The Peter McCormack Show25 Maj 2022

Bitcoin in El Salvador - Part 2 with Nayib Bukele - WBD505

The full interview with President Nayib Bukele, undertaken days after the Bitcoin Law became effective on September 7th 2021, sections of which were included in my film "Follow The Money #1 - Bitcoin in El Salvador". In this interview, we discuss motivation, opposition and legacy.

- - - -

A few days following Bitcoin being given legal status, I was granted an exclusive access interview with President Bukele for the purposes of my film "Follow The Money #1 - Bitcoin in El Salvador". Following the release of the film, it is time to publish the full interview.

It has been over 8 months since El Salvador became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender. A lot has been written about El Salvador's Bitcoin Law, and a lot has happened since. But what was it like to be at the centre of this unprecedented event? An event that could change not just El Salvador's future, but also Bitcoin's and the rest of the world.

The discussion covers President Bukele's enthusiasm for what Bitcoin can do for his country and his people; the incredible timescale within which the law was passed (it was a mere 3 months from being enacted to becoming law); the strategy behind the country's purchases of Bitcoin; internal and external opposition; and the plan behind the articles of the Bitcoin Law.

As background noise to all these changes is vocal concerns about authoritarian actions Bukele is taking; he has removed judges, influenced a change in the constitution to enable a potential second term, had troops enter parliament, and implemented stern policies aimed at reducing gang violence. The term "dictator" is banded around.

Nevertheless, he is an extremely popular president: he has an approval rating of 85%. Many citizens, sick of the years of violence and corruption, are pleased to finally see a decisive Salvadoran President. Could he become a beacon for the wider region? Could he be the leader of the Bitcoin age?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(1086)

#208 - Ann Pettifor - "A $40 Trillion Debt Crash Is Coming”

Ann Pettifor is a world-renowned political economist, author of The Production of Money, and former director of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which successfully mobilised millions to cancel over $100 bil...

3 Sep 1h 19min

#207 - Eric Kaufmann - How 'Cultural Socialism' Destroyed Our Universities

Eric Kaufmann spent over two decades as a professor of politics studying demography, identity, and voting behaviour before leaving Birkbeck College to launch the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at...

1 Sep 1h 32min

#206 - Emad Mostaque - "Your Job's Economic Life Expectancy Ends In 2 Years"

Emad Mostaque founded Stability AI, built Stable Diffusion, and helped kick off the open-source generative AI explosion - before stepping down to build a new blueprint for human freedom as founder and...

28 Aug 1h 45min

#205 - Prof. Moran Cerf - "Did We Accidentally Build A Conscious AI?"

Moran Cerf spent twenty years recording single neurons inside the brains of conscious human beings and he still can't tell you what consciousness is. A former hacker turned neuroscientist, now a profe...

26 Aug 1h 10min

#204 - Dmitri Alperovitch - China's Cyber Sleeper Cells, Taiwan & The Second Cold War

Dmitri Alperovitch co-founded CrowdStrike, ran the investigation that first exposed Chinese state hacking to the world and predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine months before it happened. He is now c...

22 Aug 1h 20min

#203 - Gregory Allen - Ex-DoD Official: "AI Is Now A Digital Nuclear Weapon"

Greg Allen has spent his career where AI meets national security. He wrote the landmark 2017 report on AI for the US intelligence community, served as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Pentagon's...

20 Aug 1h 34min

#202 - Barry S. Strauss - "We Are In The Final Stages Of Western Collapse"

Barry Strauss has spent four decades studying how empires rise and fall. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Ten Caesars and Jews vs Rome, he argues the West is repeating a pat...

18 Aug 1h 15min

#201 - Connor Leahy - The AI That Escaped: Inside OpenAI's Rogue Agent Incident

Connor Leahy has spent his career at the frontier of AI, from reverse-engineering GPT-2 as a student and co-founding EleutherAI to building the AI safety company Conjecture. He now leads US policy wor...

14 Aug 1h 9min