WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:36.660 [funky music] Welcome back to Bitcoin, Season 2 from Blockspace Media. 2 00:00:36.720 --> 00:00:48.180 Bitcoin Season 2 is about new ideas and new conversations on Bitcoin. It's the technical and the cultural mixed together for an exciting era of new topics on the oldest blockchain. 3 00:00:48.230 --> 00:01:00.940 Again, Bitcoin Season 2 is produced by Blockspace Media, an independent B2B Bitcoin media company focused on the business of Blockspace. Make sure to check out our other shows, the Gwart Show, The Mining Pod. 4 00:01:00.980 --> 00:01:13.600 Hit us on our website, Blockspace Media. Subscribe to our newsletter coming out Mondays and Fridays. You can find us on everywhere that podcasts are streamed, both video on YouTube and audio on Spotify, Apple, RSS. 5 00:01:14.140 --> 00:01:32.020 So today, I've got Carlino of SimpleProof.com, an election auditing effort, and he's explaining, I think, an underrepresented story of the past year, which is timestamping election results, particularly this very interesting event in Guatemala. 6 00:01:32.150 --> 00:01:45.600 It's already been implemented at scale and already been used to prevent election fraud. So I'm gonna bring up Car- Carlos Carlino. Welcome to Bitcoin Season 2. Appreciate it, Charlie. It's great to be here. 7 00:01:45.860 --> 00:01:50.200 So I mentioned, like, I'm kinda surprised I hadn't heard very much of this the past year. 8 00:01:50.240 --> 00:01:57.880 Maybe it didn't get circulated in Bitcoin cir- you know, narrative or circles, but, you know, we hear all about, like, Bitcoin in El Salvador. 9 00:01:57.920 --> 00:02:15.010 But it seems to be that, like, reducing or preventing election fraud in another Central American co- country like Guatemala is almost more impactful, and, you know, this audience is of, of Bitcoin Season 2 is a little more ordinals and inscriptions, like, crossover. 10 00:02:15.580 --> 00:02:24.720 This might resonate with them. I'll b- I'll back up, and I'll get out of the way. [laughs] Explain to me what you guys did in Guatemala last year. 11 00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:37.130 Well, I appreciate that, and, uh, uh, for those that don't know, Guatemala is next door to El Salvador, the country right after Mexico, so it's literally, like, two borders away. 12 00:02:37.740 --> 00:03:01.600 And yeah, I was born and raised in Guatemala, and we have a very interesting and, and awesome voting system that I got the opportunity to be a part of in 2011 and 2015, where what we do is we distribute all registered voters based on their, you know, residential address that they report, you know, when they, you know, get their ID or whatever, and they're assigned to these voting tables. 13 00:03:01.960 --> 00:03:11.620 And so the voting tables are manned by citizen volunteers that are just, y- basically select- called upon in a very decentralized way. 14 00:03:12.220 --> 00:03:22.000 In 2023, those were 25,000 voting tables, and each one had around 400 citizens assigned to them. 15 00:03:22.620 --> 00:03:32.140 So in total, Guatemala has 9.2 million voters, registered voters, that get distributed out to these 25,000 tables as of 2023. 16 00:03:32.660 --> 00:03:46.150 So I had this experience in 2011, 2015, where I was at this table doing this work and kind of realized that our voting system and voting systems in general are consensus algorithms, right? 17 00:03:46.150 --> 00:03:51.269 It's just a really complicated way for a ton of people to make a decision about something, right? 18 00:03:51.820 --> 00:04:00.060 And in the case of paper-based consensus algorithms, or paper-based voting, it essentially boils down to proof of work, right? 19 00:04:00.160 --> 00:04:14.490 So if you don't have machines doing the computing and all that, and it's just a bunch of people, you know, 'cause literally what you do at the end of the voting day is you take out the ballots, you show them in front of witnesses, and you literally, like, just write down, "All right, one vote for Charlie," right? 20 00:04:14.520 --> 00:04:19.800 And then you pull out the other one that's like, "Oh, another vote for, you know, Bob," or whatever, right? 21 00:04:19.899 --> 00:04:35.620 So it's all done paper-based, and so it is, is this proof-of-work consensus algorithm that at the end of the voting day, as a voting table volunteer, what you do, after you show this to everyone, is you create a document that has the totals of your table. 22 00:04:36.020 --> 00:04:48.760 And so instead of having 9.2 million, you know, documents that you have to, you know, verify, you actually boil it down to one document per table, which turns into 25,000 per election in 2023. 23 00:04:49.340 --> 00:04:59.340 And in 2019, when I was involved again in this, a, a, a, a f- few family members ran for office, and they asked for my help, and so I became a witness of the system. 24 00:04:59.900 --> 00:05:12.800 And at the end of election night, all of these documents are scanned and published on the internet. And so in 2019, we had this situation where the website crashed. I was plugged into the database. 25 00:05:12.880 --> 00:05:24.620 I could see it get nuked and then rebooted with 100,000 fresh JPEGs and then nuked again and reboo- booted with 100,000 fresh JPEGs. And that happened over the course of six days. 26 00:05:25.200 --> 00:05:32.060 So you're like, [laughs] "You know, do I believe these JPEGs?" And so we... It was very scarring. 