Joël: 0:00

The mindset shift was when I actively at the end of 2015 decided I would only accept work that would pay me in cryptocurrency. It was a mindset shift of sort of all in. I knew this was something big, and I I knew it was going to be a big industry someday as well. And I wanted to be part of this movement.

Joeri: 0:18

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host. And today I have a guest who is himself an experienced podcaster. Hi Joel, how are you? Fantastic. What about you? I'm good. I'm good. I already had uh a busy day today here in here in Lisbon where I live right now. Guys, if you don't know Joel, Valenzuela is a core member of DashDAO, where he is responsible for business development and marketing. A cryptocurrency user and an advocate since 2013. He has been living entirely on crypto since 2015. He's a mover for the Free State project and creates content for the digital cash network. Well, that's already an impressive background, Joel. So I just mentioned you have been living entirely on crypto since 2015. What first pushed you to take that leap to go fully unbanked?

Joël: 1:21

Yeah, so it just the general push that got me interested in the space. For many years ago, I've been interested in what is known as sound money, which is not as opposed to central bank currency. It's some kind of currency that has an actual scarce supply, like some people would say, gold and silver, for example. And some of this comes from my background. When I was young, I grew up in Mexico, and my grandmother had a lot of the old Mexican peso currency that was just no longer worth anything. And then I experienced a new peso currency and how it was being devalued against the dollar. So when I was young, I think it was about seven pesos to the dollar. Now it's something like 18 or 20. I don't know exactly where it is today. But so I always had a keen understanding that inflation can really ruin people's lives sometimes. And so this is something I was interested in. And I was looking for ways of incorporating sound money into my own life because, of course, theory only gets you so far. And I was interested in trying to basically get away from this thing that I saw that had caused a lot of damage in the world. And so it never has been very feasible in the modern age to live entirely off of gold and silver. It's just I haven't met anyone who's done it. I've met some people who've tried a little bit, but it doesn't really go very far. And so in this quest to do this, I I and it was not a primary quest. It was just something I was interested in on the side. But then I heard of something called Bitcoin. I looked into it a little bit more, and it seemed very it seemed very much like a digital version of this gold. And it was somewhere around 2013 when I moved to New Hampshire. We used to live in the western part of the US, and now I live in the East. Some of the my new friends, etc., were using Bitcoin for some daily purchases. And it did this was before payment apps such as let's just say Venmo or PayPal or whatever became very common. And so for me, the ability to send money peer-to-peer was pretty incredible. Because, first of all, at that time, making a bank-to-bank transfer, at least in the US, for small purchases, just wasn't really a thing. It was very difficult. And when I would go out, for example, to share a meal with some friends, and someone would just pay the bill, and everyone else would send them Bitcoin for their portion of the bill. For me, it it's it clicked, especially as this is a is something you don't need to present ID, get approved for an account, anything. You just download an app and then can start sending and receiving instantly. And I kind of saw that limitless potential of not only like censorship-resistant digital cash, but also sound money, something that's not inflated or based on a currency that can be inflated by central banks.

Joeri: 4:23

I think it's in 2015. Now we have 2025, a decade later. So this is a whole journey has actually been the biggest mindset shift that you had to make to sustain this one and a half percent crypto lifestyle.

Joël: 4:39

Yes, so the mindset shift, of course, I the shift that I did not have to take, that I always had is I was interested in this and I wanted to try to use it and just see how that worked. The mindset shift was the sort of the commitment, the I'm not going to the when I actively at the end of 2015 decided I would only accept work that would pay me in cryptocurrency, that I would never, I would not accept any anything that paid me in dollars. That was it for me, it was a mindset shift of sort of all in. Like I wanted to, I thought that I knew this was something big, and I I knew it was going to be a big industry someday as well. And I wanted to be part of this this movement. And the there was no infrastructure back then. There was no there were no university degrees on this, there was no in infrastructure in terms of like the payment system and payroll systems and other things like that. There was kind of no way to get in. Where in other fields, you can have a an academic background, for example. You go to university for something like this, and then there's a a job board where you look through and you can start applying to well-established companies. None of that really existed then. So I just decided to sort of force myself, put it some arbitrary conditions, some to make myself uncomfortable enough to figure out a solution. And that's just kind of where it started. So the the decision was more of I want to be part of this thing, I want to fully explore it, and this is the only way I know how is by forcing myself to. And so I forced myself to, and then since then I've just had to figure out how to make it work.

