Living On Defi by Mariano Conti (Devcon5)

my name is Mariana Conte work at the make your foundation and this is living on defy how I survived Argentina's 50% inflation of course that's the title that I came up with around two months ago when I submitted this presentation four months ago when I was just outlining what I was gonna say this was the title how to survive Argentina's 40% inflation and if we jump to today's sadly the actual talk is called how survive Argentina's fifty five percent inflation and let me tell you we still have three more months in the year so I don't know what we're gonna end up but anyway how do I survive Argentina's inflation but you probably know I'm not gonna give you three guesses the answer is very very simple I get paid and die that's it it's I get paid in a stable cryptocurrency that is pegged to the u.s. dollar which is the dollar is something that Argentinians value very very much even though some people in the US might say it is inflationary in its own sense it has its own problems for somebody in Argentina let me tell you those problems are absolutely nothing but let me take a step back this is the quick agenda for today I'm gonna do a recap of Argentina's economy this past few years it's not gonna be any charts or lots of numbers just gonna tell you a story the rest of crypto in Argentina my personal story and one defy can do today for us and for you if you manage to catch room stock here stock is a lot about the future mine is about the actual present and here's one thing everything I'm gonna say it's totally the truth at least in my perspective there is gonna be one lie and I don't want to call it a lie let's call it a twist I'm gonna leave for the end so let's go Argentina late 2011 I was living in Mexico till 2010 really nice economy doesn't feel like it but let me tell you once I got into Argentina things were starting to get really bad we had capital controls it was really hard to get access to USD there began a secondary black market the government said that the USD was worth X and the black market said it was worth Y and if you worked for an outside company the government would try to take your dollars and buy them at the official rate which was really low and people started finding lots of different ways to get access to dollars I'm not gonna go over all of them but let me tell you Argentinians are really really resourceful when it comes to acquiring dollars and other currencies that are much much better than the original tempo so there was some memories of 2001 the Carlito which was when the government just decided to freeze all of our bank accounts and just let us take a little bit of money out every month they actually pacified every single US dollar bank account and then they forests deflated the value of the peso so was a complete disaster and around 2011-2012 you know Argentina has a culture of working that freelancers working for outside companies we have really good tech knowledge I see a lot of you here and some of them and some of us that are figuring out how can we get paid and of course the answer was Bitcoin we started a lot of us can intern in Bitcoin in those early days and it worked really well for people who got in around that time 2012 2013 2014 but and I was talking to some friends we all remember those who got in early but not the people who got paid in Bitcoin in 2018 maybe when if they couldn't actually trade it back to pesos in a couple of days they would get maybe their salary reduced by 20% or something so what it gave us early on patron was protection from the system access to an economy that was somewhat unavailable for a lot of people but it had volatility of course so let me say more or less what how we are right now in Argentina capital controls are returning sadly there's gonna be an election soon and the markets have more or less spoken that things may turn bad so the government is already coding caps and how much USD we can buy and since everything depends on the US dollar in Argentina things are starting to look a little bit rough just last month central bank published a list of names with the equivalent of Social Security numbers on an official bulletin with the names in those numbers of people who have bought more than 10k USD essentially daxing them to the to the whole country and another thing that they're doing if you work for an outside company and you invoice in USD when you get that money into the interior bank account you have to liquidate it into pesos within five days and most of the people what they do they buy back US dollars once again they lose like seven percent spread so it is starting to get bad but this time we've seen this before we've always seen this prices before but I believe that there we are prepared to do something about this and the answer for me at least and for the people I'm trying to get into this died because died for us the people who are living in this kind of countries and economies die is better money it has all the advantages of a cryptocurrency but pegged to a currency that is really really valuable to us and that has implications and good properties that our local currencies at least now don't have and may never have so let's get a little bit into my crypt of story like he was said I've been living off a crypto for five years I started in late 2014 getting paid in Bitcoin to escape capital controls as I've said and then I found a theorem in 2015 and went more or less all in and 2016 decided I want to work at the best project that there is some aetherium and luckily found maker where I've been working for over three years but one of the happiest days of my life was when we deployed the alpha version of single collateral die called sigh and a couple of weeks after that I got my first paycheck a hundred percent inside that was really amazing day and just a few months later when we released the die that you guys know and use every day now the next month my paycheck came in a hundred percent died and it's been that way ever since and this is also true I was thinking about it and I've never bought crypto with fear in my entire life ever every single token that I have bit I'm not gonna call them let's say every single token that I have I've earned that via my work and this is something that I'm actually really really proud of so let's get even more personal so what I do with my paycheck there's two worlds there's the fiat world and the crypto world we cannot yet go into a store and purchase everything we die or we lease or we'd be a pony we're not there yet but what we can do is I offer amp once a month in two pesos just the bare minimum to pay rent to pay groceries they use one credit card I pay off my credit card to the full amount and I stay as close to zero as I can it's like Arjun timepieces talks it to me so I try to avoid it and then the encrypt the world what everybody does I buy some Eve I loaned I into markets like compound dy/dx Newell I buy token sets Dharma and then I'm earning interest in a stable currency and I acknowledged that there's risks there's platform risks there's smart contract risks but let me tell you if you have pesos in an Argentinean bank account the risks are nonzero