S17 E33: Joël Valenzuela on Being Unbanked with Private Digital Cash

Ever since he first received his first bitcoin in 2013, Joël Valenzuela has been on a quest to use free market electronic cash to pay for everything. Today, he is still unbanked and looking for ways to make instant payments without a bank account. He is best known for working for the DASH cryptocurrency project. But over the years, he's collaborated with plenty of other projects (mostly those related with private payments) and he possesses a wealth of knowledge in terms of adoption, everyday use as money, and user experience. Since Joël practices what he preaches and lives without fiat or banks, he is a bona fide advocate of inconvenience: using ATMs, purchasing gift cards, and trying every workaround that helps him accomplish the mission of never using fiat currencies. 00:00:00 Intro & sponsors: living without banks with Joël Valenzuela 00:02:18 The Vlad Costea handle saga & paying X to keep your name 00:04:20 Where the "Desert Lynx" name actually comes from 00:09:04 Joël's origin story: how Peter Schiff led him to Bitcoin 00:10:16 Growing up on the border & the Mexican peso crisis 00:12:16 First Bitcoin: the Chicago pizza payback of 2013 00:14:27 Silk Road's shutdown & the chaos of the Mt. Gox era 00:18:11 Digital cash vs. hoarding: the sound money mindset 00:20:54 Earning only Bitcoin: barn work, airport rides & Porkfest 00:22:47 Declining a dream political job to go all-in on crypto 00:24:39 The bank drain that made him unbanked for good 00:26:45 Centralization risk & the tyranny of the algorithm 00:31:38 TikTok's eerily accurate (and creepy) surveillance 00:33:32 Sponsor reads & the Cake Wallet Zcash giveaway 00:37:10 Bitcoin to Dash: exploring the whole crypto space 00:41:12 Mike Hearn's "Bitcoin is a failed project" rage quit 00:42:19 Bitcoin's usability failures: the pants & coffee stories 00:46:48 Picking Dash off CoinMarketCap as usable money 00:50:44 Dash founders: Evan Duffield & Amanda B. Johnson 00:55:20 Fluffy Pony, "Dash is trash" & the Miami strip-club drama 00:59:54 Reading the hate comments: the "premine cabal" 01:01:11 Litecoin's alleged inflation bug & Charlie Lee 01:04:07 Did Dash have a premine? The actual definition 01:13:09 Xcoin to Darkcoin to Dash: the name evolution 01:15:32 Master nodes, InstantSend & deterministic finality 01:18:18 The self-funding DAO treasury explained 01:22:01 Max Kaiser, John McAfee & the paid-shill era 01:29:43 What made Satoshi different & the genesis block message 01:33:57 Roger Ver, linear thinking & money as a tool 01:37:39 The 6.15 BTC "generational wealth" meme 01:41:47 BCH Bliss & why small conferences beat the corporate ones 01:46:00 Bitcoin forks: are all these coins really "bitcoins"? 01:50:54 Dash tech history: proof of service & chain locks 01:53:22 Evolution: the enshrined sidechain & DAPI 02:00:24 Adding Zcash-level privacy: the Orchard shielded pool 02:05:17 Orchard vs. Ironwood & the inflation-bug question 02:09:50 Turnstiles: why an inflation bug can't kill Dash 02:11:50 Monero's FCMP++ & why its privacy is "perishable" 02:16:56 Privacy UX, MiCA rules & unshielding to exchanges 02:23:22 Which wallets will support shielded Dash 02:27:34 Umbrel, Lightning & the pain of self-hosting 02:28:44 The for-profit ecosystem & the $15M dev "consortium" 02:34:53 Zcash's comeback: from industry joke to spotlight 02:37:23 Routing around fiat: Thorchain, Maya & DEXes 02:46:59 The number reveal & socializing the giveaway 02:50:02 Privacy as consent, not secrecy 02:51:49 The real challenges of living unbanked 02:58:35 Local AI models & maxing out privacy you don't need 03:04:31 Getting cancelled & how Zooko unblocked Vlad 03:13:03 Demaximizing & the toxic privacy-coin wars 03:21:35 When Zcash nearly built on Monero 03:25:45 Quai Network & transparent "cash-like" privacy 03:32:38 Why Dash focused on payments, not smart contracts 03:36:31 Crypto's consolidation: projects quietly going to zero 03:42:12 XEC, Amaury & bootstrapping off a fork 03:57:47 Monero vs. Zcash: marketing, memes & narratives 04:02:46 Why Joel really lives on crypto: getting real data 04:04:58 "Use it or die": the end of the narrative cycle 04:06:41 The private-equity playbook for buying dying coins 04:11:27 Why Dash is too decentralized to acquire 04:15:49 Which chains get acquired and shut down next 04:24:01 Neptune Cash, Neptune Dash & the first-ever DAT 04:36:57 The Charlie Shrem Dash debit card saga 04:38:46 Tone Vays & other Bitcoiners who dabbled in Dash 04:43:15 Cypherpunk Week Amsterdam & DashCon 04:50:56 Secret Word