27 00:05:32.220 --> 00:05:44.120 Guatemala had never gone through that in 2019, and it led to the first serious accusations of election fraud from all walks of life. Like, this wasn't a left-right issue in 2019. 28 00:05:44.160 --> 00:05:49.860 There were plenty of people from all walks of life accusing a system of election fraud. Again, that was 2019. 29 00:05:50.300 --> 00:05:58.000 And so I did a bunch of work as an election auditor to, you know, demonstrate that this was all nonsense, and we had to improve the system. 30 00:05:58.060 --> 00:06:06.546 That's when I discovered the Open Timestamps protocol developed by Peter Todd.Which I don't know if we should stop to mention that a little bit or, or, or, or after, but, um- Yeah. 31 00:06:06.556 --> 00:06:17.876 Well, we can, you can say, like, it just timestamps data onto Bitcoin. We can come back and talk about it. Excellent. Uh, and so I used that in 2019 to say, "Well, it took you six days to give me election documents. 32 00:06:18.215 --> 00:06:26.176 I might as well timestamp it, you know, at this point, 'cause I don't want you to change them without, you know, proof, um, from this moment going forward." 33 00:06:26.556 --> 00:06:37.536 And so I made a bunch of recommendations to the election authority saying, "Look, in the future, if you want to avoid this, what you should do is as soon as you publish these documents to the internet, you should use..." 34 00:06:37.556 --> 00:06:47.226 What I at the po- the time called a blockchain certification. And so basically s- drawing parallels to what I did with the open timestamps, I'm saying, "Look, this is possible to do. 35 00:06:47.276 --> 00:06:57.476 All you would need to do is as soon as it gets to the internet, you use some blockchain solution to give society a, a proof that those JPEGs aren't manipulated," right? 36 00:06:57.516 --> 00:07:03.516 And so fast-forward to 2023 and our election last year, and, uh, you know, I was very surprised. 37 00:07:03.556 --> 00:07:12.676 I was as an election auditor ready to, to go to, to audit everything, and fortunately, I was like, wow, like, they, they accepted my recommendations. 38 00:07:12.716 --> 00:07:20.496 And what happened was they contracted this company, simpleproof.com, which is a Guatemalan startup that now I work for, they hired me recently. 39 00:07:21.016 --> 00:07:47.836 And what simpleproof.com built is a government, you know, indust- industrial scale version of open timestamps, where as soon as these documents were generated on election night in, on June 25th, 2023, they were immediately timestamped using the open timestamps protocol and, you know, a few other solutions to make sure that no- what happened in twen- 2019 didn't happen again. 40 00:07:48.256 --> 00:08:08.856 And so the entirety of over 150,000 documents that make up the Guatemalan voting system and contain the summary, you know, the, the totals of millions upon millions of votes, those documents were timestamped to Bitcoin in a very efficient way that allowed... 41 00:08:09.096 --> 00:08:21.166 Well, first, reduced the attack surface to what happened in 2019, where you had six days to manipulate the JPEGs, down to basically the, the space between blocks. Blocks, right? So literally the block spaces. 42 00:08:21.656 --> 00:08:23.056 Yeah, the first block spaces, right? 43 00:08:23.116 --> 00:08:40.236 So where on average, it's like 10, 15 minutes that these documents were o- on a database somewhere before they got, you know, proven on Bitcoin, so that if someone did want to attack the election in Guatemala, they would've had to do it within that, like, 10-minute time window. 44 00:08:40.706 --> 00:08:53.556 And then also because it gets timestamped to Bitcoin, it just becomes a permanent evidence of manipulation that because we have paper-based system, you could then, you know, use the paper to prove if anything funny happened, right? 45 00:08:53.616 --> 00:09:02.196 So in- we are the first country in the world to use Bitcoin and specifically the Bitcoin blockchain to protect our voting system. Yeah. 46 00:09:02.356 --> 00:09:13.776 It's funny 'cause I got the, I got the white paper right here behind me, and part of what Satoshi, like, described Bitcoin as is that it's like a decentralized timestamping server. 47 00:09:14.416 --> 00:09:25.496 And it's, it- th- it's very poetic that this is now full circle actively being used to timestamp votes in Guatemala. I'm gonna say this a bit back to you. 48 00:09:25.556 --> 00:09:36.696 Like, as soon as the ballot comes in, you're basically taking that ballot, generating a proof of that ballot having been vo- you know, looking a certain way, posting that to Bitcoin. 49 00:09:37.396 --> 00:09:44.536 Just let, let me correct that and, and, and maybe- Yeah... it'll be easier if I share my screen. Um- Yeah, share your screen. Walk me through this. Sure. 50 00:09:44.816 --> 00:09:59.596 So to start, if folks haven't investigated the open timestamps protocol, please start there, opentimestamps.org. Uh, it's really cool and similar to Bitcoin in that it's very simple to use as a individual. 