Joeri: 6:23

Well, that's actually an interesting mindset to at that moment to you know, to really dare to do that when the whole people around you they would probably say, What are you now doing or what are you trying to do? And even today, a lot of people I meet when I talk about crypto or Bitcoin, they think of it in terms of an investment, you know, buying a Bitcoin or buying some Bitcoin, setting it aside for the future, and just you know, use regular, I would say, fiat money for their daily daily transactions. So, what is actually yeah, what do you say to people that see crypto mainly as an investment? What actually do they miss about its potential as a system for everyday use?

Joël: 7:07

Yes, so crypto as an investment, just like anything as an investment, does not make sense long term without some kind of utility. More importantly, a utility that can actually cap create value and capture revenue from users. In there's only two ways an investment can really make money. One is if it's purely speculative, in which case in which case it's like gambling. You can buy something and you're hoping someone else will buy it more later and make you money, but there's it's just a matter of timing on that. It's not an actual valuable investment, or it's some sort of a value capture thing where you're buying a piece of something that produces great value for and utility for people in the long term, such as if you buy the example of Tesla stock. If you bought some Tesla stock, you could have two ideas of why you would do that. You would buy it because you anticipate Elon Musk doing something that will make people jump in and buy the stock and then you could sell it, and that's speculation. Or you could say, I'm buying this piece of stock because it is a part of a company that is creating a product that lots of people want, they will use, they will buy lots of, and the company will have a lot of profit and revenue and go into that. So if crypto is an investment, it is only an investment in one of these two ways. I am not particularly interested in speculation because speculation is temporary, it's not sustainable long term. I am interested in utility long term, and you can approach utility purely as an investor. But in order to do that, you have to know the product and know the product roadmap, know how it's going to be adopted, know if it works. And in that case, even though I've not really thought too much about this from an investor standpoint because that's that wasn't ever my goal. My knowledge and expertise from actually becoming very involved in the use of this, I think is valuable for any investor perspective. Any investor should know does the product work? Any investor should probably in Tesla stock should probably see what a Tesla is, see the experience, see the reaction from different people who are using it, and then say, oh, this is a very good product. I think I will invest in this.

Joeri: 9:37

Yeah, it's interesting. And I also you compare it with gold, like I was back in the days when gold was still very low. I was investing in that, but because just I thought it has value because people believe that it has value, it has been at value for so many years. But yeah, I understand your point about utility, and I'm also curious in your journey, are there were there any moments when you really felt like wow, crypto is now liberating for me, or maybe on the other side, it's not possible to live like this. So I'm curious to hear that.

Joël: 10:12

Yes, crypto has been around 19 years or 16 years, I believe, right? Since 2009, and or almost 17 years coming up here. Um, which it's just now starting to get to a stage where you have regular users. There's still very few of those, even. It's mostly industry insiders and speculators still, but it were getting there finally now in 2025. But back 10 years ago or more, it was much less that. And when I I saw the potential in that peer-to-peer moment, as far as this is some kind of digital gold that you can send and receive like it's cash, but is but without the restrictions of cash to anyone anywhere in the world. That for me, I understood that's a massive benefit because there's in many countries, of course, there's remittances, people there's a massive industries that deal with this complexity of sending money across borders, and then there's payment, and there's so much that I could see could be obsoleted by a simple peer-to-peer digital currency. So for me, that was a big moment of this is huge, as well as when I was able to actually use it as money. So the first year I would say of trying to use only as it started out with, it was only Bitcoin, taught me both of those sides of the lessons. The one lesson was this does work, I can use it, even though we're very early. I do know people who will pay me with it, and I do know things I can pay with it. Enough to where I in the middle of 2016, I closed my bank account as well and just was only operating purely on these digital rails. So that was the good lesson. The not good lesson was in 2016, the Bitcoin network started to become congested, transaction fees started to go high, and it started to have real disruptions to my daily life where I had to switch from Bitcoin to other cryptocurrencies, mostly Dash, but not exclusively Dash, that year because this wasn't working. And so that is the that was the other lesson, is now it's not just this technology, does it work? Yes or no. The answer to that is yes, it definitely is, it definitely can work, but the nuance in how do we get it to work is now an endless level of problem solving of like how do we find a way to make sure this technology will continue to evolve and then it will work for everyone and not just strange experimental use cases.

