Hi everyone. Welcome to Orange Hatter. Today you're listening to part two of my conversation with Sarah.
Sarah:he was like, "Bitcoin fixes this." He kept saying that. "Bitcoin fixes this!" And I'm just like, that is so cool. And then the, I think the one kind of fact that really struck me, or the one use case that really struck me with Bitcoin specifically was when people send money remittances across borders from the US. 'cause where we live actually, in both of the major cities that I, I've lived in as an adult, there have been large immigrant populations. A lot of times people displaced by horrible catastrophes like war or oppression or civil war or something like that, or they just can't work. Like there's a huge Guatemalan population in our city. And they've come here because they can't really work in their country and they send money home. But Jason was explaining to me that when he, when they send their money home, they work really hard. Here, and oftentimes they're working jobs that don't pay very well, but they're living modestly, they're saving up money, and then they're going and sending thousands of it home every month to help support their family. But in order to do that, just the, the structure of how the financial system works, they're paying 15 to 20% to send that home. And it just breaks my heart to see people working really, really hard and then having to pay this fee to banks or to regulators to get this money to people home. And I, and Jason says, Bitcoin fixes that where. They can just transfer their hard-earned dollars into Bitcoin and instantly. Now with the newer technologies, as this technology is developing, they can instantly send it back home to their parents, to their siblings, sometimes to their wives and children with minimal fractional fees, fractions of a penny. They get to keep more of that hard-earned money, and that just gave me such a vision. How it can be used in people's day by day. And so he got more interested in the technology side. Things like you hear in terms of like people who are mining, people who are verifying the network, you know, like all this technology side. And I, and I haven't really dove, dove into that as much, but I'm really excited about the implications for people. Where Bitcoin really can change their day, their daily lives, their quality of life today. And for us, just the long-term security of Bitcoin. The fact that, for example, to get a real practical example, Talia, oh, and I, yeah, I, we have three kids as I mentioned. And just like every good parent, we opened a college fund for them. Right. I forget what it was. College advantage, you know, we sat with our banker, we opened a college fund and we put a good amount of money into it. And then when we combined inflation, the inflation and just, we were making almost nothing on this college fund. It was literally just a place to hold this money that we we're depositing every. You know, whatever. And we started to realize that that's just not really a safe place to store that money. Like the government program that was put in place so that we could earn money for our supposedly earn money for our three kids to go pay for college in 20 years was really no better than us putting it in a mattress in cash. And even that is worse than transferring all that money into Bitcoin, which is not inflationary. In fact, it's, it just seems to keep exponentially like growing in value and it is not centralized or connected to the government and not subject to any kind of policies that our government might institute in the future. As like, I still feel like, I still feel like our government's probably. Trying to do the best they can. It doesn't seem, it seems like, oh, oftentimes somebody gets, somebody gets the short end of the stick, somebody gets screwed, and we just don't want our hard earned money in this college fund to be something that gets devalued because of inflation, and they're trying to control inflation, so they just, Take it away or devalue it inadvertently. So we've, we just pulled all that and we've transitioned our savings into something that we truly feel is technologically safer than the, the traditional finance system. So that's like the long-winded answer of like, these like reasons why Bitcoin became a big part of our life. Financially speaking and also like purpose speaking, like just it gives me some excitement about having like, I don't know, a role to play in making people's lives better. And why we've kind of put our eggs in that basket as well because it just, it seems trust, it seems more trustworthy and it holds its store of value in a way that we have not seen our, like traditional finances, you know, doing. So that's where we went and started with a need with the pandemic, like a perceived need of like, the system is broken and there's this new, new tool that can fix it. That's where we are.
Tali:Yeah. Thank you so much for that. That's, that's so helpful to be able to visualize how it's practically useful. I think a lot of people get a little bit intimidated by the technology side and then they, they kind of keep away and they're looking from the sidelines because they don't understand and they think that they must understand all the technical ins and outs of Bitcoin before they can participate.
Sarah:Yes, exactly. Well, I mean, it's similar to... my children take piano. And in the beginning we started by, we were, we played them some Rachmaninoff, you know, Rachmaninoff's, very, like, super impressive piano pieces. And my intention was to inspire them, look what you could do. This is amazing. And it just scared them. Like, they enjoyed the music. They ran around like crazy people, but it was like, I could never do that because we played a video and they saw this guy like going crazy on the piano and, but instead of it sounding like crazy like they do, it was like beautiful and impressive and instead, you know, so we kind of have, we pivoted and instead we're playing them. You know, like simple like children's songs that people are having fun playing piano or you know, even like Disney songs that super fun, but they're, they're fun in, they connect with their world. They're applicable to my seven year old and they're not like, I'm sure everybody that was playing those songs could also play the hard stuff, but they don't have to, like, you can enter at a level that is for your use case. Like, like I mentioned, Jason did go deep dive. He did get, you know, going into the like master's level of, he would disagree, he would say he is not like mastering anything, but he went farther into the technological stuff. Like, he got intrigued by the hardware and the kind of, he got really excited about the idea that he could play a part in helping to build this infrastructure. I never wanted to go into banking. Like, I don't, I never really cared to know like how my check transitions into like money, like, you know, so that's just where I was like, okay, like I'm fine. I'm truly okay just using this tool for how it applies to my life my day by day. But it is, but intellectually it is exciting to know that it is such an open technology can move into it and learn it if they're excited about that, you know, like, and that's getting more and more apparent. I do think that as the technology, as more people use it, it is becoming more accessible for people to pick their level of engagement and use, you know, like that's. That's pretty cool to watch it develop in that way, you know? Yeah. I'm never like, for instance, the analogy that somebody used once that I finally like kind of clicked was, if you wanted to, you could run your own internet server, like you can run your own, you can have your own email server. You know, it can be like, I could have like a, you know, me@sarah.co or whatever, you know, like, but I don't have to like, I don't have to do that. And perfectly happy using Gmail. So, but there are people who do want to, for a variety of reasons. They want the control. They're more concerned, they're particularly concerned about like privacy or availability of bandwidth. Like for whatever reason. There are classes, there are tools to learn how to do that, but I've just chosen not to do that. And frankly, the vast majority of our world has chosen not to do that. So yeah, there are different entry levels and there are different destinations and purposes, which is super cool. It almost lends itself to more of like even more trustworthiness of the, the technology. So, but it, but it also makes me excited that like we are getting in, at the beginning when I think of like my kids, And like you mentioned, like I want them to be familiar with this terminology, with this vocabulary, with this technology in their day by day now. Learning it kind of alongside learning how to manage money in general and currency in general. Because they're gonna be leaps and bounds ahead of the people who are jumping on in 10 years and in 20 years, when it is much more standard, much more universal. Kind of like the kids who were the first kids on the block to have computers. They're the ones who were ahead of the curve when they went to college.
Tali:Thanks for joining us today and learning with us today. If the discussion with our guest resonated with you and you would like to dive deeper into the world of Bitcoin, don't miss out on joining the Orange Hatter Women's Reading Club. The meetup link is in the show notes. Also, if there are women in your life whom you think would both enjoy and benefit from learning more about Bitcoin, please share Orange Hatter with them. Until next time, bye!