51 00:10:00.096 --> 00:10:08.336 You literally go to opentimestamps.org, drag and drop anything that you would want to, you know, timestamp. A, a, you know, any file, any digital file, you can drag and drop here. 52 00:10:08.736 --> 00:10:19.936 And as an individual, this is easy, and Bitcoiners everywhere have been doing it for ages. What we did was we had hundreds of thousands of these. So what I'm showing now is trep.gt. 53 00:10:20.256 --> 00:10:33.996 This is the preliminary results election website of Guatemala. And so if you go to T-R-E-P dot G-T, you can do this for yourself, where when you click either of those buttons, it takes you to see the... 54 00:10:34.176 --> 00:10:43.296 I'm gonna have to zoom out a little bit. Do, do, do, do, do. There we go. So it's selecting the presidential election. We have five elections. 55 00:10:43.356 --> 00:10:47.216 We have Congress and municipal corporations, but let's focus on just the executive branch. 56 00:10:47.676 --> 00:10:56.776 And so you can go down here and see, oh, you know, there's a pretty little map and, you know, some bar graphs with the national totals, but I want to don't trust verify this. 57 00:10:56.856 --> 00:11:13.796 So I could go to the full right of the screen and input any number between 1,020... Sorry, one and 24,500. So what's your favorite number there between one and 24,000, Charlie? Let's just do 1,000. 1,000. So 58 00:11:14.796 --> 00:11:28.636 if you do this, now instead of looking at the national totals, which are supposed to be the, you know, sum, the, the summation of all of the voting tables, now you're looking at an individual table, but you wanna don't trust verify. 59 00:11:28.916 --> 00:11:44.116 You scroll down, there's this Ver button. When you click that, it brings up this JPEG, which was the physical document that was signed by three citizens, in this case, Jose Luis, Maria Elena, and Maria Elena. 60 00:11:44.266 --> 00:11:48.516 [laughs] Two Maria Elenas. And what they're saying is hand- this is handwritten. 61 00:11:48.576 --> 00:12:00.116 At the end of the voting day, they wrote, "278 citizens bothered to show up to vote, and their votes are distributed amongst all these parties in this way," all handwritten. 62 00:12:00.476 --> 00:12:05.396 And so what you were, to correct what you were saying earlier, it's not the individual ballots that are scanned. 63 00:12:05.816 --> 00:12:16.952 It's the voting table total-Which is what happens when the volunteers, who are these citizens up top, and they sign down here, they tally the total votes, right? 64 00:12:17.052 --> 00:12:23.972 So 400 citizens were assigned to this table, but out of those 278 showed up, and then they distribute the votes. 65 00:12:24.312 --> 00:12:38.692 And that's where I, I, I mean, this is kind of a proof of work consensus algorithm, algorithm, and it's similar to Bitcoin in that I see these citizens that are signing here, the s- u-up here, these three citizens that man the tables, as mining nodes. 66 00:12:39.222 --> 00:12:45.352 They do the hashing of, like, l- taking the transactions, the individual ballots, and then creating the block, right? 67 00:12:45.472 --> 00:12:53.532 This is a block template that they're, that they're filling out, and they do this in front of these witnesses which are sent by political parties, and they sign. 68 00:12:53.572 --> 00:13:01.352 So it's one, two, three, four, five, six witnesses, and that's where I see these guys as the validating nodes, right? 69 00:13:01.392 --> 00:13:06.452 So they are checking the work of the miners, and if they sign, it's they agree with the block that they're producing. 70 00:13:06.832 --> 00:13:15.652 And this, this, this JPEG, which again, there's hundreds of thousands of these 'cause there's 25,000 tables and there were five different elections. 71 00:13:15.672 --> 00:13:25.912 And so once this JPEG is created, this is what gets scanned, and immediately it gets verified, which is this conspicuously orange button here that you can click on. 72 00:13:26.472 --> 00:13:34.772 And so the question you gotta ask yourself is, what I was showing you before, how do we know that it's actually the document from election night? How do we know it hasn't been tampered with? 73 00:13:35.112 --> 00:13:54.412 And so Simple Proof, the, the company that I now work for, developed an immutable backup solution which was purchased by the election authorities of Guatemala, and what they're saying here is on June 25th at 11:16 in the PM on GMT -6, we received this JPEG. 74 00:13:54.992 --> 00:14:04.172 This is the SHA-256 hash of that JPEG, and here is the block where you can find evidence and proof of that. 75 00:14:04.602 --> 00:14:22.692 And further down, here is the date and, and time confirmation of that block, which means that they are very publicly telling you that they received this JPEG, and within a matter of, let's see, 11:16 to 12:20- 12:19. 76 00:14:22.772 --> 00:14:36.352 So in this case, this is a, an outlier in that it took them one hour and three minutes to h- get the hash of the proof onto Bitcoin. Again, it's not as, as good as 10 minutes, but it's definitely better than six days. 77 00:14:36.992 --> 00:14:47.552 But then further down you can download and see the JPEG so that you can compare the two different contractors' database, the, the two different JPEGs to one another. But more importantly, 78 00:14:48.512 --> 00:14:56.012 we publish also the OTS file, which is the open timestamps file that the open timestamps protocol generates. 