Joeri: 12:50

You mentioned Dash, so let's talk about Dash. Can explain a bit what the project is about. But it has been around since the early days of crypto. So I'm also curious how do you keep a project like this relevant in a market that is going so fast, obsessed but new with new things all the time? Yeah, I'm curious to hear that.

Joël: 13:11

Yes, I would say so. First of all, Dash was founded in 2014, so a few years after Bitcoin, but still one of the very earliest and oldest cryptocurrencies. And it its focus is to be on digital cash, to be the best, basically the original Bitcoin vision, except a much more modern, kind of focused use case where on-chain scaling, meaning that everyone can use it without the congestion that I experienced on Bitcoin, is a focus, as well as maintaining optional confidentiality for transactions, so you don't have to worry about your financial history being published to the whole world. Instant transaction settlement, which is still relatively rare in the crypto world, and that's one of those, in my opinion, biggest barriers to the mass adoption of this, is being able to send a payment as quickly as you can tap a card right now and have that experience really work. And so Dash has focused on all those things over the years and is significantly involved. It evolved its technology and integrations and partnerships. And so, in this world of how fast the technology moves, in these ecosystems such as cryptocurrencies, there are two kind of opposite effects going on at the same time. One is that as time marches on, the technology gets older, therefore you need a lot of work to keep it modern. And in some cases, a newer blockchain can have advantages that older ones don't. But on the other side, there's an opposite effect, which is a lot of what you're relying on is a well-established and decentralized ecosystem. It just takes time. It takes many years for the ecosystem to grow and adopt, and people all over the world to become users. So it's not reliant on just one team, for example. But also most of what I do CMO type things, but also I do business development, is what is so far has been most of my work, which is just building those integrations, making those partnerships. And a lot of what makes my job easier is just how long Dash has been around and how many integrations exist over the last decade or so, is that whereas a new project just starting out has to attack all this infrastructure from nothing and is supported nowhere and does not have liquidity on exchanges and everything. And so a lot of times, while new projects are having to focus all on that, Dash is able to just build in on what it already has. And so I think that older projects are some of the most valuable in the space. Obviously, Bitcoin is the most valuable currently. Ethereum is also very old, has by crypto standards, has a very significant market cap. Same thing with Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, those kinds of cryptocurrencies. Zcash as well is doing very well in the recent weeks. Those ones are very much of the older class, but are still highly competitive in today's market. And I would say the average age of the top cryptocurrencies is at least five years.

Joeri: 16:21

Yeah. But these days there are so many tokens and many new tokens. They promise decentralization, but few deliver it. So what does real decentralization look like in practice from your experience inside the DAO?

