, you know, if somebody's committing election fraud? Right. If somebody, you know, may uses this and just says, oh, it's on the blockchain, so there was no fraud. Right?
[01:05:17] Unknown:
So they just kind of just they they just because it's on the blockchain, it must be true. So but is that what you're saying? Because, obviously, when you're saying that people are counting by paper, you can still manipulate that to some degree if, you know, you pay off guys those 5 guys who are watching or whatever it is, the observers or however it might work. Mhmm. So just because it's on the blockchain doesn't mean that it is true. Is that which Yes. What you think? Yes. So so people are concerned in, like, authoritarian
[01:05:46] Unknown:
regimes using this as a way to sort of say that there was a elect election electoral fraud. In the case of Mhmm. 2 100,000 people are mobilized for the election. Wow. And so yeah. Imagine it must be hard keeping a conspiracy between 5 people, but between 200,000 people, I mean, somebody has to face something. Nobody's come forward yet, so I don't think there's a conspiracy there.
[01:06:16] Unknown:
Yeah. That's a good point. I I know. I like that. This is definitely a form of decentralization, like, not having everything be reliant on a software program to just count the votes. It's like, yeah, I really like that. It opened my eyes a lot to the value of paper, you know, and the value of humans doing this because who knows with AI and all the other things of how things can get manipulated and make it look really, really good. So I I think that's really great. So I appreciate you opening opening my eyes to paper again. But, yeah, I think it's like for all of us listening and it's like, obviously, there's different countries and different places that don't even have the opportunity for you to cast a vote and especially if you're a woman. You know?
And so here, we're in any place where you do have this opportunity, you might as well, you know, you might as well participate even if you're a skeptic, even if you're apathetic, even if you don't like the candidate candidates, you know, choose the lesser of 2 evils or 5 evils or however many there are, but it you know, we do have to participate. And I know, like, in our local elections here where I live let let me ask you this. If you've ever heard of this, and I don't I forget the name of what they called this, but I thought it was it was absurd.
They needed a certain percentage for the vote for the mayor. Like, we had a mayor of our city. And and whatever it was, it was too you know, there's, I don't know, 5 candidates for the mayor. And the the winner didn't achieve whatever the the threshold was for you know, I don't know if it needed to be 50%, 40%, whatever it was. But the winner did not receive it, but they won by a substantial amount over the 2nd place person. So it was, like, you know, whatever, 25,000 votes to 20,000 votes and clear winner, super clear winner. But because those 25,000 votes, for example, didn't meet that threshold, they did this whole other thing where they took the second vote, like your second choice, and then they accumulated that. And then the person who was in second actually won because a bunch of people used their alternative vote things and voted for this person.
And I was just like, what? It it it was bizarre, and I couldn't believe that this is happening. And this is in Boulder, Colorado. And so now we've got a second place winner with the 2nd place votes who won. And I'm like, why doesn't the winner just get to win? That's, to me, democracy. It's like, I don't care if you have 2 candidates or 20 candidates. Like, may the best person win, and guts get to work. I don't get it. Have you ever heard of any, like, places doing that?
[01:09:06] Unknown:
No. No. This is the first time I I hear this. If it it I would be concerned if there was just an arbitrary thing that that they said, okay. Let's just do it this way. Or if there's some, like, you know, procedure or law or rule to do this. And if if if that's the case, then, that should be changed, then democracy is the way to change it. Right? But I guess so, but it was voted in.
[01:09:34] Unknown:
Apparently, the you know, somehow, whenever it it was, this was, like, on the ballot, and it was voted that this is the new way that we should do the voting. And I'm like Okay. This is not the way that we should do voting. Who thought of the this is a stupid idea. Sorry. I mean, I don't get it. It's just like and I don't even get the electoral college. Like, why don't we just have one vote for a person and then see who won? Why do we have to have all this nonsense?
[01:10:03] Unknown:
In Guatemala, it's 1 person, 1 vote.
[01:10:06] Unknown:
That seems pretty logical. Guatemala
[01:10:10] Unknown:
has 30 years of democracy, 40 years of democracy. So it's a very young democracy compared to the United States. I I wouldn't be able to say what people thought when they created the the electoral college. I don't exactly agree with it, but, I mean, what can I say? I'm not not a fan, but
[01:10:33] Unknown:
I that's I was gonna ask you that. I understand, you know, if you knew about other you know, I don't know, all the election processes in all the other countries. And are we the only country that has an electoral college, or is, is that common in other places?
