Whenever I talk about cryptocurrency to someone, I always hear at some point: “it’s for criminals” or “it’s bad for the environment.”

The first claim is easy to debunk. Blockchain analysis company Chainalysis—which partners with governments to track criminals using crypto—concluded that illicit activities made up only 0.15% of all crypto transactions. That’s ridiculously low. And according to the US Attorney General’s Cyber-Digital Task Force: “the government has legal and regulatory tools available at its disposal to confront the threats posed by cryptocurrency’s illicit uses.”

The environmental question is more complex and mainly focuses on energy consumption. As of today, there are 18,522 cryptocurrencies. Most of them use one of the following mechanisms: “proof of work” or “proof of stake.” Proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies consume ~99.95% less, so there’s no question of energy consumption for them. Bitcoin and Ethereum—the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization—use proof of work, though. However, Ethereum should switch to proof of stake this year. So let’s focus on Bitcoin’s energy consumption.

Of course, if you believe that Bitcoin is useless, then any amount of energy it uses is a waste. Recent articles in the mainstream media explained how Bitcoin is helping starving Afghans, allowing Ukraine to raise millions of dollars in a few days for its military, and protecting Turks from hyperinflation. For me, that’s enough to prove that Bitcoin is valuable, but it’s, of course, subjective.

Does Bitcoin use a lot of energy?

It’s not a bug; it’s a feature. It’s Bitcoin’s security model. As Till Musshoff wrote: “To reverse or change a transaction, you need 51% of all the electricity that flows into the network - which again - is extremely costly.” He concludes:

The more electricity the Bitcoin network consumes → The more expensive an attack is → The more secure the network is.

According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, Bitcoin consumes more electricity than Ukraine. If Ukraine wanted to attack the Bitcoin network, they would need to use all their electricity production. Impossible. Bitcoin can resist an attack from a nation state at least as big as Ukraine.

Compared to countries, Bitcoin electricity consumption seems enormous. But what if I told you that Bitcoin consumes less electricity than Christmas lights around the world? Or than the paper industry? Suddenly, Bitcoin electricity consumption looks tiny.

What’s Bitcoin’s energy mix?

If you care about climate change, Co2 emissions matter more than raw consumption. According to the New York Times, Bitcoin’s use of renewables ranges from 40% to 75%. This makes Bitcoin greener than most countries in the world. For instance, in the US, only 20% of electricity production comes from renewables. People who run computers securing the Bitcoin network (called “miners”) get a fixed monetary reward for doing their job. So they are looking for the cheapest electricity sources to be profitable. As renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels, I assume Bitcoin will soon be 100% low-carbon.

Bitcoin boosts renewables

Crypto bros have long said that Bitcoin was a clean energy stimulus. I didn’t believe it at first. And yet, all scientific papers I found concluded that Bitcoin mining increases the profitability of renewable energy power stations and therefore accelerates the transition to green energy.1 How come?

Renewables are intermittent. They often produce electricity when no one needs it. Unfortunately, electricity cannot travel long distances without loss, nor can it be stored easily. This overgenerated electricity is wasted today. If you plug computers into that electricity when there’s low demand, power station operators can monetize the surplus supply. So unprofitable sustainable energy projects can become profitable with Bitcoin. And according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Bitcoin could be powered by wasted electricity only!

Another point often overlooked: within an electrical grid, the energy generated must always equal the energy consumed. If more power is generated than consumed, quick adjustments are necessary to balance the frequency disturbances and power outages. So renewables’ intermittent nature demands enormous investments in transmission and distribution infrastructure. Bitcoin can be used as a local buyer of last resort and stabilize the grid so that production never exceeds consumption.

Why not switch to proof of stake?

If proof of stake is so much more energy-efficient, why not use proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies instead of Bitcoin? This debate goes far beyond the scope of the current article, but I believe that Bitcoin is safer and better than proof-of-stake alternatives. As Lyn Alden explained:

Blockchains that use other consensus models with lower energy requirements, like proof-of-stake, make trade-offs to do so. There is no free lunch, and these other forms of consensus are not strictly “better” than Bitcoin’s proof-of-work model, since they have more attack surfaces and greater risks of centralization.

Environmental impact of the petrodollar

Bitcoin critics fail to compare it to our current system. Until the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in 1971, currencies were directly or indirectly backed by gold. After 1971, per Wikipedia:

President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, feared that the abandonment of the international gold standard under the Bretton Woods arrangement (combined with a growing U.S. trade deficit, and massive debt associated with the ongoing Vietnam War) would cause a decline in the relative global demand of the U.S. dollar. In a series of meetings, the United States and the Saudi royal family made an agreement. The United States would offer military protection for Saudi Arabia's oil fields, and in return the Saudi's would price their oil sales exclusively in United States dollars (in other words, the Saudis were to refuse all other currencies, except the U.S. dollar, as payment for their oil exports).

That’s the “petrodollar system.” Backed by fossil fuels and enforced by the US military. For instance, in 2000, Saddam Hussein successfully dumped the US dollar for the euro to sell petroleum. Three years later, the US invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam. In 2008 Gaddafi started selling Libyan oil in euro and yen. Three years later, NATO attacked Libya and killed Gaddafi. More than 500,000 innocent deaths and 3 million displaced and refugees: that’s the cost of the dollar system.

And if you thought that going back to the gold standard was the solution: gold mining is an environmental disaster.

Conclusion: All roads lead to Bitcoin?

Renewable energy will eventually kill the petrodollar and the ability for the US to run up massive deficits without consequences. This will make Bitcoin and other alternative currencies even more popular. If you care about the environment and climate change, you cannot support the existing petrodollar system. And as Bitcoin accelerates the energy transition, you probably have to support Bitcoin as well! 😉

What do you think? Subscribe and join the conversation!

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Further reading

• Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

• Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Isn’t a Problem. Here’s Why., by Lyn Alden

• Why The Proposed EU Bitcoin Ban Would Have Been A Mistake, by Till Musshoff

• Column: Does a greener world need less greenbacks?, Reuters

• Uncovering The Hidden Costs Of The Petrodollar, Alex Gladstein

• The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System, by Lyn Alden

• Bitcoin miners and renewable energy, by Thoralf Gutierrez

El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as its official currency in September 2021. Since then, it has been described as “the trendiest country to travel to in 2022,” and tourism has increased by +30%. I visited El Salvador with my girlfriend in November (I wrote about my trip here), and we got a lot of questions about El Salvador, so here’s my short guide.

Getting there

There are many direct flights from the US, Canada, and Latin America. For Europeans, Iberia offers direct flights from Madrid. Actually, not direct, as there is a short “technical stop” in Guatemala (refueling?) when coming from Madrid. So you may not see this flight if you look for “direct” ones. Anyway, if you come from outside the American continent, you’ll probably need to make a stop in Mexico or the US. The local airport is modern, good, and efficient.

Safety and security

This question, unfortunately, always comes quickly. El Salvador has a terrible reputation, as many gangs operating in the US originate from the country. In 2015, El Salvador was the deadliest country outside a war zone. 😬 However, as I explained in another article, the number of homicides has since been divided by 6!

Still, the US, UK, and Canadian governments explain how unsafe the country is and why you should reconsider your trip. Surprisingly, the French government’s website is more detailed, less alarming, and closer to what we experienced. In the map below, about half of the country is in yellow (that I would translate as “Be careful and everything should be fine”), and the other half is in orange (“Travel not recommended”).

We were a bit nervous before visiting, but we eventually felt safe during our whole trip. Probably as safe if not safer as in Paris or San Francisco. Including when we were visiting alone without our guide. The Salvadoran government invested in a “tourist police” (POLITUR) that provides security in tourist areas and considerably improves safety. Locals also told us that gangs don’t target tourists because they extort businesses in the tourism industry, so gangs need to make sure tourists feel safe.

We didn’t rent a car as we read the roads were terrible, but the main roads were actually brand new and looked great. Minor roads were in bad shape, though, and everyone told us not to drive at night.

The situation can still evolve quickly: El Salvador is not (yet!) Singapore in terms of safety. It’s, for instance, common to see guards with machine guns in front of gas stations or restaurants. Please also note that 1/ we stayed in relatively safe “yellow” areas, and 2/ we were there for the Adopting Bitcoin conference; the government may have increased police protection during the event. So for your first trip, if you prefer to stay on the safe side, hire a guide to drive you around and organize hikes and visits. Our guide Salvatore from Tunco Life was fantastic; I strongly recommend him! (and of course, he accepts Bitcoin)

What to do in El Salvador?

We stayed ten days, in three different places:

Lago de Coatepeque and volcanoes

We had an Airbnb on Lago de Coatepeque, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. Waking up with the sunrise on the lake is unique. The lake and its changing colors mesmerized me. No wonder the Salvadoran elite owns summer houses there!

Around the lake, we visited the Maya ruins of El Tazumal and the cute colonial village of Concepción de Ataco.

We climbed the Santa Ana and Izalco volcanoes (both active). About 20 volcanoes dot El Salvador, and volcano climbing is super popular.

San Salvador

In the capital San Salvador, we mostly stayed at the conference hotel and didn’t visit the city. Not sure we missed much: El Salvador is known for its natural landscapes, not for its cities. 😅

Beaches and surf

El Tunco, El Sunzal, and El Zonte are three small beach towns in the department of La Libertad. They’re next to each other, but you cannot easily walk between them as the water covers the sand and rocks on the beach at high tide. We stayed at the great Kayu Hotel. The Salvadoran Bitcoin movement started in El Zonte, which is now known as “Bitcoin Beach.” The ocean is gorgeous, and the area is one of the best surf spots in the world: the 2021 ISA World Surfing Games were organized there. The Salvadoran government even renamed this coastline “Surf City!”

What’s the food like?

Huge disappointment when it comes to food: we expected delicious local dishes, but sadly El Salvador doesn’t produce many agricultural products locally and imports a lot from the US, often cheap, low-quality products. So food was often bland or even quite bad. A notable exception was the succulent El Jardín de Celeste in Ataco.

Still, you must try El Salvador’s national dish: pupusas, thick flatbread made with cornmeal and stuffed with cheese, meat, squash, and/or beans. Horchata is the most popular drink, and it goes well with pupusas:

What about Bitcoin adoption?

You can find Bitcoin ATMs all around the country. All big international chains (McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc.) accept Bitcoin. Many small businesses don’t accept Bitcoin, though, because they are against Bitcoin, don’t understand it, or simply don’t have customers using it. According to an independent survey done in December 2021 (3 months after the adoption of Bitcoin), 21% of the population uses Bitcoin at least once a month. And according to a March survey released by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 18% of businesses report having made sales in Bitcoin. The percentage is probably higher for individuals (like taxi drivers and guides) who can use their personal wallets. If the acceptance rate is about 20% nationally, this figure hides considerable geographical diversity. For instance, in November (just two months after the law’s adoption), the adoption was closer to 70-80% in the beach town of El Zonte and about 10-20% in Coatepeque.

