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