I feel like today people like myself, we have actually the means and the power to fight, and it has never been a time in the world actually like that until Bitcoin came in 2008. Everything is possible actually, because money is everything. When Foday Joke was a high school senior growing up in Senegal, he was accepted to Emporia State University in Kansas to study engineering and to play basketball. But before enrolling, the value of the tuition money his father had set aside was cut in half overnight because of a backroom deal spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund and the French government. So all of the money that my dad saved for me to basically go to college overnight was worth 50% less. That experience is what led to Jokes, current career as a software developer working to make Bitcoin easy to use as a medium of exchange for anyone in Senegal with a smartphone. Bitcoin is not controlled by anybody, nobody can come overnight and send it to us this much or 50% less or 40% less. So if you are in a country where maybe your money might be divided on a whim of other nations interfering with the local economy, storing your money in Bitcoin might be a better deal for you in the future to preserve your wealth and preserve your value. So it's providing a parallel story about it? Exactly. And a superior one that is not going to be the whim of the French government, the US government, the Senegal. That's right. Senegal has been subject to monetary colonialism since 1945. When France ratified the Bretton Woods agreement, which gave a control over the currency of 14 African nations. On the morning of January 11th, 1994, the CFA Frank or CIFA was pegged to the French Frank at a valuation of 1 to 50. The following day, it was cut to 1 to 100 after the French government gave into pressure from the International Monetary Fund in World Bank to devalue the currency. Not only did this temporarily crush jokes college dreams, it also led to widespread political unrest. As West Africa's subsistence farmers could no longer afford to import essential goods, including drugs to treat malaria. It was really a big uproar for these African countries, but the local people really found themselves pretty much around because your purchasing power overnight was worse at. The cruel irony was that the economic fate of millions of Senegalese was completely out of their own hands. It highlights the human rights foundations Alex Gladstein, no amount of protests could overthrow their economic masters. Jokes father was eventually able to pull together the money and Jokes got to attend college after all. After graduating, he came across a video featuring a Senegalese scientist and historian who criticized the French African monetary system. Jokes says it was the first of three awakenings that set him on his current career path. The next was Steve Jobs famous 2007 announcement of the iPhone, which ultimately led him to consider how poorly traditional banks served the citizens of Senegal. Jobs handheld computer created an opportunity to circumvent these institutions altogether. But Jobs's revolutionary new communication device needed a decentralized monetary system to match, which is where Bitcoin comes in. Reading Satoshi Nakamoto's groundbreaking 2008 paper led to Jokes' third awakening. But the Bitcoin network alone isn't well suited to becoming a medium of exchange for everyday purchases in Senegal or anywhere else. That's because it currently has the capacity to process only a handful of transactions per second, which is where the Bitcoin Lightning Network comes in. So Bitcoin, for it to rival the likes of Visa and Messacard, it would have to do upwards for like 20,000 transactions per second, or like the 25, even 25,000. Today unfortunately Bitcoin only does 7 to about 12 transactions per second. Lightning Network works like a bar tab. You go to the bar, you open a tab and you pretty much go back and forth and take as many transactions like this one and then you settle with your bill at the end of the night. So Bitcoin is a base layer, but unfortunately it's not really fast or nor is it cheap. So basically what happens is, you and I, we open a channel, or like a Lightning Network channel, we put some funds in there that we love. And then we can contact as many times as we want, millions of times basically. At the end of the month, we basically go settle on the Bitcoin layer itself, which is a little bit more expensive because of course it's the base layer, but Lightning wise, our transactions will pretty much cause a fraction of an end. So it's almost instant, almost free. And then at that point we can rival the Messacard to the Visa and other world. With Bitcoin, the Lightning Network and ubiquitous smartphones, Job thinks it's possible to build a new free market monetary system that will finally liberate Senegal and other African countries from the last vestiges of colonialism. I feel like maybe governments are still threatened maybe, but to me, open source technology is just beautiful. And I believe actually that our work is so important that we have to do it no matter what the consequences are. So if you can leverage this technology to fight the oppressor, right? And technology, open source technology is actually what we need right now. And it's here. So why not use it?