Joël: 16:37

Yes, and getting decentralization right, I think is I would say it's almost like an impossible task to get 100%. And so we need to get as close to that as we can. Um, it's can be very, very challenging. Uh it's so I think that a lot of what Bitcoin did, I would say Bitcoin got maybe a seven or an eight out of ten in terms of this, right? Where they got a lot of the basic fundamentals where the supply of the cryptocurrency got very widely spread. So lots of people had it, and not no one party had too much. The infrastructure was able to be run from anywhere, and for the most part, mining got was decentralized for many years. I feel like right now at this scale, there's a few players that have big network effect advantages, such as Foundry in the US, and obviously via BTC and the whole Chinese mining scene, uh, originally from there, I should say. There's a lot of things that that Bitcoin got right, obviously having open source technology and uh having no founder or foundation or team that kind of runs things, I think, helped a lot. Fortunately, Bitcoin kind of has a vulnerability as far as there is no real way to decide things as an entire network. It's almost too unrestricted. And in that situation, powerful, motivated entities can come in and steer the direction of the project. And so we saw this over the course of Bitcoin's history. Anyone reading the early writings of Satoshi, the white paper, the basic structure of the network, and also all the early Bitcoin developers can see that the purpose of this was supposed to be a digital payments network that also had a scarce sound money element to it, but it was supposed to scale massively on the main blockchain. And this was later modified by the current maintainers of Bitcoin, who many of whom were on the direct payroll of a company, which their entire business model is to offer layer two solutions, which you do not need if the layer one can perform all of those functions. And of course, there's many conspiracy theories about exactly how things shook out. There's a lot of disagreement, but it should be relatively obvious that there was a path that was set forward, and then there was a group of financially motivated people who ended up taking over direction of the project. You could say that maybe you could argue if they control it or not, but they definitely changed the direction. And the same thing was happened with Ethereum, where Ethereum also had a pretty specific roadmap as far as how they would expand it to the world. And one of those elements was, for example, execution sharding, which would basically split the main blockchain into other pieces that run at the same time, but basically everything would be on the main chain. And at some point, without public discussion, sharding was removed from the roadmap, and many layer two companies, again, rent-seeking kind of companies, came in and started to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to operate all these other blockchains that would then take the business that would go on the Ethereum chain otherwise. So we'd see this pattern, and that's where the Dow comes in, the decentralized autonomous organization, where you have a completely decentralized system where there's no team, no group that is responsible for making decisions on the network. It's whoever, for example, owns a certain number of the tokens or can combine a certain amount of the tokens together with others to form a vote. And then that funds the network or funds development for the network from the network and can also publicly make decisions. So you can ask everyone who holds coins on the network, what do you think about this? And it acts like a shareholders meeting in a company, where if you have a company that has that's supposed to be a public company, which is a corollary to a DAO, and you have no shareholder voting capability, you just say, I, as the CEO, will decide the future of this company, and I am fulfilling the will of the shareholders, but there's no actual mechanism to see how many shareholders vote in which ways. People would call that a farce. And that's what we see in crypto today is this kind of situation where you don't have the ability to have shareholders actually decide things. And in a public company where you do have a risk of, let's just say, a CEO saying this company is going to completely pivot from its core product offering and do something completely different. And you if I were to invest in a company like this, I would want a shareholder vote so I could vote to potentially remove board members or remove the CEO and change them if I the thought it would be detrimental to the company.

Joeri: 21:49

I love that explication because of explanation because a lot of people talk about it, but you explained very clearly for some of the listeners that are maybe a bit new to this crypto world. You explained it very well. Now, another thing I wanted to talk to you about is about the Free State project. You're deeply involved in that. Explain a bit for our listeners what it is about and maybe how that community has shaped your views on autonomy, governance, crypto adoption.

