"Having Legal Tender in a Currency You Can't Control = You Cannot Print Problems Away" Mariano Conti

In this week’s episode I speak with Mariano Conti, the former head of smart contracts at MakerDAO. Mariano knows the value of having permissionless and uncensorable currencies first hand —he started earning in Bitcoin in 2014 in Argentina because pesos would instantly lose value and it was hard to get dollars. When he learned about Ethereum he went all in and started working at Makerdao before DeFi was even a thing in 2016. When Dai was created, he was one of the first to take out a collateralized loan against his ETH and used that loan to buy a car. It must have been the first DeFi loan used to buy an actual physical thing.

The crypto space has come a long way since with an entire financial system built out of money legos and this week with a huge milestone of El Salvador becoming the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.

Mariano talks about this historical moment and why it’s significant that it was a Latin American country to take this step. But he’s also cautious about what’s next, saying that he doesn’t expect many countries to follow suit as El Salvador had some very specific characteristics which made it easier for it to adopt Bitcoin, which other countries don’t have —namely, the fact that it was already dollarized. He also wonders whether it would have been better to adopt a stablecoin instead of Bitcoin.

Still, to Mariano, that doesn’t really matter as it will be the people of Latin America and elsewhere who will adopt crypto -- regardless of what governments say.

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