79 00:14:56.392 --> 00:15:05.252 And here you can see the text-based version of this, which is a bunch of cryptographic proofs, but that's kind of almost impossible to really figure out. 80 00:15:05.552 --> 00:15:23.032 What Simple Proof has also developed is an open timestamps navigator that allows you to see how the Merkle trees and the SHA-256s of that JPEG, this C- D7B29 in this case, we can go back and verify it's yes, that is the same hash 81 00:15:23.972 --> 00:15:36.712 for the JPEG. And through a series of Merkle trees or, or, or, or hash, uh, functions, you can see that this trail leads all the way up to a final root hash. 82 00:15:37.412 --> 00:15:44.032 And so through a series of cryptographic proofs, we can get to a final SHA-256 that can... 83 00:15:44.072 --> 00:15:51.992 is available this transaction ID, which if you're running at your own node, you can p- get this transaction ID, look it on, on, on your node. 84 00:15:52.412 --> 00:16:07.592 But if not, you can just click the link to go to the mempool.space, and at that point we can go down to the op_return portion of the details and then look for that hash, and there it is. So- So- There we go... 85 00:16:07.632 --> 00:16:20.552 yeah, this is, this is the crazy thing because I think, like, you know, again, I'm gonna regurgitate this kind of for the ordinals people, like, the, the past year's kind of been dominated by criticism of putting JPEGs on Bitcoin. 86 00:16:20.572 --> 00:16:35.192 And but this is very interesting because this says we're going to hash the JPEGs. We're going to compress this data incredibly, incredibly well- Provably... because, yeah, be- because you... 87 00:16:35.292 --> 00:16:40.472 all you care about is just proving that something existed in a certain way at a certain time. 88 00:16:41.072 --> 00:16:55.372 So it reduces the service area for election fraud for somebody to come in and to take all those ballots and then to alter them, and then a new reality of election results magically pops up out of nowhere. 89 00:16:55.472 --> 00:17:05.832 This says, I can go to mempool.space, or better yet my own node, and verify the hash of these ballots myself. 90 00:17:05.892 --> 00:17:18.112 So I, I, I, I, I can trust that maybe my local precinct is, is, is telling me the truth, but I can also verify that they didn't alter the documents after a certain time. Exactly. 91 00:17:18.152 --> 00:17:29.372 And, and again, I wanna just push back and say it's not the individual ballots, it's the summary total of about 200, 3- 300, 400 votes into one document. 92 00:17:29.852 --> 00:17:36.632 Um, in the case of Guatemala, we don't get access to JPEGs for the individual ballots for, you know, basically privacy concerns and stuff like that. Yeah. 93 00:17:36.672 --> 00:17:42.402 But we do get access to these JPEGs that are essentially kind of like coin joints, right? So it's like- Yeah, but this is, but this is- Yeah... 94 00:17:42.402 --> 00:17:50.452 is a significant leap forwards in just, just proving the existence of election results. For sure. 95 00:17:50.732 --> 00:18:02.852 I mean, basically what it boils down to is what Simple Proof is, is building is using Bitcoin to uphold information integrity with immutable, immutable record keeping and trustless verification. So it's... 96 00:18:03.102 --> 00:18:26.562 The, the origin of why this was so important to, to, to us and, and, and my recommendation to the election authority in Guatemala is that as an election auditor in 2019, if I audited the election and I found proof of election fraud-My lawyers told me they're probably going to send you to prison because they're gonna accuse you of election tampering. 97 00:18:26.662 --> 00:18:42.472 So how could I defend myself from that? It would be, I would need a mechanism to prove that I never tampered the JPEGs. I have to... The, the onus is on me to demonstrate that I never committed election fraud. 98 00:18:42.962 --> 00:18:57.582 And so by incorporating this, the election authorities, what they are doing is they are standing behind the data that they publish to say, "Look, on election night, everything we publish is immutable," essentially. 99 00:18:57.642 --> 00:19:07.132 Like, I- not even the state with... I mean, unless they figure out a way to reorg the Bitcoin blockchain, which, you know, is arguably impossible. 100 00:19:07.542 --> 00:19:18.562 What the election authority is doing is they're standing behind what they publish and saying, "We are removing our own ability and anyone's ability to manipulate digital information." 101 00:19:19.122 --> 00:19:26.822 So in a post-truth world, and this, partic- particularly with elections, what this means is now you can rely on digital data. 102 00:19:27.162 --> 00:19:38.362 Now you can differentiate a JPEG that is official from a JPEG that was just, you know, created by AI and published by some random sock puppet online, right? 103 00:19:38.802 --> 00:19:53.922 And so to me, the way I say it is Bitco- that Bitcoin can become an anchor of truth in a sea of lies. Who cares if people create fake information and, and populate the internet with millions of fake JPEGs? 104 00:19:54.262 --> 00:20:04.261 You can use Bitcoin to say, "These are the real ones, and I could care less about everything else." That's a line, that's a clip right there. You mention that, y- you know, going... 105 00:20:04.592 --> 00:20:14.742 I, I, you, you shared a story with me of how this is, this, these timestamps have already been used to dispute or challenge some election fraud. 