Who Is the Pro-Bitcoin Candidate That Just Won Argentina's Presidential Primary?

And now Will's History Corner with Will Foxley. I love that. Ok. You guys ready to talk to Argentina? Who, who, who are we gonna get historical with it? Because with food is really good though. They have like the skirt steak with like the sauce and it's a little uh ok, Javier won the primary for the president presidential election earlier this week commanding about 30% of the vote against two other parties that came in about 28% 29% respectively. And now we're waiting for another election to see if he can win 45% of the vote. He was expected to only pull in at third place. But the fact the Libertarian candidate who wants to dollar the country and is pro Bitcoin made first place in this primary means that his opportunity to seize the presidency are pretty high. Now, why does this matter? Well, let's go back in time over its history. Argentina since its freedom and independence from Spain has defaulted nine times over various decades. The most recent being in 2020 2014 in 2001, its chronic defaults have led to a lot of of pressure on the economy, inability to grow and a lot of problems for local populations which have seen its currency devalue time and time again and high interest rates. It's led to Argentina actually being one of the highest countries for crypto penetration with Bitcoin and ether being common units of account all over the country. Uh Ethereum is a huge community and ecosystem with Argentina because of the history of defaults and now with a possible pro Bitcoin president coming into office in October again, possibly there's still more elections to come. We could see even further advances of crypto within the country. General authority of your take. Yeah. So I was reading on Bloomberg this morning the about the reaction, what ha what has happened in the country since this vote? And it just sounds like it is getting very dire there for um for people that Bloomberg is reporting that Argentine shops have been hit with 20 percent price hike overnight from suppliers. So this is hitting everyone from like salons to cafes, coffee shops, 18% devaluation of the peso announced after the vote, 100 15% inflation that's been going on there. Uh for a while, people are afraid that hyper inflation could return and I just, I I wonder to see how this will play out because while he is pro Bitcoin, the story says that there are no plans to introduce Bitcoin as legal tender like they have in El Salvador And so I'm just curious how we start to address the issues of the people who are living in Argentina who are experiencing these things that Bloomberg reported this morning. And I don't know if being pro Bitcoin solves that. And it would be interesting to see, you know, how countries like Argentina maybe look at what's happened in El Salvador and start introducing things. But at the same time, you need infrastructure that needs to be a plan in place. It takes a really long time to get these things going and then to get small business owners like cafes and salons to start using Bitcoin as legal tender to start to bring people away from um the economy that has been failing them. And so I don't know what to make of the story. I just feel for the people in Argentina right now, Wendy. Um so I want to take this a step further when I hear that there is a public servant or somebody is bullish on Bitcoin or is keeping an open mind about it. That makes me think, hey, they probably have the same alignment I do when we're talking about money, when we're talking about inflation, when we're talking about the underdogs. So even though there's not necessary plans to integrate Bitcoin um as legal tender like El Salvador, that definitely tells me that this person that is running for office is going to be a little bit more conservative fiscally and could potentially do better for the particular local economy than somebody that was not pro Bitcoin. Because let's face it. Most of the people in America that we have in power now, money printer go, just money printer go, we're sending money to all of these different places. We keep printing and that kind of falls back on the taxpayer as far as far as inflation in Argentina and all that stuff goes, I'm not there so I can't comment on it too much. I just think it's absolutely horrible and it's so sad that the underdogs and just average people are the ones that are suffering because of the poor policies and the poor actions of our public servants. So to me, when I hear that a public servant is pro Bitcoin, it makes me a little bit more likely to do additional due diligence on them and possibly support them because they have the same type of um mentality that I do when it comes to money. Yeah, the comments in this piece are pretty interesting right past comments from this guy, you know, just outright saying, quote, central banking is a scam, right? You know, this is stuff that you would hear on, you know, your average crypto podcast. And this is someone who has a decent shot of becoming president in a pretty major economy here in the western hemisphere. So the idea that uh these ideas could advance into the system in some way, super interesting Jen. I think your point is very well made about sort of the immediate uh sort of ramifications, anxiety fears around some of these changes. But it is interesting that the, the primary, you know, part of his proposal is the do the dollarization of the Argentinian economy, right? Uh What that would look like? I think in a pretty big place in South uh South America would be really interesting. It might open the door, I guess for again, as will mentioned, the usage of stable coins, the usage of other cryptocurrencies, the usage of other sort of private sector innovations in the monetary space. Um could become a really interesting example in a bigger economy than El Salvador's right. Um could become really interesting, should this uh should this advance its way through? But again, it's all preliminary, it's early days. But again, some of the comments that have been made by this guy are super interesting and super in line with a lot of people in the crypto space. Um So it is interesting to see will, what do you think? Yeah, last thought for me is just going back to like Argentina's early days used to be one of the big powerhouses of Western history. You know, like the global economy, we talk about food is that gonna go like beef was a huge part of like their own entire economy. And that's where, you know, you get the whole story about like the cattle ranches down there. Uh But they just had so much political terms, oil like military Dictatorships and then also central banking cause a lot of problems just depending on how you look at the situation. And you see a candidate who is pro Bitcoin come up and you see the, the way that crypto is made inroads into communities there and you start looking and be like, hey, maybe like Argentina's best days are out of it. It's a pretty exciting story.