and they're actually very much I would say in the mid 20s 30s 50s the risks are there so I would much rather trust you guys with my dive and the Argentine government and another thing that's happening this is getting more common every day I'm sure that there's a lot of you that get paid and die your salaries maybe it's in full maybe it's some amount but I've been talking to so many of you and people get paid and die and you use that die to put into things like compound earning interest and for the ones that actually live in countries like Argentina Venezuela you're escaping volatility inflation you're escaping control of like a crappy government and the economy so this is not only happened in Argentina it's happening in so many places and what I always say it's like if you want to see what krypter can do today look south look to the emergent economies people like me everybody has stories like this and talk to these people and learn from them and try to build for this kind of people too and this is something that we're doing at the Maker Foundation working with local companies from a lot of the Latin American countries that I mentioned also Mexico Brazil helping exchanges and on and off ramps and maybe creating point-of-sales or working with Thai wallets and the most important thing of all educating people educating people which is key I say we this is personal I want people earning and saving and die I try to get as many people into this as I possibly can and okay we come to a twist right it's not a very big choice but I like it nonetheless I've mentioned all of what I do the earning and I getting things into compound like having a normal there's a lot of people in Argentina that I know that do this but I go one step further right this I'm not a normal person who works for an outside company and gets paid like I'm up here talking to you at Def Con I work in the etherium ecosystem with all of you that I can help make this place better and this ecosystem better so what do I do I turn everything I get into either because I believe in this and when I see all of you I think that this is the right thing to do I am a maximalist and even though it would be better to just maybe keep everything in die this is not what I'm gonna do I'm up here I'm making this world better and I turn everything into e like I told him I asked a friend of mine so what's your trading strategy and what he said is I try to buy a little bit every day so that's exactly what I do I try to buy a little bit every day because of all of you you know the core devs the EIP writers I went to so many talks today teams working on a theory and phase zero one two all the community the people who tweet if this money over and over and over even you guys I love you it is because of you and that's what I'm gonna keep doing and just remember a strong eath makes for a stronger die die is a stabilized version of ether so everything that we're doing I think is encouraging the dial system and that's going to make at least the people in my country I'm trying to get out of the crappy economic system that they're in we're helping to make it better and now I would like all the Argentinians here which I know pretty much every one of you to just like stand up I want to see all of you because most of you and you see that there's a lot most of them [Applause] [Music] [Applause] most of them have stories very similar to mine and I want everybody who didn't get up to just look at them and I'm taking Argentina because it's what I know but I know that there's probably a lot of you from other places that face there's equal problems but look at the people who stood up and talked to them it's like what I've said today this is an anecdote but enough anecdotes and it starts to resemble something of kind of like data then that's the way I see it so we're all trying to get DEFCON 20 20 bonus itís because I think it's the right place to be there because you all know that what I'm talking about is what we leave every day and just like do everything I'm saying that sweet DEFCON be a 2020 and thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we actually have like five minutes for questions and this is the last talk of the day so if anybody wants to get up and ask a question you're free to do so otherwise yeah I see a couple of hands please to the microphone we do have some more t-shirts and we have the yep look for us after every time you said your friend I see is your friend does that that's your friend exist at all this friend is an amalgamation of a lot of people including a lot of the people who stood up yeah okay sorry for this but how do you pay taxes yeah and this was this was in one of my slides and I decided to take it out I do pay taxes I decided not to put him in because talking to people from so many different countries tax laws are so different that I would end up spending most of the time discussing tax strategies I pay my taxes yeah but I might do better in another country it's like if you want to know what I do for taxes like come to me after and all that I mean I've said almost everything I'll be happy to tell you the rest that since everybody's coming from different countries I don't want to assume anything anybody else we're good hey thanks very inspiring by the way as someone who also gets paid in crypto I wanted to ask a question what were some of the largest challenges you had to overcome in the last few years you know leaving the traditional finances behind so first it was just basically off ramping the fees were way too high they still are sometimes so for me sometimes it's even easier maybe I can change died to pesos or maybe I can get dying to ether in two dollars and $10 in two pesos it's like there are many different ways to and since the economy changes everyday there may be a good or better way to do it differently and then just another was I started using only cash and that didn't really work for my like credit history so I did have to go back a little into the system via credit card just the fact that I thought that I could be using crypto every single day and that is not the case but I used it once a month at least to offer him and that is enough for me well and aside the little bit that I buy every day hey great talk you're putting yourself out there it's basically explaining how you're bending the rules against the government aren't you afraid that there might be some consequences to that like that the government starts taking other measures to find people like you I think it is possible but I'm not trying to make myself a martyr or anything it's we've seen plenty of other people do what I'm doing over the years first with Bitcoin I'm doing this with dye so I don't want to say that it's a price I'm willing to pay but if we get enough people outside the system then maybe we can get the system to see that there is something wrong and help it change we have with one minute I thank you very touching talk thank you I'm traveling to Argentina in December and what's the best way to change dye or ether to low local pesos I mean locally I'll give you my Telegraph great so if there are any more questions thank you so much for staying I love you all [Applause] you