106 00:20:14.802 --> 00:20:27.841 I know that this also may be kind of a, a tricky topic to navigate, but could you try to attempt to explain how this has already been used in a dispute in the Guatemalan election? For sure. 107 00:20:28.062 --> 00:20:39.001 So I believe, uh, pictures, uh, are, are, uh, say a thousand- I'll show, I'll share the screen again for you. Yeah. Well, so, so I, like I said, I, I now work for Simple Proof, but I'm also an election auditor. 108 00:20:39.202 --> 00:20:50.602 And oops, so this is my report from March, 2024. People can find it on digitalwitness.io. It's in Spanish. It's a 272-page report, so all in Spanish. 109 00:20:50.742 --> 00:21:06.872 So, but if we go down to the bottom, basically what we found was, so the election results of Guatemala were surprising. The way I like to describe it is Guatemala's been ruled by the same owners for about 80 years. 110 00:21:07.082 --> 00:21:17.082 The last time we had real change was around 1955. That's when the CIA intervened. Guatemala's famously the second country that was, uh, intervened by the CIA. 111 00:21:17.422 --> 00:21:30.971 The first one was Iran, and number two was Guatemala in 1955 when they deposed Jacobo Arbenz. And then after that, we started this civil war, and I mean, it, it's been the same owners since then. And in 2023, 112 00:21:32.352 --> 00:21:43.282 so the same owners, and they changed the management, right? So they, they, they replace the, the, the, the president, the, the, the manager, but the owners are, have, have, hadn't changed since 1955. 113 00:21:44.262 --> 00:22:00.102 And so the s- the event was so surprising that what the regime did with that, you know, 'cause they didn't wanna lose, it doesn't like to lose, the outgoing government weaponized the judiciary and accused the election authorities of election tampering. 114 00:22:00.622 --> 00:22:12.862 And so what you're seeing on your screen is the fact, on the right-hand side, for, for those that are just listening to this, is what we did was we created a heat map of all the timestamp data that was produced on Bitcoin. 115 00:22:13.152 --> 00:22:25.102 And so on the right, you can see what Bitcoin says in terms of timestamps. And, and so it concentrates, you know, like, on election night, there were 125,000 documents created. 116 00:22:25.492 --> 00:22:36.922 And so with this heat map, we can see that the immense majority, like 90 some odd percent, is all around the midnight hour of election night. So that's what people are saying. 117 00:22:36.942 --> 00:22:47.202 On the X-axis it's, it's time, on the Y-axis it's amounts. And so mo- or, or anyway, most of the, the documents are around midnight on Bitcoin. 118 00:22:47.922 --> 00:22:55.122 And on the left is what the judiciary through the election crimes unit accused the election authorities of election fraud. 119 00:22:55.502 --> 00:23:02.742 And so on the left you see three lines, two hard ones, and then one kind of vague one at the beginning. 120 00:23:03.202 --> 00:23:13.522 And so what they're accusing is saying there are documents, it's about 7% of the documents were created prior to 6:00 PM. And it's like, well, what do you mean created prior to 6:00 PM? 121 00:23:13.532 --> 00:23:27.062 And it's, they basically took the metadata timestamp. So JPEGs have a little thing called date created by, and so that timestamp is just inside the file and you can see it. Uh, but that's created by the hardware, right? 122 00:23:27.602 --> 00:23:45.802 And so they're saying 7% of the documents were created prior to 6:00 PM, and that's proof positive that there's enough documents that were created prior to the votes being counted, 'cause, you know, the voting stations end, or the po- polls close at 6:00 PM, so how could a JPEG be created before 6:00 PM? 123 00:23:46.602 --> 00:23:56.022 And so that was super concerning. And when they published this in December, and this is, like, their smoking gun, right? Say, "We've got the smoking gun. They created JPEGs prior to 6:00 PM." 124 00:23:56.762 --> 00:24:12.162 But the problem is there's this really strong, you know, third line of JPEGs created around the 34-hour mark. And when you compare that to Bitcoin, it forces you to essentially present... 125 00:24:12.312 --> 00:24:18.422 And that's why the little logo that people are seeing here is the Back to the Future logo, but in Spanish, Volver al Futuro. 126 00:24:18.942 --> 00:24:33.902 And so the logic and, and the mathematics that-The election crimes unit is using to argue election fraud would require to explain how JPEGs were created in the future after they already exist on Bitcoin. 127 00:24:33.912 --> 00:24:37.722 And so this is forty-five percent of all the election documents. 128 00:24:38.262 --> 00:24:54.762 And so the judiciary now has to argue that time travelers hacked the election of Guatemala, or by using Bitcoin we can come up with a more logical explanation, which is the technology contractor that was hired, and paid good money to do this, 129 00:24:55.802 --> 00:25:04.242 made a s- m- made a huge mistake and they misconfigured the time zones of the hardware. And so that's why you have three lines. 130 00:25:04.482 --> 00:25:14.742 It's basically 7% of the machines thought they were in, you know, the Pacific Islands, 45% thought they were in Africa, and about 50% believed that they were in Guatemala. 