In any case, El Salvador is the only place in the world where you can ask a business “Do you accept Bitcoin?” and the owner won’t laugh at you or ask “Bit-what?” There, it’s like asking “Do you take credit cards?” You may get a no, but it’s worth asking. Most importantly, you can see real Bitcoin use cases there, beyond trading and “hodling.” People use Bitcoin to avoid remittance fees, to pay online without a credit card (only 10% of Salvadorans own a credit card), and to pay their utility bills faster.

Where else can I find information?

El Salvador isn’t a trendy destination. Tourism is primarily local, and it can be hard to find detailed and up-to-date information in popular travel books. That’s why a local guide can be helpful. Wikivoyage and the Facebook group “Expats in El Salvador” are excellent sources of information.

We loved our trip, and even though the country is tiny, there are many things to do. We’d love to go back and visit other places such as Suchitoto, San Salvador, El Impossible, El Boqueron, waterfalls in Juayúa, Lake Ilopango, Joya de Ceren, Conchagua, and coffee plantations. All Salvadorans we met were extremely friendly, welcoming, and helpful. I hope tourism can boost the economy and change the country for the best. I also want to come back to see how Bitcoin adoption will evolve.

So if you like hiking, surfing, or Bitcoin/crypto, you should visit El Salvador. It’s also an excellent way to support the country and its inhabitants. Please let me know if you have any questions about El Salvador!

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The El Salvador Series:

1. El Salvador: First impressions

2. The rise of a new El Salvador?

3. From El Salvador to the world

4. Bitcoin Beach: Where everything started

5. Real Bitcoin use cases in El Salvador

6. Can El Salvador be the next Singapore?

7. El Salvador: My Travel Guide (this article)
   

With Covid and the advent of remote work, many surmised the demise of cities. I don’t believe in this scenario because, as Alfred Marshall wrote in 1890, in dense clusters, “the mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air.” Urban life brings economic opportunities and better infrastructure. That’s why three million people worldwide are moving to urban areas every week, and this trend is here to stay:

Still, if Zoom won’t end urban life, it does make talent and capital more mobile. So technology could revolutionize the very notion of a city. That’s the ambition of CabinDAO. Its founder, Jon Hillis, defines a ‘decentralized city’ as “a network of distinct physical locations tied together by shared governance and culture.” As crazy as it may sound, decentralized cities are just another instance of a “cloud formation” taking physical shape, as outlined by Balaji Srinivasan:

It’s now common for a couple to meet online and stay together for years. Or for an internet startup with 100 employees to be fully remote. Decentralized cities extend this concept in terms of scale and duration. Digital nomads—remote workers living a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle—were the forerunners of this concept. However, most of them move alone and don’t belong to a community. They’re not (yet) “tied together by shared governance and culture.” On the other hand, participants at Kumbh Mela are. But what is Kumbh Mela?

Most Westerners are unaware of what is the largest celebration on earth. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu festival celebrated four times over a 12-year cycle, its location rotating between four pilgrimage places on four sacred rivers. The Kumbh Mela lasts about eight weeks, and in 2019 it attracted more than 200 million people—the population of Brazil—including 50 million on the most attended day. (As a matter of comparison, Burning Man gathers 80,000 participants over nine days.) On the above “Classification of Cloud Formations,” Kumbh Mela would be classified as a gigantic “Cloud Gathering.” Kumbh Mela is organized in October on a riverbed once the river’s waters recede after the monsoon. In June, traces of the event disappear with the new monsoon as the river floods the site. That’s why Kumbh Mela has been described as “The Ephemeral Mega City,” the “Cyclical City,” or a “virtual pop-up megacity.”

I’ve unfortunately never attended Kumbh Mela, but I followed Tarun Khanna’s “Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies” MOOC, where he explains that:

• This megacity is constructed and deconstructed in record time: approximately two months for each phase. Total budget: US$590 million.

• It follows a ‘Sites and Services’ approach. The government provides the essential grid—rudimentary roads and bridges to cross the river, a basic sanitation system, water supply, street light, internet and cell phone capabilities, and free electricity—then blocks are leased to private religious trusts that had been around for hundreds of years (Akharas). In essence, a public-private partnership.

• The grid is rigid, but within the grid, every block can self-organize freely. Some blocks are highly hierarchical, while others are more democratic.

• Blocks are mostly made of tents for sleeping, eating, religious gatherings, entertainment, and socializing. There are also 14 hospitals, 150 first aid posts, mass vaccination centers, fire services, and police stations.

• After the celebrations, bridges, telephone lines, electrical poles, and street lighting are recycled.

• Even the governance is temporal. One year before the event, the state’s chief minister sets up a top-down governance structure, and the state bureaucracy allocates resources. Then for six months, during the implementation of Kumbh Mela (construction, event, deconstruction), the administration structure flips, and the commissioner of the festival is giving temporary extraordinary powers. This bottom-up management structure has minimal interference from the state’s chief minister.

• It is safe. Despite the size of the event, no major incident happens. The worst incident in the 21st century was the 2013 stampede which killed 42 people. To compare, about 3 million Muslims attend the Hajj pilgrimage every year, and the 2015 stampede resulted in 2,411 deaths.

• Although the festival is inclusive and anyone can attend—irrespective of their faith—most participants are Hindu. They’re from different denominations, come from all parts of India, and speak different languages, but they’re there for a common religious and cultural purpose. As a result, politics and potential contestations are all suspended for a few weeks for this incredible celebration. Kumbh Mela becomes the physical representation of what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community.” Here: the Hindu nation. Therefore, the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage is both a personal journey for the pilgrim and a collective act of faith for the community.

When we talk about cities, urban planning, and architecture, we tend to take permanence as a default condition. Kumbh Mela teaches us that cities can be ephemeral. “Decentralized cities” aren’t that crazy after all.

I also believe that this strong sense of community among Hindu pilgrims makes Kumbh Mela possible. Decentralized cities will have to construct similar “imagined communities” to succeed. Indeed, as Roxine Kee and _marulli noted: “A decentralized city, on the other hand, places a heavier emphasis on culture because it has no set physical location.” Coco Liu from Talent City—a project aiming to build Africa’s “Silicon Valley” in a new city next to Lagos—similarly told me that Talent City would rest on three pillars: physical, digital, and cultural infrastructure. I love this framework because Kumbh Mela shows that the cultural component is essential. As it is intangible, it’ll be the hardest to build and maintain. Kumbh Mela has existed for 5,000 years; on the other hand, how can decentralized cities quickly develop a powerful feeling of community? I don’t know, but I’m excited about this challenge!

And of course, if we can create decentralized cities, the logical next step will be to build decentralized countries, aka “cloud countries.” 🚀 Does this sound crazy to you? Let me know!

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I started this newsletter in October 2020. Since then, I’ve significantly improved my writing. Here’s how.

Less is More

On Writing Well by William Zinsser and The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. taught me that succinctness is power. So trim useless words, adjectives, adverbs, and even sentences. If you’re struggling with a sentence: delete it! Check this cheat sheet for cutting clutter.

“Omit Needless Words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. […] When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.”—William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style

“Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose. […] The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.”―William Zinsser, On Writing Well

Cheat with Online Tools

As English isn’t my native language, I make many typos and grammar mistakes. Thankfully, Grammarly—a Ukrainian startup 🇺🇦— fixes them for me. If you haven’t read The Elements of Style, no worries, the Grammarly Premium version spots needless words for you. It makes your text more concise and, therefore, more powerful.

When I’m almost done, I check my draft’s most common terms with WordCounter. Then, I find synonyms with Lexico.com and replace them to avoid repetition.

Let your Writing Speak for Yourself

Don’t explicitly say the message you want to convey: let the reader guess it. So don’t say “The scenery was beautiful,” but describe how beautiful it was.

“Instead of announcing what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.”—William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style

Embrace Humanity

Fellow 1729er Coleman Foley recently noticed that my articles were more persuasive and engaging when I grounded them in my own experiences. It’s so true! I forgot that “Humanity” was one of Zinsser’s “four articles of faith.” So talk about people—whether you or others—and add humor! 😉

“Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”―William Zinsser, On Writing Well

Leverage the Web

Online writing differs from print on one point: the web has hyperlinks. I love Wikipedia because there are blue links everywhere. You can browse from one subject to another and then randomly end up reading about “men of retirement age who spend their time watching construction sites.” 😅 According to a popular hypothesis, all Wikipedia pages are six or fewer links away from each other! I want to create similar serendipity in my content, so I add as many links as possible. I also use these links as sources: so don’t trust me; click and verify!

What are your tips for better writing?

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After much hesitation, I eventually got a smartwatch. I thought it was a gadget for gym rats, but I realized that smartwatches could help you stay fit and are incredibly useful in disease prevention.

They keep you active

With remote work and delivery services, it’s so easy to stay home all day long. And yet, according to the World Health Organization: “Sedentary lifestyles increase all causes of mortality, double the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity, and increase the risks of colon cancer, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, lipid disorders, depression and anxiety.” 😱

Like all other smartwatches, mine1 counts my steps and estimates my activity level. So, if I realize I haven’t done much at the end of the day, it pushes me to go out, at least for a short walk. My watch also reminds me to do some stretching or squats after sitting for more than an hour. This short exercise break is similar to the Pomodoro Technique that I’ve always tried to follow without success. I feel much better now after these short breaks. These two simple features are probably enough to justify the acquisition of a smartwatch.

A lab on your wrist

What’s more, smartwatches such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 measure:

• Heart rate,

• Stress level, using heart rate variability. It suggests some breathing exercises that work surprisingly well if you’re stressed!

• Sleep patterns and snoring,

• ECG, with atrial fibrillation detection,

• Blood pressure,

• Basal metabolic rate,

• Body fat percentage,

• Blood oxygen saturation,

• Skeletal muscle mass,

• Body water.

The only other way to measure these metrics is often a heavy device, only available through doctors, such as a Holter monitor. So it’s a miracle that you can now get them with your watch.

Still, even though these features are approved by regulators, they’re not yet as accurate as dedicated medical devices. For instance, the blood pressure on my watch only moderately matches the one given by an arm cuff. Nevertheless, it provides a good range of regular data to send to your doctor. Hypertension is often called the “silent killer”: it’s the 9th leading cause of death in high-income countries, but most people who have it don’t have any symptoms. Detecting it early on is fantastic! A recent study showed that smartwatches could as well help Parkinson’s disease patients manage their postural hypotension, which usually goes undetected. By the way, blood pressure monitoring on Samsung Watch is available all around the world... but not in the US, as the FDA hasn’t approved it yet… We should have the right to try such devices. It’s yet another example that we need more technologically-progressive jurisdictions.

