Expansion of Prosperity: Bitcoin in Latin America | Hashpower Academy

Video Transcript:

Hello there and welcome to the hash power academy from Latin America. I’m currently living over here for a couple of months and uh while I’m here I’m looking to explore and from the content side of things storytell any particular projects of interest particularly in this area. So, in this video, I’m just going to explore the idea of Bitcoin in Latin America across all the different avenues, whether it’s things that are already happening or things that could happen in the future. But overall, Latin America is growing and thriving whilst there is a a lot of noise and chaos in the northern hemisphere. And for the past 5 years, I’ve been traveling here on and off the uh health and pandemic years, shall we say, and spent a lot of time in Mexico and just noticing, you know, the differences of culture, language of course, and and just seeing all these sorts of societal level changes, especially whilst I was spending many of many years and sorry, many hours of that time delving into Bitcoin content online. And on the physical side of that, seeing different things happen such as electrical power cuts and going, “Hang on, if there was Bitcoin mining here, all this excess solar that was creating this instability of their grid and the temperature changes, especially seeing all these sorts of different opportunities that that Bitcoin will have here in the future, because I know there’s a lot of similarities across the different countries in Latin America. I can’t speak for all of them. Um, but definitely in the South America side of things, it’s new to me. So, here I am and I’m looking to explore and connect with people from all different levels to to understand what’s happening here and tell those different stories and produce content for it as such. So, diving into one of the first things from from a user side of things is there is a lot of layer 2 usage here because the need for trade and transaction particularly in dollars. Yes. um is needed here. There is currencies across this entire continent that are inflating slash going into hyperinflation at particular points of history. And so people are quite familiar here to earning what they can and spending it as quick as possible so that the prices don’t going up don’t go up too quickly. And that’s an interesting perception or an interesting psychology to explore that that people recognize that their money holds no value and is leaking value by the second. So they have to go and spend it as quick as possible. And it’s almost as if uh everyone in the northern hemisphere on their five to 10 to 15% inflation per year just being this sort of uh boiling the frogs in water by heating the water slowly and realizing that we’re hitting those uh 100% points where it comes to the amount of interest versus income GDP that countries earn. But that is quite a detraction from the conversation here. Why are people in Latin America storing their time and energy in digital dollars such as USDT on the different layer 2 chains? It’s because they are trying to escape inflation and that’s very important. Across the Bitcoin layer, we’ve got lots of events here I’ve noticed. So, I’m definitely interested to go to a different different sort of events here across uh the different countries here. And then on the developer side of things, there’s also quite a developer community across this entire continent. There’s obviously quite a range of salaries here in comparison to the northern hemisphere and more economically developed countries that we’re going to find people that have grown up on the internet here in Latin America and have developed software skills and going into job roles that bring and access higher economic value into their into their countries that may not be as an average quite high in income. So these are great opportunities that Bitcoin and the wider digital asset space, yes, are creating income streams for areas that that were more physically constrained in what they could earn. And that brings us to the mining side of things that there is mining developing here at scale now. And some of the things that may happen over this next year of 2025 to continue is if there is instability on the tariff side of things, whether Bitcoin mining machines are exempt or not from high tariffs, well, it’s going to make that decision of whether people want to send their mining hardware to deploy in the US with those higher costs or to places such as Paraguay. And somewhere I’m quite interested in is the south of Argentina, which has lots of oil fields. And so there’s gas being released and you have to burn it. And so seeing those other economic opportunities for the Bitcoin network to be physically built out because you got to understand that the the analogy of California and natural wealth in that local area being found, gold, the gold went out and goods, services, businesses, and people flooded in. And so the opportunity that Bitcoin offers is wherever Bitcoin mining is locally deployed. It’s consuming energy locally or from the sun or a hydropowered dam. The example being Paraguay where they have a dam that produces more power than sometimes what the country needs. So it sells the excess for a very cheap rate to Brazil. And if Bitcoin mining is offering a multiple uh amount of revenue per kilowatt, megawatt, gigawatt, well, why why would you sell it at a cheap price if there’s some new way of economically turning energy into money at a higher rate? And so we are seeing a lot of increase in the amount of mining deployment here in Latin America which is really important because it’s the issuance of the the last remaining million bitcoin plus fees into an area that is naturally growing thriving developing as well and they can fast track the development into the 21st century because I always take the example of England in the sense that we have these very old infrastructure systems, the sewage systems and all these sorts of things. Even even the way they’re constantly ripping fiber C, you know, fiber cables, the old cables and replacing it for fiber where because we already set up these other infrastructure pieces. Uh it’s more costly to have to replace that infrastructure than it is to just build new. So the opportunity here in Latin America is they can accelerate their infrastructure development to the modern 21st century of all these different new digital rel related payment systems and new forms of energy systems. And that means that any form of scale out of Bitcoin mining justifies more energy buildout which builds out more Bitcoin mining until there is a fair market pricing for the energy that the local level people can buy it. And this brings us to the other side of things, grid instability. I have noticed that there is more frequent power cuts here in Latin America from all my different travels and experiences than there is in other places. Now there being say more violent weather, temperature changes, uh access to energy that may not be as reliable or fluctuations on their grids, whatever the the exact grid instability problem is, it boils down to this. Bitcoin mining is an economic buyer of energy that will sell it at a higher rate if there’s a way of doing so. So, they’re naturally buying and selling energy opposite to the the grid, which means it’s bringing stability to the grid. There’s too much energy on the grid. Solar is at full beam. There’s no clouds. Um, there could be a very high increase of of supply and not enough demand. miners can overclock potentially and and and capture that that excess. And to the downside, loads of cloud to come over or too much too much uh too many storms, not enough of all the different power sources, too much uh demand balanced against supply, something needs to switch off. So if there’s a natural seller of power that will switch off and scale down when the grid needs it that that that balance of the power to buy it or to sell it means that grids remain more stable. So that development of grid infrastructure here could be greatly beneficial. Um well sorry the bene the benefits of Bitcoin mining bringing that level of stability increase to these grids. And yeah, the the other side of this is there is a lot of non-renewables here. Burning of plastic couple of miles away. There’s all these different ecological issues here of extractions of different things and poisoning of rivers. And so developing new types of energy and compute systems that create economic incentives and monetize stranded energy assets like a renewable, you know, hydro dam in the middle of nowhere and the industry locally has left. Um the the running costs are fixed costs to that dam. So if they can’t sell all their power because the local area is not buying it enough, those fixed costs that they have go to a smaller group of people. But if a buyer such as a Bitcoin miner comes in and takes up the large significant volume of that energy and thus a large large percentage of those fixed costs, it means that the other users of the grid get less of those fixed costs and they’re more closely paying just the energy cost as to what’s defined by the market. So yeah, Bitcoin in Latin America. This is going to be the first video just to delve into a few different topics. But yeah, looking to explore different opportunities across this entire stack in all different ways. And the main thing is to probably go to a few events. So if I go to any events, I’ll let you know. Um, obviously I’m speaking here in English. Uh, I will try and make sure that there is a transcribed Spanish version to this as well. Thank you for listening and I hope to see you in the next video. Goodbye.