131 00:25:14.982 --> 00:25:28.962 And so obviously you're going to get different, you know, timestamps. And if it weren't for Bitcoin, there would not be an independent, you know, version of the truth that proves this mistake. 132 00:25:29.322 --> 00:25:43.722 And so had the authorities not used this solution, some of us believe that the current president would not have been allowed to take power because the outgoing regime would have successfully argued that there was election fraud, and this was purely because of a mistake, right? 133 00:25:43.782 --> 00:25:50.682 So if someone makes a mistake in configuring time zones, maybe that's the difference between the president taking office and not. 134 00:25:51.362 --> 00:26:02.042 But if you use Bitcoin, you can actually prove what really happened with an independent arbiter that could care less about your opinions about the truth, but rather is just based on mathematics. 135 00:26:02.282 --> 00:26:13.342 This, yeah, this is really cool. I, I, I think I'll probab- I, you know, we, we talked with Peter Todd himself on the, on one of our other podcasts for Blockspace on the Mining Pod, uh, last month. 136 00:26:14.242 --> 00:26:23.852 And I was asking him about this, this, this story in Guatemala, and he says he was not, he really didn't have a whole lot to do with it. 137 00:26:23.882 --> 00:26:35.432 This is something that you guys and Simple Proof put together, executed, promoted, got all the way up to the Guatemalan, like, governing bodies to actually execute this. 138 00:26:35.782 --> 00:26:45.732 But it, you know, I live in, in the, in, in the United States where there are, there is accusation of election fraud, but it's not widespread, it's not pervasive. It doesn't like... 139 00:26:46.012 --> 00:26:53.432 It, it is eating into the fabric of society, but not quite as deeply as it is in Guatemala. But there are other places around the world that 140 00:26:54.422 --> 00:27:10.762 may have these concerns, or just simple third-party verification could reduce some criticism. Talk to me, Carolina, about, like, the future plans that you guys are working towards. 141 00:27:10.922 --> 00:27:26.602 I know that, you know, you did this in Guatemala successfully, but what are you try... What's on the, the, the pathway here? What lies ahead? Thanks. Well, we, the origin of this is there's a concern of what happens when 142 00:27:27.562 --> 00:27:42.512 even, like, the state on state disagrees with itself? But, you know, for me, it was in that 2019, if I get accused of treason, which is what election fraud in Guatemala can lead to, how can I prove what is real, right? 143 00:27:42.542 --> 00:27:51.382 And in the digital world, it's so hard to prove what's real. It- th- there's no way really to do it, but Bitcoin at least allows you to 144 00:27:52.342 --> 00:28:02.442 increase the likelihood of something being real and decrease considerably and potentially eliminate the possibility of sneaking in fake things. 145 00:28:02.482 --> 00:28:11.982 At the very least, your, any would-be attacker would be forced to do it on the moment of creation. And what we, what I wanna do is live in a world where 146 00:28:12.962 --> 00:28:20.702 the state and, you know, essentially, and anyone who gets the opportunity to create something, that should be the, the end of it, right? 147 00:28:20.902 --> 00:28:44.342 Like, once, say, a tax record is created, evidence that could be used in court, like anything that's really material and important, once it's created, if you timestamp it to Bitcoin, then in the future, if some- if an attacker, if someone wants to, you know, change evidence and say that you're the one that is guilty of something, then we sh- we can use Bitcoin to protect ourselves against that. 148 00:28:44.692 --> 00:28:54.042 And so the election gave us an, a, an opportunity to prove the use case, but it goes well beyond that to say, really this is public registries everywhere. 149 00:28:54.482 --> 00:29:03.562 In a future where AI makes it trivial to create fake stuff, like Bit- Bitcoin is our anchor to reality. Bitcoin is the anchor of truth in a sea of lies. 150 00:29:03.982 --> 00:29:13.662 And so we are now seeing interest from the Guatemalan government and, and other aspects of Guatemala saying, "Wow, if this is useful for elections, then that's, like, our most important public registry. 151 00:29:13.802 --> 00:29:18.362 It, it literally defines the transfer of power. Can we use it in, in other areas?" 152 00:29:18.562 --> 00:29:47.382 And so we're starting to see demand for this in elsewhere, but in particular for the US, I would say there's going to be a lot of concern, and as an auditor, when I saw my Guatemalan election authorities publishing all the data timestamped to Bitcoin, I mean, it gave me so much peace of saying, "Wow," like I, I don't have to concern myself of potentially, like, reality changing and, and fighting this endless battle of what's real and what's not. 153 00:29:48.042 --> 00:29:59.322 Rather, when an authority says, "We stand by our work, and you can check it yourself. You don't need to trust us, here it is." That says something incredibly powerful. 154 00:29:59.362 --> 00:30:09.962 And so we are interested in finding people in the US who would be, you know, who would want to work with us and, and find ways of deploying this ahead of the November elections. Please reach out. 155 00:30:10.242 --> 00:30:13.582 You can contact us via simpleproof.com, we're, we're on Nostr. 