And it’s only the beginning. Smartwatches will soon measure blood sugar levels in a non-invasive way! Today 415 million people worldwide are living with diabetes, and they may have to check their blood glucose several times a day. A non-invasive device will make their lives easier. On top of that, diabetes is the 9th leading cause of death globally, with an estimated 1.5 million deaths. And yet, 50% of diabetics are undiagnosed. This problem is not limited to developing countries: even in the US, 21% of patients are undiagnosed. Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of diabetes, is largely preventable by following a healthy lifestyle. Still, one-third of Americans have prediabetes: their blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be diagnosed with diabetes. The vast majority of prediabetics don’t know it. They only realize it when they start developing diabetes and related symptoms. It’s too late then. But contrary to diabetes, prediabetes is reversible, and early diagnosis using a smartwatch could prevent thousands of people from developing diabetes.

Similarly, Apple is working on sleep apnea detection for the Apple Watch, using the existing blood-oxygen sensor as SpO2 levels decrease during sleep apnea. About 1 billion people worldwide suffer from obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), and most are unaware of it. OSA is associated with neurocognitive morbidities such as attention and memory deficits. If diagnosed, a simple device such as eXciteOSA (20 min daily neuromuscular stimulation of the tongue) can reduce mild OSA by 50% after 6 weeks.

Whether it’s hypertension, diabetes, or sleep apnea, early detection by smartwatches and subsequent treatment could improve the quality of life of millions of people and save thousands of lives.

The researchers’ best friend

Besides prevention, smartwatches are helpful for research. For instance, there’s much discussion about “Long Covid,” some doctors claiming it’s only psychosomatic. However, Fitbit analyzed data from people with positive Covid-19 tests and concluded that it took a month for sleep quantity to return to normal after infection and almost three months for resting heart rate (RHR), which is way longer than for other viral infections. For about 14% of COVID-19–positive participants, their RHR did not return to normal after more than 133 days: they may suffer from “Long Covid.” Without wearable devices, we would never have been able to reach such a conclusion before. Another study also proved that Covid could be detected 3 days before symptom onset with a Fitbit or an Apple Watch!

About one in five Americans use a smartwatch or fitness tracker, and almost half of them would agree to share their data with health researchers. “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”: for centuries, medicine was running blind, and for the first time, we’ll have continuous records of the essential physiological data for millions if not billions of individuals. So I predict that the massive trove of data generated by smartwatches will become crucial in medical research and lead to discoveries.

Hypochondriacs beware!

Smartwatches are lovely, but this “quantified self” trend has a dark side: anxiety. I noticed it myself: after I got my smartwatch, I started checking everything all the time. I was sometimes anxious when some metrics were below or above the “normal” values… At least during these moments, the stress detector worked quite well and recommended some deep breathing exercises. 😅

Goodhart’s law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Smartwatches are no exception. Researchers found that some sleep tracking users had an unhealthy obsession with getting perfect “sleep scores,” which actually worsened their insomnia! They coined a new term for that condition: orthosomnia.

Conclusion

If you don’t have a smartwatch and want to be more active, I think it’s worth it.

If you own one: what’s your experience? Did it help you to stay healthy?

I may be too excited about smartwatches as I’m still in my “honeymoon phase.” Do you share my optimism? Is there a bearish case for wearable devices? Let me know what you think!

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I buy everything online, especially grocery shopping, and I’m often told that this is bad for the environment. I wanted to check. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything on Wikipedia. The pandemic led to a significant increase in e-commerce, and today, 20% of US retail is online (vs. 30% in the UK), which makes this question even more relevant:

Consultancy firm Oliver Wyman did the most recent study on the subject. Analyzing three sectors—fashion, books, and consumer electronics—they concluded that shopping in physical retail stores in Europe resulted in 2.3 times more greenhouse gas emissions than online shopping. However, this study was commissioned by… Amazon! Another unpublished study by Amazon concluded that “online grocery deliveries generate 43% lower carbon emissions per item compared to shopping in stores, and smaller basket sizes generate even greater carbon savings.” Since then, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has repeated that online shopping “consistently generates less carbon than driving to a store.” Should we trust him?

I looked at other independent studies. In particular, a 2021 paper reviewed all the literature on the subject. If online purchases perfectly substitute offline ones and if you only consider “direct transport impacts” (first-order effects), then there can be considerable savings in fuel consumption. Transport distances are indeed naturally lower in home delivery rounds as compared to individual store visits:

The above picture isn’t entirely accurate as warehouses used for e-commerce are further away from consumers than shops. Also, consumers can use other modes of transport. On the other hand, 10% of shopping trips result in no immediate purchase. Taking all of that into account, one study concluded that a personal shopping trip by car emits 24x more CO2 than a single drop within a home delivery round while taking the bus lowers the difference to 7x.

However, the authors of the review insist there’s no perfect substitution as online shopping changes consumers’ behaviors. For instance, e-commerce facilitates fragmented shopping. There are more returns online, especially in clothing. As e-commerce grows, some brick-and-mortar shops close, forcing customers to rely on their cars more. So the authors conclude that “there is no particular type of shopping that has an absolute environmental advantage.”

🤔

Why such a difference with the results communicated by Amazon? Probably because the previous paper relied solely on transportation costs. Another study modeled the grocery supply chain. According to them, offline, customers buy large baskets infrequently, which leads to more food waste. They estimated that online shopping could lead to an 8-41% reduction in emissions. More congested cities with a lower physical store density have the biggest gains. The change in food waste in households is the key component in these results. 30% of food is wasted globally across the supply chain, contributing 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the biggest emitter of CO2 after the US and China.

Many other factors give online shopping an advantage over physical retail. For instance, the fleet of e-commerce companies is greener than the average car: Amazon recently bought 100,000 electric vehicles and aims to be carbon neutral by 2040.

In physical retail, overstocking is also standard—consumers are more likely to buy from abundant-looking displays—leading to more waste. There’s better inventory management in the warehouses of e-commerce retailers.

And a traditional supermarket is energy-intensive: it is maintained at a comfortable temperature for shoppers while keeping food items refrigerated and frozen. On the contrary, warehouses operate at lower temperatures, and they don’t have the issue of constantly opening and closing entry doors.

Based on these studies, I think that Jeff Bezos is right when he says that: “shopping online is already inherently more carbon-efficient than going to the store.”

That being said, what you buy has way more impact than how and where you buy it. One study on meal kits found that food production was responsible for 65% of a meal’s carbon footprint. Whereas “transportation and logistics associated with the last mile are a pretty small overall contribution to the total environmental impact of food.”

So don’t listen to the naysayers: online shopping is good for the environment! And send them this article next time they criticize you for buying online 😉

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Wikipedia turned 20 earlier this year. No one initially believed it would work. Today, with 300,000 active contributors and 58 million articles written in 325 languages, Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, and it’s a reliable source on many topics.

But there’s a significant disparity between languages: 6 million articles in English, 1 million in Modern Standard Arabic, 50,000 in Kurdish, and only 360 articles in Fufulde, a language spoken by more than 40 million people across 20 countries in West and Central Africa.

Wikipedia was founded based on Hayek’s view that information is decentralized: each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively. As a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge rather than a central authority.

However, half of the world’s population doesn’t speak a language with significant coverage on Wikipedia (more than 1m articles). So information cannot flow to these people, and they cannot contribute to the world’s knowledge. Therefore, a subset of each Wikipedia is not covered by other editions. For instance, 20,000 articles on the Kurdish Wikipedia do not exist on the Arabic one. There are 20 million distinct topics across all language editions of Wikipedia, but “only” 6 million covered in English. The knowledge gap is enormous.

Wikidata was launched in 2012 to solve this problem. Wikidata is a structured database linked to Wikipedia. For example, Napoleon’s entry on Wikidata includes all basic information about him: name, place of birth, date of birth, etc. Because data is structured, it is also easily queried. Assistants such as Siri and Alexa use Wikidata’s structured dataset to answer questions: you can ask Wikidata to give you the list of largest cities with a female mayor or all oldest living US ex-presidents in chronological order. Using Wikidata, we can also fill in “infoboxes” on Wikipedia (e.g., here on a French article, about cheese, of course!). Wikidata entries can then be translated automatically into any language to generate content on Wikipedia.

But that’s not enough. We can only generate simple articles using these methods. And many “small” languages like Fufulde aren’t covered by machine translation systems like Google Translate. Besides reading, we want everyone to contribute. How can a Fufulde speaker document local politics in their hometown? Here come’s Abstract Wikipedia! Its goals:

• Allowing more people to read more content in the language they choose.

• Allowing more people to contribute content for more readers and thus increasing the reach of underrepresented contributors.

In Abstract Wikipedia, articles are written in a language-independent format, using items from Wikidata and semantic functions from Wikifunctions. Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can edit. It’s the Wiki version of GitHub. Wikifunctions will, in particular, host “renderers”: functions that turn the language-independent “Abstract content” into natural language, using the linguistic knowledge available in Wikidata. So Abstract Wikipedia = Wikidata + Wikifunctions.

This English sentence: “San Francisco is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose.” would be stored on Abstract Wikipedia as:

Items with “Q” followed by a number are entries on Wikidata (e.g., Q65 is Los Angeles). “Instantiation()” and “Ranking()” are two renderers. Instantiation() generates in English “x is y.”, such as: “Paris is a city,” “Wikipedia is a website,” etc. We just need to translate the Instantiation() renderer just once in a language, and we can then use it to generate thousands of different sentences in that language. It would then be easier to cover not only 325 languages but the 7,139 languages spoken globally.

With renderers, we could build any article. See here for a more complex example. Thanks to Wikidata, we could also update all editions of Wikipedia in one click. If the president of Slovakia changes, we just need to update the line “head of state” in the Slovakia entry, and all renderers will now display that new name. Wikifunctions is not yet live, but a temporary test is available here.

If all of that sounds like “web3”, it’s maybe because Wikipedia was the first “DAO.” And we could go even further. Today, information can only be published on Wikipedia if backed by reliable sources, such as other encyclopedias, scientific papers, news organizations or newspapers. What if a source goes offline? Then broken links have to be rescued using the Internet Archive. If information disappears from a source—for instance, because of censorship—then hopefully, the previous version is available in the Internet Archive, but that’s sometimes not the case.