[01:10:47] Unknown:
That I've heard of United States
[01:10:50] Unknown:
that that I know of, but I I, you know, I don't know of others. We're just like everyone's on the metric system, but we're on this other ridiculous system. So
[01:10:59] Unknown:
What's concerning is somebody can try to use that, electoral college process who try to, you know, nullify the will of the people. Old fake elector thing. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's very
[01:11:17] Unknown:
scary. It is. I just it's like, can't we just go back to common sense governance? You know? That would be such a treat, if we've even never had it. I mean, probably not in my lifetime we've had it, and I don't know. I I just anyway, la la la. Well, cool. Am I gonna see you at any conferences coming up? Do you have any any plans to travel and go what are you doing for the having?
[01:11:47] Unknown:
No plans.
[01:11:48] Unknown:
Plans just I don't know. I know I need to be with Bitcoiners for sure. I don't know exactly where I'm gonna be, but Peter told me I should come to London. So, maybe I'll talk with him about spinning some tunes and talking about Bitcoin for peace over there with those wonderful London folks. So, that would be cool. Or, I don't know where he's doing it, but that would be really neat. Anything for the rest of the year? You're gonna go back to El Salvador? You're gonna go what do you got going on? Yeah. Maybe maybe, go to El Salvador.
[01:12:15] Unknown:
No plans, really. I'm just, you know, on this, simple proof. We're doing we're, you know, develop still developing more software, more easy to understand for people. So now you can just create a visual tree and see how a document is actually linked to a Bitcoin transaction. Like, see it visual manner, not just trust the code. So we're we're working on that. I'm, like, pretty busy on I'm a I'm a computer nerd, so
[01:12:46] Unknown:
let's just stay in my awesome computer nerd, Rafa. I love you. So, hey, everybody who's listening or watching, you guys, go check out rapha_cordon, c o r d o n, and get ahold of him. And if you guys wanna start volunteering and getting this tool into your local election official's office so that you guys can have fair elections that are transparent. So, Rafa, you I know I'm not like Peter or Natalie or certainly not a Joe Rogan, but I'm hoping that anybody listening might wanna help and, you know, support democracy using your tool, and I think it could be cool. Like, what another neat way another neat story that we can tell about how Bitcoin is helping change the world. You know?
I love it so much. So yeah. Any final thoughts for the audience before we rock and roll?
[01:13:33] Unknown:
No. Just, check out simpleproof.com. Check out the the documentary, and remember that democracy is something that we need to defend. Nobody defends democracy. We may lose that power and never get it back.
[01:13:49] Unknown:
Yeah. I I know. It's like extinction. Right? You don't wanna have any species go extinct, and we don't want our democracy to go extinct because, you know, dark ages do last for quite a while before we can get our freedoms back. So especially now with the surveillance state and all of these other tools that they're trying to control us with. So I do believe we can't take this lightly. This is not, you know, oh, maybe we'll do this. It's like our freedom and our our privacy is hugely at risk, you know, and technology is obviously our friend. And it can be our foe when it's put in the hands of people who only care about their own power. And I think it's very important work that you're doing, Rafa, and I hope that everybody here follows you and checks you out and, you know, stands up for freedom where they are. So, yeah, this is awesome.
And, yeah, I really appreciate you, and I look forward to seeing you in person again. And everybody's listening. Thanks again for tuning in. And my name is DJ Valerie Belove, and this is a Bitcoin for Peace podcast. So peace, love, and warm aloha. Right on. Alright.
Bitcoin as a tool to preserve democracy
Introduction to Rafa Kordan and Simple Proof
Explanation of how Simple Proof works in elections
Outcome of the election in Guatemala
Potential issues with using Bitcoin for elections
Scalability of the open time stamps protocol
Potential use cases of open time stamps
Challenges in promoting Bitcoin and open time stamps in the political realm
Concerns about censorship and manipulation in social media
Importance of protecting democracy and fighting for transparency in elections
The need for transparent elections and the role of influential individuals
The role of county clerks in organizing elections
The need for support from the Bitcoin community
The availability of resources for talking to election officials
The documentary 'Immutable Democracy' and its relevance to safeguarding elections
Contact information and website for Simple Proof
The need for volunteers and a potential volunteer marketplace
The importance of protecting democracy and the role of Bitcoin
Concerns about the misuse of blockchain technology in elections
The potential of Bitcoin for creating power shifts in institutions
Different election processes and concerns about authoritarian regimes
The importance of defending democracy and the risk of losing power