156 00:30:13.982 --> 00:30:36.192 But in general, it's just an invitation to anyone ahead of November of saying, "You can help your neighbors, you can help your local authority protect against an onslaught of madness that could hit them in November, and prove a use case where Bitcoin, and specifically the Bitcoin blockchain-Protects democracy, protect us, protects truth. 157 00:30:36.612 --> 00:30:43.212 Allows those of us that are more interested in truth than the lies to come to an agreement, to, to reach consensus. 158 00:30:43.732 --> 00:30:58.632 And in Guatemala at least, what that's allowed me to do is give normies a different touch point to Bitcoin, where now it's they know that Bitcoin protected democracy, so now they're a bit more open to hearing about all the other cool stuff that you can do with it, right? 159 00:30:59.052 --> 00:31:03.512 So I just invite people to see it as an opportunity to reach your neighbors with a different touch point. 160 00:31:04.392 --> 00:31:12.812 Yeah, it's interesting 'cause you, you bring up, yeah, this is a, this is a different way of using Bitcoin than simple, the, the simple, straightforward monetary use case. 161 00:31:13.172 --> 00:31:20.622 And this is interestingly, kind of central to the broader Bitcoin discussion right now. And maybe this is a f- this, maybe this is a reason why 162 00:31:21.652 --> 00:31:28.892 I, maybe I'm ignorant, but I haven't seemed like this, this seemed like a very big story. It didn't seem to circulate in Bitcoin circles. 163 00:31:29.312 --> 00:31:42.382 And, and to me, this is, like, one of the, like, this is very aligned with what Bitcoin's purpose is. I'll invite you, you know, speculate, like, why i- is this not popular? 164 00:31:42.532 --> 00:31:53.772 Is this because this is a non-monetary use of Bitcoin, that it's a little bit, it's not as resonant with some of the current North American Bitcoin narrative? What are your thoughts here? 165 00:31:53.782 --> 00:31:59.912 My thoughts are, we had to kind of lay low, to be honest, 'cause there was a, a, it was a bit dangerous for a while. 166 00:32:00.012 --> 00:32:13.552 Uh, you know, some people fled the country in Guatemala, like, literally, the election authorities w- who are some of the highest-ranking judges in Guatemala, like, it's the Supreme Court of Guatemala, then there's another supreme court, and then there's these guys. 167 00:32:13.592 --> 00:32:24.612 It's eight, eight of them, and four of them literally just fled the country from October through February. And so it wasn't until March that we can really, like, the dust kind of settled. 168 00:32:24.952 --> 00:32:40.212 This was, this was a war in Guatemala and, you know, finally someone won, and now you have clarity moving forward, and so we can speak much more clearly about this than we were before because there was danger. 169 00:32:40.941 --> 00:32:48.132 And so I think there's, there's an element of that, of just, like, being our, ourselves ca- careful and, and not necessarily speaking out about this too much. 170 00:32:48.492 --> 00:32:58.542 But then in addition, I think, uh, this isn't something, this, this is a, a good middle of the road, right? Like, I, I do not know a single Bitcoiner that is against the use of OpenTimestamps. 171 00:32:59.432 --> 00:33:05.532 Bitcoiners don't agree on basically anything except 21 million and OpenTimestamps. 172 00:33:06.002 --> 00:33:27.612 [laughs] And so it's like, but agreement between Bitcoiners and, and generally in media, like, I think Bitcoin will need to be careful of, of realizing that we can also fall prey to, to getting attacked from fiat and, and, and the, the, the, the old world of bringing in these bad, uh, traditions of, "Oh, if something is, if, if we are all in agreement, then it's not sexy, and so let's not talk about it. 173 00:33:27.672 --> 00:33:38.292 Let's just g- get ourselves into tribes and hate each other and, and wanna kill each other, and not pay attention to the fact that we're actually allies in a much greater war [laughs] that is going on." 174 00:33:38.722 --> 00:33:43.892 And so I, I, I think it's lower your time preference. Like, this is, we, we hope this is going to be relevant. 175 00:33:43.932 --> 00:33:49.312 We're actively looking for people to help us take this, like, the use case is proven, the t- the tools are built. 176 00:33:49.592 --> 00:34:02.152 It's, it's, it's clear that this can help in democracies and elsewhere, and now we wanna take it so that you, you, you don't have to talk about Guatemala as, like, oh, this random place that's full of, you know, who cares about Guatemala? 177 00:34:02.162 --> 00:34:07.512 And like, maybe I care a little bit about El Salvador, but who cares about Guatemala? Let's, let's take it to the US, right? 178 00:34:07.552 --> 00:34:23.632 Let, let, let's find a county somewhere, like, find a county clerk, find an elections commissioner that's already orange-pilled and tell them about this, 'cause this is, A, cheap, and B, a very clear use case where the mining of Bitcoin can protect information integrity. 179 00:34:23.752 --> 00:34:36.332 And you can, if you protect information integrity in elections, you have effection- effectively protected democracy, which means that Bitcoin protects democracy, and if you're against Bitcoin, then you're against democracy, right? 