On the other hand, if data goes onchain, it will be there forever and won’t change. The Associated Press started doing just that in October. They now publish economic and sports datasets onchain. Could Wikidata be updated automatically with onchain data? Using this “ledger of record”, as Balaji claims, “argument from cryptography begins superseding argument from authority”. And with Abstract Wikipedia, these sources of absolute truth would be available in all languages!

Abstract Wikipedia is still in its infancy and should integrate with Wikipedia in 2023. To know more about the project, read this article written by its founder, Denny Vrandečić. To participate and build the future of Wikipedia, click here!

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During my trip to El Salvador, I was surprised: #Singapur (“Singapore,” in Spanish) was trending on Twitter! Locals even tweeted quotes of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father:

“If you want to defeat corruption, be prepared to send your friends and relatives to jail.” (not sure this quote is genuine…)

The President CEO of El Salvador himself often mentions Singapore (e.g., after a mayor from his own party was arrested for a crime):

Below his tweets, several Salvadorans present Singapore as an example to follow. Are these accounts real? Hard to tell. But does it make sense to compare Singapore and El Salvador, two countries that are so different?

A Tale of Two Countries

Seventy years ago, Singapore and El Salvador had similar GDP per capita! Singaporeans and Salvadorans were about 10 times poorer than Americans. Today, Singapore has the second-highest GDP per capita (PPP) in the world after Luxembourg, but Salvadorans are still 7 times poorer than Americans.

Singapore’s success is mainly due to its founder’s incredible strategy and execution, making it a major financial, business, and shipping center. Could El Salvador follow the same path?

Crime and corruption

The effective control of crime and corruption is one of the reasons for Singapore’s success. Nayib Bukele—who doesn’t belong to the two parties that have dominated the Salvadoran political life for decades—was elected on an anti-corruption platform with the slogan: “There’s enough money when no one steals.”

Bukele also launched a “Territorial Control Plan” to reduce crime: increased police presence, modernization of the police, and reconstruction of the local communities. In 2015, El Salvador was the deadliest country outside a war zone. Since then, the number of homicides has been divided by 6! Last month, the International Monetary Fund lauded El Salvador’s “major advances in some high-profile anti-corruption cases” and its “efforts to reduce crime.” However, last week, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said Bukele negotiated a truce with imprisoned gang leaders, offering them prostitutes and cell phones in jail to ensure that violence remained low. If that’s all they gave to gangs, it looks like a great deal to save thousands of innocent human lives! On the other hand, the US also sanctioned two government officials for corruption, as they stole government-purchased goods destined for COVID-19 pandemic relief.

I stayed in tourist areas and felt safe in El Salvador. Probably as safe if not safer as in Paris, where I come from, or in San Francisco, where I flew after El Salvador. So there’s still a long way to go for El Salvador to be as safe as Singapore, but it seems to be heading in the right direction!

Infrastructure

Before my trip, I read that El Salvador had terrible infrastructure. I was surprised to arrive at a modern and efficient airport and see that most main roads were brand new.

I don’t know how these renovations are financed. After El Salvador cut ties with Taiwan in 2019, China promised $500 million in development projects, including $200m to support “Surf City.” However, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “El Salvador has not yet seen Chinese companies play a significant role in road and bridge construction.” And the renovation of the airport was designed by an American company. So it seems that El Salvador is quickly modernizing its infrastructure with local funds!

Geostrategic position

Singapore is strategically located in the Malacca Strait as a trading and logistics hub. Similarly, El Salvador links the Pacific to Latin America. For instance, a converted LNG carrier recently arrived from Singapore to create a gas terminal and an LNG power plant in El Salvador—making it a net exporter of electricity. This was the largest private infrastructure investment ever in El Salvador. According to CSIS, this American investment attempted to counter China’s progress in El Salvador.

For China, El Salvador could indeed be the gateway to the Americas. China proposed to build a multimodal hub in La Unión, with a deep water port and a new airport. This hub would be located in the Gulf of Fonseca at the intersection of Salvadoran, Honduran, and Nicaraguan territory, giving China access to El Salvador’s neighbors. The US is worried this port could include a military base. Like Singapore, it seems that El Salvador is trying to balance its relations with China and the US and befriend!

Cultural links to the regional power

66% of Singaporeans are ethnic Chinese, and there are strong links between China and Singapore. So Singapore benefited a lot from China’s growth. In parallel, 2.5 million Salvadorans live in the US. Lee Kuan Yew made English and Mandarin Chinese official in Singapore. Today, Spanish is the only official language in El Salvador, it connects the country to other Spanish-speaking territories, especially in Latin America. El Salvador could probably benefit from adopting English as its second official language. It would be way easier for investors to navigate through its laws.

Business-friendly environment

Singapore’s economy has been ranked the freest in the world. El Salvador still ranks relatively low in that regard. A French entrepreneur told me it took him one year and a half to open his business there. The Salvadoran government has announced a plan to cut red tape; let’s hope they’ll do it!

Democracy and political freedoms

Both Singapore and El Salvador are regularly accused of being authoritarian. For instance, Singapore is among the worst countries in the world in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index. So that’s maybe an area where El Salvado shouldn’t follow Singapore. Unless you initially need a strong leader to build a new state? In that case, Bukele scored some points… For instance, according to Human Rights Watch, he entered the Legislative Assembly with armed soldiers last year in an apparent effort to intimidate legislators into approving a loan for security forces. And he arrested a critic of his Bitcoin Law. In an interview, El Salvador’s vice-president recognized that the president currently held the executive, legislative, and judiciary power. For him, this absence of separation of powers is a temporary necessity as El Salvador needs to be entirely reformed after decades of nepotism.

You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.—Friedrich Hayek

Like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, I believe that economic freedom is a precondition for political freedom. Eventually, as Salvadorans get richer and have more economic opportunities, the country will respect more other human rights. So I’m optimistic about civil liberties, provided that the economy improves.

Bitcoin City

On November 20, Bukele announced the creation of “Bitcoin City.” This city built from scratch will be powered by geothermal energy from the nearby volcano. It will be funded by “Bitcoin bonds” and free of income, property, and capital gains taxes. Bitcoin City will be ideally located… next to the future multimodal hub of La Unión built by China. With Bitcoin City, Bukele wants to make El Salvador… the “Singapore of Latin America”!

There have been many attempts to build cities from nothing in developing countries and attract people with tax incentives. As far as I know, all of these experiments failed. People move to cities for their ecosystem, not for the low taxes. You need businesses, schools, restaurants, museums, and a vibrant local community, not only low taxes!

However, with this name, Bukele is leveraging an existing community—Bitcoiners—who now sees El Salvador as a safe haven. They have a reason to move, more compelling than low taxes: to live with like-minded people sharing their values. This cloud community now has a piece of land. And if enough of them move to El Salvador and invest there, it will transform the country! Could the Bitcoin community and El Salvador be the first successful example of a “cloud country”?

Let’s hope for the best!

Singapore proved that a country can lift itself out of poverty in a few decades. Many challenges lie ahead for El Salvador to catch up after decades of slow growth, crime, and corruption. A few months ago, no one could locate El Salvador on a map. The eyes of the world are on El Salvador today. I wish them a successful transition and a prosperous and peaceful future. And with a 10.3% GDP growth in 2021, they’re already in the starting blocks!

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The El Salvador Series:

1. El Salvador: First impressions

2. The rise of a new El Salvador?

3. From El Salvador to the world

4. Bitcoin Beach: Where everything started

5. Real Bitcoin use cases in El Salvador

6. Can El Salvador be the next Singapore? (this article)

7. El Salvador: My Travel Guide

The Adopting Bitcoin Conference was incredible, and I’m glad I discovered El Salvador and the state of Bitcoin adoption there.

Bitcoin critics often claim that Bitcoin is useless in the real world and only used by criminals. In response, many participants shared videos of them using Bitcoin at McDonald’s or Starbucks. Great! But it seems artificial—especially if the payer is American—as all these places accept US dollars, credit cards, and Apple/Google Pay. In addition, the user experience is better with contactless cards or phones than with Bitcoin wallets with clumsy QR codes.

However, there are real use cases of Bitcoin in El Salvador, for both locals and tourists, that show the power of Bitcoin.

The first day I arrived, I bought a SIM card for $1 in a local tienda. Then, I had to visit the provider’s website to buy a prepaid plan. I could only pay with Bitcoin or with a card emitted by a local bank. So I HAD to use Bitcoin. The payment experience online is actually better with Bitcoin than with credit cards. With a card, you have to take out the physical card from your wallet, meticulously type your card number, select the expiration day, and finally turn your card to see and enter the security code. And often, after all these steps, your bank sends you a text to confirm the transaction! With Bitcoin, you copy the invoice displayed on the website, open your Bitcoin wallet, paste the invoice, and click on “pay.” And I’m sure in the future, you’ll click on the invoice, and it’ll automatically open the wallet. By the way, with Bitcoin, there are no more irritating restrictions based on where your bank is located.

As a European tourist, I converted foreign currencies to get dollars. When I ran out of dollars, Bitcoin was the only way to pay people. It was way easier, cheaper, and safer—especially at night—than finding an ATM or a bureau de change that would charge me high fees. Similarly, I wanted to pay in cash, but the merchant didn’t have the change, so I paid in Bitcoin: problem solved! As a tourist, Bitcoin is just better than physical cash.

70% of Salvadorans don’t have a bank account. To pay for their electricity bills, they have to go to the electricity company’s office or some local shops and pay in cash. As explained in the documentary below, for those living in villages and small towns, it can be a 3-hour journey to pay a single utility bill! But utility companies now accept payment with Chivo, the government Bitcoin wallet. That’s why our local guide was glad we paid him on his Chivo. As El Salvador is a cash society—only 10% of Salvadorans own a credit card—even those who own a bank account need cash, and there are often long lines in front of banks to withdraw money.

The Chivo wallet can receive US dollars or Bitcoins. And when receiving Bitcoins, Salvadorans can automatically convert them to dollars—probably the most common practice today. In that case, they use Bitcoin as a payment infrastructure and not as a currency. Please note that I ignore how the US dollars on Chivo work. Is it just a centralized bank account in a government bank? Or USDT on ERC-20? Or on Bitcoin (using Omnilayer)? Mystery surrounds the Chivo wallet, and it was often criticized during the conference. The Chivo team wasn’t present at the event, and no one even knows which company built Chivo! Still, Chivo worked for me every time I had to pay a Salvadoran, but many others reported issues. I also noticed a change among some Salvadorans I paid:

• First time—their first Bitcoin payment—they converted 100% of the amount to dollars,

• The second time, they converted 100% of the amount to dollars and then converted back part of that sum to Bitcoins,

• Third payment, they didn’t convert to dollars and kept 100% of the sum in Bitcoins. They told me that because Bitcoin was a non-significant part of their income—most people still pay in dollars—they could use it as savings and didn’t care about short-term volatility.