Joël: 22:16

Yes, and I would say right the Free State Project has come a long way since then, but in the beginning, there was a lot of overlap in the Free State Project and all of cryptocurrency. So the Free State Project was a project, it was a graduate thesis by Dr. Jason Sorens, who basically his idea was in, you know, briefly I should say, but I'm sure there's a lot more nuance into that. But the ideas of freedom, and we're not talking one political party or another, but just that the government should at the maximum enforce property rights and keep people safe and national defense and keep contracts, but should not get into other things like, for example, running state-run enterprises or a welfare state or those kinds of things. That's not the role of government. So the maximum role of government is life, liberty, property is to protect those. The people that believe in this are always in the very small minority in everywhere in the world. And I would argue there's more of them in the US as far as a percentage than in most other countries, but even the best case scenario, which is the US, is still a very tiny minority, not enough to affect actual policy change. So his idea was what if we what if all the people who believe in the minimal role of government and maximum human freedom decided to physically relocate to a relatively small area, a relatively small state, and then become active in the governance process of that state. And so then they would be an actual significant voting body, for example, and would have the ability to actually effect those changes. And if those changes are in effect, the idea is that liberty is so much better for humanity as a whole that the more of it we have, the better and bear better a jurisdiction would do. And then that would signal to the rest of the world, watching, the rest of the country first, of course, and then the world, that this is actually a good idea, that we should liberalize our economies, we should restore rights for all, we should reduce the size and scope of the welfare state, etc. Because look at where, in this case, New Hampshire is. And so New Hampshire was picked by this project that was formed as nonprofit that was formed around this idea from Dr. Sorens' paper. And then since then, a bunch of people signed on to move to New Hampshire to make this dream a reality. Now, when I moved in 2013, because I very much care about these same ideas of liberty, and also I was at a point in my life where I was not happy with my current living situation where I was, and I wanted to wanted to make a change, everything lined up. The Free State Project's goals were they they moved out from purely a political thing to more of a general social movement. And it was the first world's largest and probably still is intentional community, where an intentional group of people come and form a community. And one of those most interesting byproducts of this intentional community wasn't participation in the legislature, even though that did end up happening as well and has had a significant impact in New Hampshire politics since. But a lot of the early cryptocurrency movement came from this kind of uh incubator stage of liberty ideas from this concentration of people. So, for example, there was a there was a radio show, still is out of Keene, New Hampshire, called Free Talk Live, that one of the members of the Free State Project, a couple of members of the Free State Project moved from Florida to Keene to run this show. And on that show, they started talking about Bitcoin because some of their listeners talked to them about Bitcoin. And Roger Vare, who is known as Bitcoin Jesus, was the first angel investor in Bitcoin startups, heard about Bitcoin by listening to this show. He was a donor, he was he was an advertiser on the show, actually. And he heard about Bitcoin and then he contacted them and said, I want you to take, I want to pay you in Bitcoin. This is great. Heard about on your show, you should actually start taking it, and he started using it. And so without his influence, there would not necessarily be anywhere near a crypto ecosystem like there is today. And then Gavin Andreessen, who was who inherited the keys from Satoshi Nakamoto, came up in person to be on that show in the early days. And we also had the Bitcoin ATM was invented in Manchester, New Hampshire. And Vitalik Buterin came up and visited during his time at Bitcoin Magazine before Ethereum was launched, and some other key figures such as Charlie Trump were there. There's a lot of those early, the early roots of the crypto movement were created because of the Free State Project. And there's a lot of, in fact, there's a crypto conference called the Free State Bitcoin Digital Assets Conference that just wrapped up a couple weeks ago, run by early Bitcoin pioneer Bruce Fenton, who was involved with the Bitcoin Foundation, etc., back in the 2010 era. So for a long time, New Hampshire was synonymous, or the Free State Project and cryptocurrency were almost synonymous. And since then, the industry has grown so much bigger than just a small group of freedom radicals trying to try this out. But that connection is where, of course, it influenced me. I, if I had not moved for the Free State Project, I probably would have gotten interested in cryptocurrency, but maybe many years later, like 2017, for example.

Joeri: 28:00

Wow. Great stories that you have, Joel. The time is really going fast when I'm listening to you. There is a lot more to discover. All the projects that you are working on, as my listeners know, there are always show notes. Everything you mention will be found in there. But if they want to follow you, if they want to find out more about your projects, where would you like me to send them?

Joël: 28:22

Yes, so personally, the best way of following me is on X. My handle is the Desert Links. Desert is in Hot Place, Links is in the Cat. And that is probably the best place to follow me anywhere. I have a podcast called Digital Cash Network that's on YouTube, etc. I also, of course, share everything from my X account. And you can also just look up my name and just about anywhere you see that. My day job, of course, is marketing and business development for the dash DAO. And so dash.org is a good way to find out about that. Or if you all are on X, follow the Dash Pay account, which is the official-ish Dash account. So those are the best places to follow.

Joeri: 29:09

Amazing. I will put all the links in the show notes, as always. People can go there. Yes, Joel, thank you so much. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show. I learned many things.

Joël: 29:21

Yes, thanks very much. This is a distinct pleasure, of course.

Joeri: 29:25

Guys, thank you so much for listening. Joel, share a lot of value. I'm sure that what he said can be really, really useful for people around you because crypto is getting more and more part of everyday life. So be sure to share the episode with people around you. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. Also, if you give me this five stars, this will help me reach an even bigger audience. And of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.