180 00:34:36.752 --> 00:34:38.532 And so I see it as 181 00:34:39.532 --> 00:34:54.592 we had to prove the use case and it was dangerous, and we're now coming up for air, and it's right on schedule so that we can turn this into a watershed moment for all of Bitcoin in November, where, you know, there will be a, a before and after, right? 182 00:34:54.672 --> 00:35:00.932 People will now, I, I hope, demand that all election documents be timestamped to Bitcoin. 183 00:35:01.152 --> 00:35:12.672 And eventually, all public registries, but we should at least start with what's arguably the most important function of the state, which is transferring power to a legitimately [laughs] elected, you know, person. 184 00:35:12.992 --> 00:35:16.512 So let's start there and, and work our way up. 185 00:35:17.332 --> 00:35:41.592 It would be very poetic if Guatemala, the country who about 80 some odd years ago, the United States very invasively altered the, the f- the future of, if Guatemala served as a demonstration for the way the United States could reduce and prevent our own question and accusation of corruption domestically. 186 00:35:41.672 --> 00:35:55.772 So I look forward to Bitcoin quite literally fixing this, generations and decades of, of problems with the existing fiat world. Carlinho, thank you so much for sharing this with me. What are your parting thoughts? 187 00:35:56.032 --> 00:36:09.812 And again, call to action, where do the listeners go to follow you and pay attention to what they can do to help? So appreciate it. Uh, I, I do wanna emphasize that this doesn't, this, this isn't foolproof. 188 00:36:09.892 --> 00:36:19.112 This doesn't eliminate all possibility of election fraud. But I think we can get bogged down into thinking that in allowing perfection becoming the enemy of good. 189 00:36:19.332 --> 00:36:26.092 I come from a, from a very different angle from the developing world of saying, you know, "Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good." 190 00:36:26.132 --> 00:36:41.924 Doing this is a, an incremental, like, very logical, obvious benefit to elections everywhere, and it's an easy win for Bitcoiners. And so, you know-I would argue it eliminated 99% of the attack surface. 191 00:36:41.954 --> 00:36:51.164 And so, yeah, there's still 1% of attack surface, but let's at least make it harder for people [laughs] who want to attack us. Like, there's, there's no argument against this. 192 00:36:51.804 --> 00:37:03.954 And then just reach out because if November is barreling down towards us, uh, the way the elections work in the US is they're run by local authorities, so it's not one single body like Guatemala. 193 00:37:04.044 --> 00:37:09.084 Like, we convinced the one single body that r- runs the national election here. 194 00:37:09.504 --> 00:37:19.964 In the US, you've got about 3,000 local election authorities that are all facing this incredibly monstrous challenge come November, and odds are they're your neighbor. 195 00:37:20.264 --> 00:37:26.464 You know, they're, they're, they're someone that you grew up with or whatever, and they probably don't know how to protect themselves. 196 00:37:26.784 --> 00:37:36.544 And so I believe that they will never forget if you showed up and said, "Hey, dude, like, what's your plan in November? Like, are you gonna publish any data to the internet? 197 00:37:36.984 --> 00:37:47.944 'Cause if you do, you realize you're opening yourself to an attack from AI and who knows what else. Here's a very simple, cheap way to protect yourself." And, and, you know, it's gonna help them. 198 00:37:47.984 --> 00:37:55.964 Like, in our case, it's helping the election authorities avoid jail time in Guatemala. Like, it's... That is what's happening. 199 00:37:55.984 --> 00:38:07.304 And so if you do that for your neighbor, they won't forget it, and they won't forget that Bitcoin played a role. And so it is much easier to fight the FUD and get people to just open up to it from a very different way. 200 00:38:07.964 --> 00:38:17.824 And so, yeah, don't, don't, don't forget your neighbor. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This does not fix all, like, everything. Like, there's... We, we don't touch the ballots. 201 00:38:17.904 --> 00:38:24.884 This is, this is purely there's this thing that already happens. We're just gonna come in and, and help those people that are involved there. 202 00:38:24.944 --> 00:38:34.824 And it's, it's been a wild ride, and, you know, we're just very happy to share what we have learned and hope that people take advantage of it and just contact us. Rock on. 203 00:38:34.924 --> 00:38:41.364 Thank you so much, Carlinho, and I look forward to seeing you at more Bitcoin conferences in real life. You're gonna be in Nashville perhaps? 204 00:38:42.104 --> 00:38:53.804 I will be speaking at Nashville along with Peter Todd to discuss why timestamping elections is a good idea, so, uh, look forward to that. All right. Make sure to go to that stage. 205 00:38:53.904 --> 00:39:05.524 I'll also see you in Nashville, Carlinho. Thank you so much. This is Bitcoin Season 2, new conversations and new ideas from new people on Bitcoin. Bitcoin Season 2 is produced by Blockspace Media. 206 00:39:06.064 --> 00:39:14.024 Make sure to check out other podcasts, The Gort Show, the Mining Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter, blockspace.media. See you next week. 207 00:39:16.344 --> 00:39:37.964 [upbeat music]