Chivo critics also often complain that it is a custodial wallet: the government owns the wallet’s keys and can theoretically do whatever they want with the funds. However, the woman I helped set up her Chivo wallet told me one day later that she had lost her PIN… So I’m glad that she could call Chivo’s customer service and recover her PIN.

Remittances are often described as the perfect use case for Bitcoin as they represent 24% of El Salvador’s GDP. The Salvadoran government hopes Salvadorans can save $400 million in fees each year by sending money with Bitcoin instead of money providers like Western Union, which charges 2% fees, or PayPal charging 3.4% in El Salvador! That’s why the government installed Bitcoin ATMs all over the US—mainly in California and Texas, where most Salvadoran Americans live—to allow the diaspora to convert their dollars to Bitcoin and send them without fees to their relatives.1 The president claims that 3 million dollars are remitted every day using Chivo. However, I haven’t met anyone using Bitcoin for remittances. It’ll probably take some time.

Credit card fees are also high in El Salvador (4 to 5%), but the rare businesses that accept them here are for tourists and the upper class, so they may not care that much. (On the other hand, Amazon stopped taking Visa credit cards in the UK, claiming their fees were too high.).

El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin is also a stress test for all Bitcoin wallets. I realized how painful the QR code UX was: we need contactless Bitcoin payments asap! Lightning invoices, in general, are cumbersome. For instance, I paid someone, and later, I wanted to tip them back home but could not. The Lightning Address protocol fixes that, but it’s not used at all in El Salvador. During that trip, I also switched from Muun wallet—which had too many issues—to BlueWallet.

Although the above use cases may seem marginal (but “great new things often come from the margins”), for locals, they have a profound impact, especially for the unbanked. So thanks to Bitcoin, El Salvador may leapfrog directly from cash to digital payments.

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The El Salvador Series:

1. El Salvador: First impressions

2. The rise of a new El Salvador?

3. From El Salvador to the world

4. Bitcoin Beach: Where everything started

5. Real Bitcoin use cases in El Salvador (this article)

6. Can El Salvador be the next Singapore?

7. El Salvador: My Travel Guide

We’re heading to El Zonte, today known as “Bitcoin Beach,” for the last day of Adopting Bitcoin. It’s here that in 2019, an anonymous donor supported social projects with “the only requirement to develop a bitcoin-based economy.” Gradually a Bitcoin economy emerged in El Zonte. This place was an incubator to experiment before expanding Bitcoin to the rest of the country.

El Zonte is a beautiful surf beach. But it is small: 3,000 inhabitants if I believe Wikipedia. The main street is a dirt road where there was a food court organized by locals today.

It was nice to see “Hope House,” where all this movement started. There, they give English classes and computer science lessons to kids. For this community, “Bitcoin is hope.”

But with all the government communication, today, El Zonte looked more like a Bitcoin amusement park. Disneyland for Bitcoiners, with giant Bitcoin signs, QR codes everywhere, and television channels interviewing visitors.

Yes, all these small streets vendors and tiendas accept Bitcoin. And Lightning works smoothly: instant payments with almost no fees. But as soon as we leave the food court organized as part of the conference, it’s another story. Even the touristy Michanti Hotel, in El Zonte’s main street, doesn’t accept Bitcoin. There it’s cash or credit card. I said “even,” but this may be normal. Cash is king in El Salvador, and most places do not accept credit cards. The rare businesses accepting credit cards do not have a huge incentive to switch to Bitcoin. They already have simple, user-friendly, digital, instant payments with credit cards. Contrarily, unbanked people (70% of the population) who own a small business can leapfrog from cash to digital payments using the Bitcoin/Lightning infrastructure. These people will maybe never have a bank account or a credit card. That’s why El Zonte is exciting!

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The El Salvador Series:

• El Salvador: First impressions

• The rise of a new El Salvador?

• From El Salvador to the world

• Bitcoin Beach: Where everything started (this article)

• Real Bitcoin use cases in El Salvador

• Can El Salvador be the next Singapore?

• El Salvador: My Travel Guide

Second day of Adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador. Today’s talks mainly focused on scaling Bitcoin, technically and geographically. The world is watching El Salvador, and bitcoiners want to ensure this experiment is a success.

In three separate talks, Alex Gladstein (from the Human Rights Foundation), Monica Taher (Trade & Investments Secretariat of El Salvador), and Ray Youssef (CEO of Paxful) all stressed that the goal of the Bitcoin law in El Salvador isn’t for foreigners to buy a coffee with Lightning but for the 70% Salvadorans without a bank account to get financial freedom: learn how to save money and invest for their future.

What are the barriers for other countries’ adoption? In 1694, the British established the Bank of England and invented modern central banking, then all countries followed. For Gladstein, it could be the same for Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is still early, and it’s a massive risk for countries. Taher mentioned a WhatsApp group with Latin American government officials interested in the Salvadoran experiment, especially Mexico and Paraguay. Ray Youssef said that his company was in contact with many governments that could follow El Salvador. He thinks the next country adopting Bitcoin could be Paraguay, Brazil, or an African country. According to predictions on CoinMarketCap, the most likely countries are Paraguay, Venezuela, Anguilla, and Panama. Latin America is definitely at the forefront of Bitcoin adoption!

Bitcoin is often described as “digital gold,” meaning a digital store of value. But for Ray Youssef, the killer app in Nigeria was Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It’s expensive to send and receive money from abroad, and credit cards are not widely available (many people are unbanked) and have low limits anyway for Nigerians. That’s why Youssef claims that Africa is leading Bitcoin adoption. Fodé Diop, from Sénégal, came to El Salvador as soon as he learned about the Bitcoin Law to learn how to accelerate Bitcoin adoption in Africa. Here’s a video about Fodé’s mission:

Cool stuff mentioned by Taher, the Salvadoran government now uses profits from Bitcoin investments to fund projects such as schools and veterinary hospitals.

Many attendants criticized the government Chivo wallet because it is custodial and doesn’t offer Lightning transactions by default. However, Gladstein insisted that El Salvador could have launched its own coin, a CBDC, as the Nigerian government recently did with its e-naira. Instead, the Salvadoran government decided to plug the country into an open system, and even if Chivo has issues, it is interoperable with the rest of the network. It will be interesting to compare Bitcoin in El Salvador to the e-naira or Facebook’s experiment in Guatemala—El Salvador’s neighbor—using an Ethereum-based USD stablecoin.

Other talks focused on technical scalability. For instance, Taproot can reduce the cost of running a full node with batch verification and strengthen Bitcoin resistance. Bastien Teinturier from ACINQ then presented some elegant solutions to improve privacy on Lightning, such as Taproot/Schoor, to prevent identifying funding transactions (there’s still an issue with closing transactions, though). According to Bastien, it is also easy to identify mobile wallets (they never route payments, don’t have a stable IP, and are often offline). So if a mobile wallet is in the route, it means it is the payer or the receiver. That’s a privacy issue that trampoline payments can fix.

Another scalability issue: running a big Lightning node. Romain Rouphaël and Victor Afanassieff from LNMarkets started playing with Lightning back in 2018 when they tried to sell… Bitcoin socks (not a typo) online! They felt the magic of Lightning worldwide instant payments with no third party. But there were only 500 nodes and $50k total capacity at that time, and the Lightning UX was terrible. So they gave up (but they still have some Bitcoin socks if you’re interested!). Today, there are 30k nodes and $200M on Lightning. In 2020, they launched LNMarkets, a Bitcoin derivate trading platform running on Lightning. They now run one of the biggest nodes and shared their experience. They expected a lot of work from running such a large node, but surprisingly, because users add funds and then withdraw them, channels are on average balanced. The magic of Lightning! The other magic happened during the conference when another speaker suggested LNMarket could use another technology. Cross-pollination at work!

User experience is also a major hurdle slowing Bitcoin adoption. For Giacomo Zucco, existing Bitcoin wallets aren’t great. I experienced that several times in El Salvador. Chivo wallet is terrible, but others aren’t much better. For instance, I had many issues with Muun, not being able to pay a Chivo invoice because the expiry time was too short (according to Muun). We’re still so early…

For Fodé Diop, QR codes—currently used by all Bitcoin wallets—are awful and should be ditched as soon as possible and replaced by NFC payments:

Fodé also reminded us that many people are illiterate in the developing world and that we need to design Bitcoin wallets for them as well. Thankfully, because Bitcoin is open source, the UI can easily be adapted.

Some talks focused on new use cases:

• Bitcoin for the creator economy: Bitcoin is superior to fiat because, thanks to Lightning, we can stream money. This is a revolution in the creator economy. You can, for instance, pay to stream a podcast. Censorship-resistant money will then imply censorship-resistant content. “Fix the money, fix the world.”

• The programing language, Simplicity, currently on the Liquid sidechain, enables more powerful smart contracts on top of Bitcoin. It could become a future Bitcoin upgrade… “maybe in 20 years from now”! A reminder that development in the Bitcoin space is… prudent. If not slow…

• Discreet log contracts (DLCs) to create oracles on Bitcoin.

So it was a long day. Tomorrow we’ll be in El Zonte, aka Bitcoin Beach, where everything started, to meet with the local community.

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The El Salvador Series:

1. El Salvador: First impressions

2. The rise of a new El Salvador?

3. From El Salvador to the world (this article)

4. Bitcoin Beach: Where everything started

5. Real Bitcoin use cases in El Salvador

6. Can El Salvador be the next Singapore?

7. El Salvador: My Travel Guide

I arrived yesterday in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, for the first day of Adopting Bitcoin. The conference is hosted in an upscale neighborhood. Compared to where I was in the previous days, it feels like a different country. Huge modern malls with American chains such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Pizza Hut—all accepting Bitcoin—replaced small tiendas and dirt roads.

Chris Hunter from Galoy opens the conference. He draws a parallel between Bitcoin and the creation of the United States. Back then, the Founding Fathers wanted to separate the Church from the State. Today, Bitcoiners want to separate Money from the State. As Friedrich Hayek wrote in his seminal article The Denationalization of Money:

“The root and source of all monetary evil is the government's monopoly on money.”

For Hunter, Bitcoin is “Internet native digital money over IP.” He thinks that, with adoption by Twitter and El Salvador, Bitcoin is approaching the chasm, from early enthusiasts to mass adoption. He concludes that Bitcoin is among the greatest inventions of all times, with fire, the wheel, the steam engine, and the internet.

