B (33:21)
So we. We had an amazing team assembled, you know, Parabylant, Raheem Taghi, an entire team of Austrian economists, and Samuel Coleman, for example, was helping out with our constitution. So basically reforming everything, like looking at the entire structure of government and then rebuilding it as it should be or as it's supposed to be. I'm a firm believer. I've always. Even as a kid, I was always against any form of government, actually. And when you grow up, you see that there is maybe a need for government in certain aspects of civilization. You know, you might need. Similar to Switzerland, you might need one organization to be able to organize a canton, for example, but you don't need them in the extent to which they've grown in countries like ours. Basically, almost every country except for Switzerland has a government that's overextended itself. So we have the same thing here. And we looked at, okay, what do you actually need to keep. Keep the country running and how can you transition to that? So we looked at ministries. We had. We have 17 ministries in Suriname. So we looked at how can we. What is the optimal amount of ministries that you would need, which ones are necessary and what, to what extent is their role. You know, I'm. I'm a firm believer in government shouldn't be controlling us. It should be in service of the people. Right? So more like utility. More like a utility company. Whereas now it's. It's. You vote for them once and they basically do whatever they want for five years. And then in five years you're so, so pissed off at everything they've done in those five years and what they haven't done or that they were supposed to do that you vote them out and you vote basically the same thing back in. So how do you restructure the system in a way that you change it from its core and build something new, something better? And the constitution? We were working on getting a draft of the constitution. Samuel was helping out a lot with that. He already made some drafts and some suggestions because, you know, a constitution is something that needs countrywide support. You can't just write it for the people then expect them to accept it. So he was helping with that to make it more decentralized. So we have districts here, for example. We took the model from. From Switzerland, Switzerland as cantons. And we could apply the same decentralization to governance. I'm very pro having a similar federal structure where you have, you know, an X amount of presidents basically, that rotate, you know, every year. So you've. You have seven, I think, Switzerland, seven leaders. And basically one is president for a year. And they rotate constantly. So that seems like something that would inhibit and limit corruption, but also not just corruption where someone does something that is financially wrong or morally wrong, but also it prevents them from being corrupted. Right? Because as you know, like. How do you say this in English? They say. In Dutch we say Mach Korempert, you know, so power, power corrupts. Right? So if. If a leader doesn't have the. The call it the throne, whatever for. Or the seat for the presidency for longer than a year, then that limits the. The risk of that happening. So I'm very pro that model. And that is what. What we started, know, lobbying for, fighting for. I started arguing with my entire political party to. To be able to get a discussion on the. About the. The constitution going. And from the constitution with that decentralization that basically brings the budget closer to the people and gives the people a director right to vote because they can actually vote for something when it's happening, not five years after. You know, if they need a bridge, they vote for it. Now if someone wants to implement Covid measures, they vote for it. You know, in Switzerland, not all cantons were on lockdown because they simply voted against it because their economies couldn't handle it. If, you know, they're dependent on ice skating, for example, or sorry, skiing and the ski resorts all need to be closed. So the same level of sovereignty and decentralization also from a budget perspective. And then at the, at the, you know, at the, at the central government level, we had six ministries, the most essential, of course, but then we also were looking at each ministry and how to reform each ministry. So like for example, education, right now there are all public schools and it's a very low price to pay for education for your child. It's not super expensive, but they're all poorly run. I supported it. We did a project at the school that hadn't been painted in 23 years and they had no materials for the kids. So we were looking at how to privatize education, basically shifting incentives as well, you know, and removing the organizational aspect away from government. You could basically, if we have, we don't have a very large working population, it's about 140,000 and half of them work for government. So you can easily, if we looked at the, the economics of the country as well, and you could easily shift around and if you lower taxes, for example, since it's just us taking royalties or income and then paying government like 68,000 half of our working population, you could easily lower taxes and remove the amount of subsidies that are going to, you know, to these schools. And instead of it being a subsidy you could give. And this is something Arthur Laffer actually suggested. Dr. Laffer suggested we give vouchers to certain people that, you know, can't afford that education, for example, or a certain class completely abolish taxes from until a certain income so that they can grow and prosper and you know, create, you can incentivize them to be more productive. So we really were looking at how to restructure the tax brackets and also, you know, how spending is done. Because if you have, for example, what we were looking at is a sovereign wealth fund and funds of the population, royalties go directly to, to education, to healthcare, to these sectors that need them, for example, then you don't need government in between as the intermediary Right. All they need to do is do a public tender and the same for healthcare. You know, looking at strategic ways to shift healthcare and other sectors here. How to privatize most of the government company. We have 380 plus state owned companies that really need to be privatized and that also a source of source of income. And we have about 2.8 billion in oil royalties at a minimum flowing in starting 2028. So how do you prepare for that coming in and how do you structure the sovereign wealth fund and the ministries and government in a way that the country and its people ultimately benefit from it? You know and we can actually have an economic boom here and see the country develop as I've seen El Salvador develop in the past five years. And core