María Luisa Hayem Brevé, Minister of Economy of El Salvador, then gets on stage. In perfect English—coming from France where politicians barely speak English, I’m impressed—she starts a charm offensive aimed at Bitcoiners and investors. Her government wants to take advantage of El Salvador’s strategic geographical location to transform the country into a digital hub for crypto, AI, and tech outsourcing. They’re on a mission to simplify investment rules and cut red tape. All governments say so; we’ll see if this holds in the future. But El Salvador has already scored points on marketing: the country used to be in the news only for gang violence and crime. Since the Bitcoin adoption, there’s been worldwide positive coverage about El Salvador for the first time in decades. With 700 attendants from 30+ countries, this conference is also a success for the government. The minister wants to make these attendants “ambassadors of El Salvador,” and judging by the enthusiasm in the crowd, it’ll be easy! To conclude, she boasts El Salvador’s insolent growth, with an expected +9% GDP growth in 2021, compared to 5.2% in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the World Bank.

The Salvadorans and Americans—including one Salvadoran American—behind the Bitcoin Beach initiative sit on the next panel, held in Spanish and English. I overestimated my Spanish skills and didn’t take headphones for the translation, so I couldn’t understand everything… Still, speakers remind us of El Salvador’s tragic history, with a 12-year civil war taking the lives of 80,000 people. Moving to the US to send money to relatives has long been the only dream of young Salvadorans. When parents emigrate, they often leave their kids behind in El Salvador. Growing up without their parents, these kids fall prey to gangs who offer them a sense of belonging, a second family, and economic opportunities. Social projects in the beach town of El Zonte—that would later become “Bitcoin Beach”—initially focused on breaking that cycle to show young Salvadorans that they could build a future in El Salvador. [See also this article: “How Surfing Saved Me From Joining the MS-13 Gang”] Later, Bitcoin arrived in the city, thanks to an anonymous donor who supported social projects with “the only requirement to develop a bitcoin-based economy.” Bitcoin was the perfect tool to empower the local community. Before the Bitcoin law, only 1.8 million people in El Salvador (28% of the population) had a bank account. Now according to government sources, 3m people have a bitcoin wallet:

Unbanked people could not save: they spent all their hard-earned money at the end of the month. For the first time in their life, they can save. Community leaders used Bitcoin as a tool for financial education in El Zonte, teaching kids what money is and why saving is essential. The discussion gets extremely emotional when one Salvadoran speaker cries, mentioning all his friends who didn’t have this opportunity to use Bitcoin before, and I guess, ended up in gangs or poverty. That’s why for all the speakers, Bitcoin is hope. There’s also a new sense of pride among the diaspora to see El Salvador eventually presented positively. Panelists are confident that Bitcoin will also increase tourism in the future, but for them, “Bitcoin is already changing life here.”

The following speakers are Veronika Kuett and Peter Young, who present “Free private cities” (FPCs): “Semi-autonomous jurisdiction within a host-nation that is run by a private operating company offering its citizens the basic services of a state against a pre-defined fee.” Anyone can join an FPC if they accept the “social contract” of the city’s service provider. This social contract is bilateral: new amendments only apply to new residents and existing residents who approve them. I find this weird because there will quickly be hundreds of different versions of that “social contract” in force in the FPC at the same time. That’s a nightmare for everyone. For Veronika and Peter, FPCs allow us to escape from inadequate regulations, for instance, housing regulations pushing prices up. FPCs want to be “SEZ+” (Special Economic Zones Plus): more than just investing, taxation, and trading regulations, they would cover all areas, especially healthcare, education, dispute resolution, and housing. Why would a government allow FPCs? Because they could share a part of the service provider’s revenue. Even though FPCs would be free to adopt any currencies, speakers see Bitcoin as a natural fit because it would allow FPCs to transact internationally without intermediaries like central banks, which can censor the transactions they don’t like. The closest projects to FPCs are in Zone for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) in Honduras, El Salvador’s neighbor. Morazon and Próspera ZEDEs already have residents. Próspera’s prospective real estate looks beautiful. But will they ever be built? You can learn more about Próspera and become a resident here. Also, will El Salvador follow Honduras and create FPCs? We don’t know yet, but there’s a lot of innovation in governance in Central America!

John Carvalho then presents the launch of Synonym: “Web 3, Without the Shitcoins”. It offers a platform for creating digital tokens anchored to Bitcoin. I didn’t understand much, but if Synonym is Web 3 on Bitcoin, where are DeFi applications such as Decentralized Exchanges?

Next: Ryan from LND gives real-world examples of Bitcoin as “Freedom money”:

• “Freedom to save”: he cites human rights defenders in various authoritarian countries who, before switching to Bitcoin, had their bank accounts arbitrarily frozen. Another example: negative interest rates in several Western countries. Bitcoin fixes this.

• “Freedom to spend”: he explains that many Salvadorans used to take the bus to pay their bills. They can now do it instantly on their smartphones, thanks to Bitcoin. Remittances are another excellent example; Western Union charges 2% to send money to El Salvador. Sending money on Lightning is virtually free. However, converting dollars to Bitcoin still involves fees (as less as 0.10% on Binance).

• “Freedom to earn”: Ryan mentions Salvadorans who raise funds online. They can now reach a large global community of donors, each of them giving a small amount through the Lightning network. Many people around the world can also get paid in Bitcoin to do microtasks on Stak.

For Ryan, the opportunity is enormous, and Bitcoin hasn’t crossed the chasm yet, a recurring theme in today’s talks. Visa and Mastercard process about $16T each year: 100,000 times more than the Lightning network today!

Many speakers mentioned the importance of user experience to cross the chasm: Bitcoin today isn’t user-friendly. Education is also crucial. In particular, one educator told me that in El Salvador, his team needs to repeat that “Bukele is not Satoshi, and Satoshi is not Bukele.” They go around El Salvador to evangelize people about Bitcoin.

El Salvador’s name comes from “Jesus Cristo, El Salvador Del Mundo” (“Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the World”), and for sure, there was quasi-religious zeal in the room today. Many attendants see El Salvador as the promised land, the “Saviour of the World.” And they see themselves as missionaries, spreading the Good [24] Word[s] around the world.

Tomorrow’s talk will expand on these themes, with a recurring question: How can El Salvador become the Singapore of Latin America?

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The El Salvador Series:

1. El Salvador: First impressions

2. The rise of a new El Salvador? (this article)

3. From El Salvador to the world

4. Bitcoin Beach: Where everything started

5. Real Bitcoin use cases in El Salvador

6. Can El Salvador be the next Singapore?

7. El Salvador: My Travel Guide

In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. This week, it hosts the Adopting Bitcoin conference to learn about the local experience and expand to other countries.

I arrived in El Salvador 3 days ago to attend the conference and here are my first impressions.

But before, some background on El Salvador, the smallest country in continental America. Dotted with dozens of volcanoes, El Salvador also features great lakes and beautiful beaches. Historically inhabited by the Lenca, the Maya, and the Pipil peoples, Spain conquered El Salvador in the 16th century. It gained its independence from Spain in 1821. El Salvador became a mono-export economy: first based on indigo and then coffee. The economy has since diversified but in the 1980s, the Salvadoran Civil War, opposing the US-backed right-wing government to left-wing guerrillas—supported by the Soviet Union—ravaged the country. Thousands of Salvadorans died, many more left. Today, 2.3 million Salvadoran live in the US while 6.5 million live in El Salvador. Remittances from the diaspora still represent 24% of El Salvador’s GDP! In 2001, the government replaced the local currency with the US dollar to reduce inflation. Since then, El Salvador’s inflation has been lower than its neighbors’. However, it was already the case before the dollarization. So El Salvador lost control over its monetary policy, but what they got in exchange is unclear. The country is also plagued with gang violence and corruption. Its GDP per capita (PPP) stands at ~$9k/person.

In 2019, Nayib Bukele, a young Palestinian Salvadoran independent from the main political parties, became president. A wind of change for El Salvador! However, he was soon described as “authoritarian” for sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to encourage the passage of a bill…

In this context, in June 2021, at the Miami Bitcoin 2021 Conference, Nayib Bukele announced that his country would adopt Bitcoin in addition to the USD.

Why El Salvador? There was a precedent there: in 2019, an anonymous donor supported social projects in the beach town of El Zonte with “the only requirement to develop a bitcoin-based economy.” Gradually a Bitcoin economy emerged there. El Zonte was an incubator to experiment before expanding Bitcoin to the rest of the country.

Coming back to my trip: arriving in San Salvador, I was surprised to discover a modern and efficient airport with Bitcoin ATMs provided by Chivo (more on Chivo below) to withdraw cash using Bitcoin. I haven’t tried them, though.

We headed to the beautiful Lago de Coatepeque, where the local elite owns properties.

Our driver accepted Bitcoin, but we preferred to pay in cash as we had some. On the road, he complained about inflation. I was initially surprised because El Salvador is dollarized, and usually, inflation is an issue in countries where the government prints a lot of money. But El Salvador doesn’t print money…

Once at our Airbnb, we met with the housekeeper. She likes the Bitcoin Law, but she doesn’t understand Bitcoin, and she’s never used it. She also mentions that she hasn’t downloaded her Chivo wallet. So together with Romain Rouphaël and Victor Afanassieff from LNMarkets, we help her to activate her Chivo wallet :)

The process is simple; she instantly receives the $30 government reward.

But even after that, she still prefers to be paid in dollars as she says that no one around uses Bitcoin yet. She was right, we tried to pay in a dozen small shops and restaurants in the lake area, and only one accepted Bitcoin. Those who didn’t accept Bitcoin didn’t provide any reason, except one shopkeeper who told me his boss was from Guatemala and didn’t use Chivo.

Chivo is a custodial Bitcoin wallet launched by the Salvadoran government. You can receive and send USD1 and Bitcoin. When you receive Bitcoin, it can be automatically converted to dollars through a government fund (and vice versa). By default, payments between Chivo and another non-Chivo wallet are made onchain. (I don’t know how payments between Chivo wallets work). Lightning payments are possible, but the option is hidden and unavailable on the Chivo Merchant version. Chivo is only available to Salvadoran citizens: they need to take a selfie and a photo of their ID card to activate their account. Once done, they automatically receive the equivalent of 30 dollars in bitcoin! The minimum wage is ~$300/month, so it’s a huge incentive. In addition to that, Salvadorans get a 20% discount on gas if they pay with Chivo (However, we tried two gas stations, and they didn’t accept Bitcoin). Salvadorans are free to use other wallets, but because of these incentives, most Salvadorans who use Bitcoin only use Chivo.

But why does El Salvador promote Bitcoin that much? I initially thought that the Bitcoin Law was mainly a marketing operation. El Salvador wants to promote tourism: it has incredible beaches—hosting the World Surfing Championships— but before the Bitcoin Law, who knew El Salvador? However, the vast incentives offered by the government prove that it’s more than just marketing for foreigners.

Another explanation could be that, paradoxically, with Bitcoin, El Salvador can take back control of its currency. Indeed, as all citizens use the government Chivo wallet, linked to a real-life identity, the government could theoretically track all the transactions done. Because Salvadorans can theoretically withdraw their Bitcoins to another non-custodial wallet, I think this assumption is wrong.2

I was told another reason: Because El Salvador is dollarized, it is subject to the whims of the Federal Reserve. Before, the US had a more reasonable monetary policy, so dollarization was acceptable. But over the past two years, the US printed a lot of money. And the local saying goes: “When the US gets the flu, El Salvador sneezes” According to my contacts, the inflation could be even worse here because of the importance of remittances. For instance, when Salvadoran Americans received pandemic relief checks, they may have sent them directly to El Salvador, increasing inflation. However, looking at data, inflation in El Salvador and the US seem equal, and remittances to El Salvador seem to be constantly growing. So, according to this theory, Bitcoin could be an insurance policy for El Salvador: an exit of the US dollar system in case the Federal Reserve goes full money printing and hyperinflation follows.

What are the next steps for El Salvador?

• Some Salvadorans associate Bitcoin with the government: if they don’t like the government, then they oppose Bitcoin. For Bitcoin to be widely accepted, it needs to transcend political lines.

• Improve the Chivo wallet: the UX isn’t great, and it’s not Lightning by default.

• Find a solution when there’s no signal. Because of volcanoes, the signal is often poor and Bitcoin (or any other crypto-currency) unusable. Should the government install Starlink over the country?

I’m now heading to San Salvador for the conference, and I’ll publish a sum up every day. If you have any questions about El Salvador, please let me know.

And to finish, proof-of-workout: 2 active volcanoes hiked in the same day (Santa Ana and Izalco)!

Our guide Salva, from Tunco Life, is fantastic. He offers excellent tours around the country: I strongly recommend him. And, of course, he accepts Bitcoin! 🚀

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The El Salvador Series:

1. El Salvador: First impressions (this article)

2. The rise of a new El Salvador?

3. From El Salvador to the world

4. Bitcoin Beach: Where everything started

5. Real Bitcoin use cases in El Salvador

6. Can El Salvador be the next Singapore?

7. El Salvador: My Travel Guide

Several people answered that the market will eventually choose the best blockchain and that so far, non-Bitcoin crypto applications have colossal market capitalizations and thousands of users. In contrast, Bitcoin currently has no global product-market fit beyond its “digital gold”/“store of value” use-case.1

The authors acknowledge that the “development on Bitcoin is (literally) years behind its crypto peers.” Still, they believe that “the alleged promise of crypto will be fulfilled on Bitcoin sooner or later.” For them, Bitcoin’s layered architecture is more robust and will enable an extension of functionality in due course. On the other hand, the approach adopted by most Bitcoin competitors to put “all the features […] into the mainchain […] introduce[s] unknowable attack vectors and hence holistic fragility. The naïve view is that this compounds the utility of every functionality. The mature view is that it compounds only the vulnerabilities.”2

The authors compare Bitcoin to the internet protocol (TCP/IP), organized into four abstraction layers. We all know how successful the internet became. But the internet also had a more centralized competitor: the Minitel.3

Unless you’re French and more than 25yo, you probably have never heard about the Minitel. Launched in 1982 (15 years before Google!), the Minitel was an online service accessible through telephone lines. During the 80s and the early 90s, there were more services, users, and money on the Minitel—operating in France only—than on the internet!

In 1997, French President Jacques Chirac even boasted: “Today a baker in Aubervilliers knows perfectly how to check his bank account on the Minitel. Can the same be said of the baker in New York?”

Indeed, according to The Atlantic, Minitel hosted “25,000 online services long before the world wide web had even been invented”. Users could make online purchases, book trains, check stock prices and weather reports, manage their bank accounts, search the telephone directory, read the news, engage in interactive gaming, have a mailbox, date, and access the state administration.

But the Minitel wasn’t an open platform and only provided Minitel services. Even though the internet developed slowly, its open, layered, and modular architecture finally won. TCP/IP was developed in the 70s, the first email was sent in 1971, the World Wide Web was invented in 1989, Amazon launched in 1995, Google in 1997, and by the end of the 90s, the Minitel was effectively dead.

Even though I find Bitcoin’s layered architecture aesthetically beautiful, and even though I like its “slowly but surely” approach, I don’t know if Allen Farrington & Big Al are right. No one truly knows. And the Minitel precedent is a good reminder that progress is not linear and that “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” It also reminds us that the first-mover advantage may not hold, even with strong network effects: the Minitel didn’t resist the internet that was 10x better in terms of UX, speed, architecture, and ecosystem. So will the financial infrastructure of the future be built on Bitcoin? On Ethereum? On a new chain? Or will it stay as it is?

What do you think?

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Unfortunately, several studies proved that prayer did not improve the health of the person for whom prayer is offered. Surprisingly, one even concluded that patients with knowledge of receiving prayer had slightly more complications…

But what about the effects on the person praying? First, there are different types of prayers to distinguish:

• Thanksgiving: expressions of gratitude,

• Meditative and contemplative prayers, such as adoration,

• Confession: admission of negative behaviors and request for forgiveness,

• Supplication: requests for intervention in specific life events for oneself or others,

• Obligatory prayers: fixed required prayers repeated at each worship time.

According to one study, less ego-focused prayers (thanksgiving, meditative, contemplative) positively affected optimism and well-being. In contrast, ego-focused prayers (confession, supplication, obligatory) actually had a negative or null effect!

“Egoless” prayers are similar to meditation and mindfulness practices that emphasize the negation of ego. The Mayo Clinic, in effect, describes prayer as “the best known and most widely practiced example of meditation.” And some see meditation as a “secular prayer.”

It is proven that people who express gratitude regularly are happier, feel better, exercise more, and have fewer visits to physicians, among other benefits. So it is no wonder that thanksgiving prayers improve well-being.

We know that contemplative prayers and meditation involve the same parts of the brain. And, contrary to prayer, there are many studies on the effects of meditation. There’s in particular evidence that meditation can reduce anxiety, depression, and pain.

But it seems that meditation—so probably also egoless prayers—can do more. A 2017 review indeed concluded that meditation might also strengthen the immune system by:

• Increasing the number of CD-4 cells, the immune system’s helper cells,

• Reducing markers of inflammation,

• Increasing telomerase activity, avoiding cancer and premature aging.

Some results are mindblowing: for example, a 2008 study conducted at UCLA concluded that “mindfulness meditation slows progression of HIV”!

Someone recently told me that I should pray in order not to be sick. Raised in pure Cartesianism, I, of course, dismissed their advice. But they, and millions of other believers, may actually be right! Similarly, fasting is practiced in various religions, but it’s only quite recently that the health benefits of intermittent fasting have been identified. So what else could we learn from the ancient wisdom of religions?

What do you think? Do you meditate or pray and feel some benefits?

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However, different sources conclude that in the US, Europe, and Asia, even though the invested amounts may be increasing1, the number of deals is decreasing, especially at the angel/seed stage (i.e., the first financing round of a company). Here are some charts:

US: First-financing deals, flat/declining since 2015

US: VC deals flat since 2015

Europe: VC deals declining since 2016

Asia: VC deals, esp. angel/seed, declining since 2015

China: VC deals declining since 2016

World: Angel/seed deals flat/declining since 2015

Why is the number of seed deals declining?

I don’t know! 🤷‍♂️

Here are some hypotheses:

• Alex Wilhelm wrote in TechCrunch that SAFEs (Simple agreement for future equity) could be to blame. I’m skeptical because I don’t think SAFEs are as popular in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere as they are in the US. However, the decline is reported everywhere. And anyway, SAFEs could still be reported.

• According to Crunchbase, it may just be a reporting issue: “[Seed] Funding counts trended down, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this stage of funding tends to be heavily influenced by data lags, so that number is likely to go up as more deals are added to the Crunchbase dataset over time: Often, we find as much as 40 percent of deals are added in the year after a quarter closes, and as much as 50 percent to 60 percent two years out.” But even if there were a 2-year reporting delay, data until 2018 would still be correct. And yet, the number of reported seed deals started to decline in 2015/2016.

• There are maybe more and more stealth startups? However, according to Beauhurst: “the percentage share of unannounced fundraisings has remained fairly steady, fluctuating between a low of 65% in 2014 and a high of 71% in 2017 and 2018.”

• Reports from PitchBook, DealRoom, Crunchbase, and Preqin may be wrong and miss many deals. Maybe, but why would they be “more wrong” today than before? Tomasz Tunguz noticed that AngelList Venture had different data, but the graph is unclear, and I don’t know if it’s the number of rounds or the round volumes in $M.

• Startups may prefer alternative ways of financing, such as debt or ICO in the crypto space. And more grants are available for startups from governments or the private sector (e.g., AWS Activate).

• Because it’s cheaper to start a company, and thanks to alternative financing options, many founders may bootstrap their company and later raise a proper Series A round, skipping the angel/seed step. Or they may even continue outside the VC path forever.

• Some VCs may have changed their investment strategy to focus on a few big deals, especially at the later stage, rather than many small deals at the seed stage.

• [Update] Some suggested on Twitter that the reports may be primarily based on press coverage. As the press coverage is limited (because the number of journalists and newspapers is limited), journalists focus on big rounds and don’t cover seed rounds. This explanation makes sense. However, the number of early-stage (Series A & B) deals has also decreased since 2018 in Asia and globally. And actually, startups don’t need the press: they can announce their fundraising on their website and social media accounts. They can even update their own Crunchbase or AngelList profile themselves to mention their fundraising. In both cases, PitchBook, DealRoom, Crunchbase, and others should be able to identify these deals and add them to their database and their report.

• [Update 2] Tomasz Tunguz suggested that check sizes have increased significantly “because more capital is a strategic advantage in a market flush with money.” That makes sense, and I think that from the point of view of investors, if you have more cash to deploy, then it’s easier to do as many (or even fewer) deals with bigger rounds in each deal than to do more deals of the same size as before. This explains why the number of deals is flat/decreasing, whereas the cumulated volumes are increasing.

So two options:

• If the figures are correct, maybe because of all the above factors, it means that capital is getting concentrated at the later stages (Series B+), with bigger rounds at each stage. So VCs need significantly larger exits to get a return on their investment. Also, unless fewer people start a startup, this means it’s harder to raise a seed round. But in this scenario, when you raise, you raise a lot more than before!

• If the figures are wrong, then I think these reports aren’t reliable. If they don’t know the number of deals (and not even the trend), then all the conclusions drawn from them may be wrong as well.