to this for me was, was Bitcoin just being money because we have a, a pretty inflationary local currency with which doesn't really function because everybody saves and transacts in US dollar or Euro anyways for anything that matters. Our local currency is just yeah a way for, for the government to be able to yeah sort of placate the population I guess. And you know we've you know all, all bitcoiners have studied inflation and know exactly what, what that is, how it works and, and what it causes. And I, I really see that or I truly believe that you need to separate money from state like actually remove the, the, the capability of printing and money that can be printed from, from a country as, as a whole. I think that's how you get you know, actual adoption of Bitcoin as money because then you can really have a country where you're using this as currency. And you know, even with the, with, with the, with the Austrians I, with the economists, we were having so much debates about how that would actually work because nobody had really thought about it or is, is actually looking at the specifics of how would this actually work in economy. Right. Because if we right now El Salvador is, is a dollarized economy. It's you know the dollar is, is plainly used. They still have a central bank. Bitcoin is adopted as legal tender now. It isn't anymore but it's still, it's, it's used as legal tender. The, the, the, the circular economies do they. But it's still at a government level. The same amount of control and centralization still exists. The corruption just displaces itself from cartel only or government only to now financial sector as well. So it's still a very corruptible system. I think if you change the currency of an actual country. And it's been done here before. It's not our first, it's not our first currency and the currency that is actually in rotation, our economy is not that big. So it can actually be done. Everyone would earn more over time in comparison to every other currency in the world. Right, because then our currency would just be SATs, just to be Bitcoin. So your salary would be worth more over time. And that creates of course other cross question or raises other questions and issues because how do you do with, with exports, you know, things like gold or foreign companies that, that are active here, how do they pay local salaries that keep increasing every year in, in, in dollar terms? So wasn't an easy problem to, to mull over or, or figure out. You know, Rahim, for example, he, he didn't think that making Bitcoin a currency or that that would work or how that would work. We had endless debates about it and I think it would be. We'd have to pilot test transition or figure out how to transition. So that's what we were mostly debating out debating about like how would you transition fully to Bitcoin as money? You know, making a legal tender here, that's one, one paper, one, one Foreign Exchange Commission. It just has to, has to adopt that and then it's money countrywide. But that doesn't mean that people are going to trade their dollars or their euros or their SRD for bitcoin to actually live on it. And the core, the core problem is where does the Bitcoin come from? You need to locally mine, so you need to have an energy positive economy. So we need small modular nuclear, we need hydro, we need. There's another dam in the plans. They need to build that for example. Those are solutions that you can look at to mine Bitcoin. And then that creates a source. One, one source at least. And then the other would be converting royalties, you know, received from oil and gas and converting that and maintaining it in a sovereign wealth fund for the people. That could be a source. But it's still. Yeah, that's, that was still a pretty big how to, how to, how to implement was, was a pretty big, big problem to solve. But other than that we had. You can for example, do an asset issuance on rgb. It's one of the protocols you can do smart contracts with on Bitcoin, not one of the crappy scammer ones you could do. Yeah, we could do a digital SRD then for example, and transition. But then you come too close to cbdc. So how do you fix, you know, it's just like you open up a can of worms and you start, you know, trying to go through and figure out a solution for everything. And then on the other hand, you also wanted that free market dynamics do their thing. So we're kind of in that process or in the middle of that process. And I think the main, the main objective is especially in government funding, once the government uses it as currency, is transparency. Because in that instance you actually want to know and see where the money's going, flowing and how it's used and if it's done in an open source way, anyone can see followers or know how spent, how funds are spent. That isn't to me an immediate solution to corruption. Right? Because they can't, they basically can't cheat the system. And if they cheat the system, they'll, they'll be caught or found. And that in combination with an ERP system should fix any and all problems and related to corruption. But you know that, that doesn't solve the entire economy. It's, it's, you have to, we have to diversify as well. We're, we're very, very, very dependent on commodities. So our economy rises and tanks with the international gold, gold and oil prices and we have no liquid capital market, no functioning capital market. And if I look at, you know, the capital markets in the US then that's not a direction we want to go into. We can, we much rather build a capital market similar to that of Singapore. So there are examples, teams we've worked with, we've worked with MIT as well. They have an MIT rep program that's focused on developing innovation hubs. So diversifying the economy with 1 energy, 2 new forms of energy, creating a favorable environment for the innovation of these energies as well. Biotech was one of our focuses and yeah, innovation, the innovation hub itself. So anything tech related, whether it be Bitcoin or AI or whatever kind of startup is looking for a, a frontier environment, this would be it because you're building from, from scratch basically here. So it gives you, it gives you a, a pretty dense market that isn't, you know, it's not big, it's, it's not a large market where you could maybe run into two issues. And then legacy markets, for example, because of the way that legacy markets are structured, you can test and implement here and build completely new products or new innovations just from scratch, literally. And the fact that we're small too, that gives us an advantage to swiftly be able to change government and these structures, change the ministries Change how the funds flow, the incentives flow and gradually be able to convert the entire economy to a bitcoin standard. Yeah, I can go on for hours, Gabriel. They can even stop me here.