Do you see other reasons explaining the decline? If you’re an investor, did you observe anecdotally such a decline? Or is it totally wrong? I’m curious; please let me know!

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But what makes a tech-friendly country? Digital nomads may look at the internet speed, weather, Bitcoin taxes, or safety. You can play with these criteria—and many others—on NomadList to find the best location for you. Unfortunately, the number of sunshine hours doesn’t determine how technologically progressive a place is…

So should we look at the number of unicorns or the VC market? But these lagging metrics depend a lot on the size of the local market. Tech-friendly countries want to attract foreign talent, so we could consider foreign-born population or net migration rate. But many places welcome immigrants without being technologically progressive. Some governments offer programs to attract tech talents, investors, and remote workers; however, these countries are not necessarily technologically progressive themselves. For instance, no matter how good the Portuguese tech visa is, the local administration isn’t that tech-friendly (even though the situation has improved since Covid).

We could also look at the institutional framework: tax burden, rule of law, hiring and firing practices, absence of corruption, or how easy it is to start a business. These great indicators are gathered, with others, in global rankings such as Heritage’s Index of Economic Freedom, Fraser’s Economic Freedom of the World, the World Bank’s Ease of doing business index, the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, WIPO’s Global Innovation Index, or the US News Best Countries rankings.

These rankings are fantastic, but they were built for the twentieth century. For example, it may be easier to set up a new business—like a restaurant—in Denmark than in the US, but Uber and other ridesharing companies are banned in Denmark. And even though Germany is among the most innovative and competitive countries, startups can’t easily give stock options to employees there.

All countries want to make it easier to start and run businesses. All governments have been decreasing corporate tax rates over the last decades, and since the World Bank launched its “Ease of doing business index,” states have kept improving their score. Indeed, reducing the number of days to create a company is not controversial. Conversely, tech and new entrants may challenge entrenched interests and legacy companies. And there are also huge expectations from citizens and customers to maintain high-quality standards enforced by strict regulations. These regulations were often necessary and well-designed when enacted, but they may not be adapted to new technologies.

So how do countries deal with radical innovation in the most regulated industries?1 They act like tech companies: they use a sandbox to test their code in a safe environment, iterate at a small scale, and then deploy.

To do so, governments create a “regulatory sandbox”: a “safe, testing space where participants can test their new business model, innovative products, services, and delivery mechanisms, without immediately incurring all the normal regulatory consequences of engaging in the activity in question.” According to Margaret Hagan, in such a safe playground: “the private sector can innovate without worrying about fines or liability, the regulatory agency can test regulations to see what works before going through the long process of creating new rules, and consumers have access to these services in a controlled environment. The goal is to relax or change existing regulation in a controlled and evaluated space to run real-world experiments. These experiences can be collected and inform evidence-based regulatory schemes. Sandboxes are used as an alternative to regulation that is based on speculation about what behaviors could result — and what risks and harms can emerge — from changing technologies or changing policies.” Sandboxes are similar to Chinese Special Economic Zones, established to experiment with the market economy, but they’re not limited to a specific location.

This revolutionary concept was invented by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in 2015 to support fintech companies. Like all great ideas, regulatory sandboxes seem obvious in hindsight. That’s why Singapore (with its “never say no” approach), Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, and others quickly followed. In 2020, the World Bank identified 73 fintech sandboxes in 57 countries. More than half of them were created between 2018 and 2019, suggesting rapid growth:

The UK FCA’s evaluation found that the sandbox had reduced the time and cost to market, facilitated funding, increased competitive pressure on incumbents, and led to high levels of innovation with new offerings (e.g., 40% of British sandbox firms were using distributed ledger technologies). Regulators also found there was little misbehavior on behalf of the participating firms. According to a 2020 paper, “the empirical analysis showed that the introduction of regulatory sandboxes had positive effects on venture investment in fintech industry.” And according to the Bank for International Settlements: “regulatory sandboxes improve access to funding by reducing information asymmetries and regulatory costs.”

The first sandboxes were limited to fintech, but the concept was then extended to other industries, such as:

• A healthcare sandbox for telemedicine in Singapore,

• A sandbox for drones and aviation in the UK,

• A sandbox for self-driving vehicles in Taiwan,

• A data protection safebox in the UK to reduce the uncertainty and ambiguity of GDPR related to new use cases of data,

• A sandbox for a digital ID in the UK,

• A legaltech sandbox in Utah to allow nonlawyers to provide certain traditional legal services, already joined by Rocket Lawyer,

• An energy sandbox in the UK allowing residents to buy and sell renewable energy from solar panels within their own apartment buildings. Typically, this is illegal in the UK, where generated power can only be used by the owner or sold to the grid.

Last month, the UK launched a “scale up” sandbox, as its programs initially primarily targeted startups.

All these regulatory sandboxes were focused on a specific industry. Japan and Korea went further with “all-inclusive” regulatory sandboxes that any tech company can join, from a shared kitchen service to an e-bike manufacturer.

Utah followed these examples and launched the first US all-inclusive regulatory sandbox in March 2021. Utah will create a new body, called the Office of Regulatory Relief (ORR). Any company can apply to the ORR, cite specific regulations that they wish to be waived, and explain how doing so will benefit consumers and promote innovation. The ORR then reviews the application with the relevant regulatory agency. Successful applicants receive regulatory exemptions for one year and may reapply for a one-year extension. A revolution!

What about other US states? Arizona was the first state to adopt a sandbox in 2018 (in fintech). Then followed by Wyoming, Nevada, West Virginia, Hawaii, and Florida in fintech; and Kentucky, South Dakota, and Vermont in insurtech. The State Bar of California’s approved a sandbox for legal services in 2020. Still, it hasn’t been implemented yet because some lawyers are afraid of increased competition and see this initiative as a “seismic event.” Tennessee is also considering an all-industry sandbox similar to the one in Utah. [Update: The Tennesse sandbox didn’t pass.] There are currently 28 initiatives for new sandboxes in state legislatures across the US.

Unfortunately, there’s no US federal regulatory sandbox (as far as I know, please answer this post if I’m wrong). In 2018, the Treasury noted that: “replicating the regulatory sandbox approach in the United States is complicated by the fragmentation inherent in the US financial regulatory system: the sheer number of disparate regulatory actors, at both the federal and state levels, compounds the difficulty of implementing a single, comprehensive sandbox-style solution. A no-action letter or exemptive relief granted by one regulator does not bind others.” However, some agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) may issue “No Action” letters to startups, a partial alternative to sandboxes. On the other hand, the EU plans to create a pan-European sandbox for distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain services by 2022.

Every month, a new sandbox program starts somewhere. Still, not all sandboxes are created equal. Some only provide limited exemptions, so startups don’t apply, as for the Ontario Energy Sandbox. Or the testing period may be too short. Building an excellent regulatory sandbox isn’t easy. And some researchers even criticize them because they “put pressure on the time and resources of already over-burdened regulatory authorities.” But that’s precisely why I think they’re fantastic! Jurisdictions with regulatory sandboxes accept transferring the regulation’s burden—time, money, and skills—from companies to governments. I believe this is the best evidence that a country is technologically progressive.

The UK and Singapore have arguably been first movers, and they continue to pioneer innovation in this space. But other jurisdictions, such as Utah, are catching up, and the competition will be fierce!

There’s probably a regulatory sandbox program tailor-made for you, depending on your needs. I listed more than 100 sandboxes in 63 jurisdictions here. Have a look, and go where you’re treated best! And if you find any mistake or if I forgot a program, please get in touch with me or comment on this post.

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In a recent series of articles, entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan explained his preferred method to “start a new country.” His concept: “cloud countries” or “network states:”

“Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community. We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country.”

The idea of moving where you’re treated best isn’t new. Over the past 30 years, concepts such as Sovereign Individual, Digital nomad, Hypernomad, and Bitcoin Citadel, and movements like the Free State Project have also emerged:

“When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”—Farkas Bolyai

This “Cloud first, Land last” strategy offers a new perspective on an old problem. It gives the practical steps to make the Bitcoin Citadel metaphor a reality, i.e., to build a tribe. In Balaji’s words, it’s a “reverse diaspora:” “a community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online, and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.”

So, could online communities lead to physical nations? It may seem crazy, but several historical examples suggest this model could work.

For instance, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), even though it possesses no territory today, is a “sovereign subject of international law” and the “smallest sovereign state in the world.” It owns buildings—some enjoying extraterritoriality—and embassies worldwide, issues its own (not yet crypto-) currency and (not yet digital) passports, and has thousands of members. The Order of Malta claims continuity with the Knights Hospitaller, a chivalric order founded in 1099. Organized by language, the Hospitallers had possessions and citadels all over Europe and even in the Americas! They eventually ruled over Malta from 1530 to 1798. Likewise, cloud countries will scale communities, starting with outposts in different geographies, until they find a piece of (is)land. However, this process can be reversed: in 1798, Napoleon invaded Malta and expelled the Order, which became dispersed throughout Europe. A cloud country can quickly move back to the cloud in case of a threat. Tomasz Kamusella reminded me that Estonia already practices this as a contingency should a foreign country attack and occupy the State. In such a situation, Estonia would continue as a “cloud state,” thanks to its data embassy in Luxembourg. Anyway, the Order of Malta was probably the first cloud country. [2024 edit: the Nizari Ismaili state established in 1090 might have been first.]

The Knights Templar was another powerful chivalric order. Founded in 1119, they established financial networks across Christendom and developed banking. They were the world’s first multinational corporation; I consider them the network states’ ancestors.

The Jewish diaspora also created a state after centuries of diasporic existence. Israel’s history is long and complex, but part of its success was the WZO’s early strategy to create a homeland through persistent small-scale immigration. In particular, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) raised funds—with thousands of “Blue boxes” among the diaspora—to acquire land in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. By 1948, the JNF owned 54% of the land held by Jews in the region. The JNF also issued commemorative stamps featuring renowned figures, landscapes of Israel, and JNF projects to raise funds. Today, a charity or a community could similarly auction NFTs or create a token and launch an ICO. Israel was later nicknamed the “Start-up Nation” due to its economic success. But even before the creation of the modern State of Israel, Jewish communities were able to create large wealthy settlements at different points in history. In the 12th-century town of Kalisz, Poland, Jews even minted coins for the Polish prince, with names in Hebrew letters. Maybe in the same way that Network Unions will issue tokens. Contrary to Balaji’s cloud countries, one may oppose that ethnoreligious groups like Jews are not communities built from scratch that can grow quickly in membership. However, even though today Jews are all genetically connected, many groups and tribes converted en masse to Judaism in the past. Similarly, cloud countries will grow by convincing people from all around the world to join them. There must be an upside for newcomers to join the network.

Mormons—officially, “Latter-day Saints”—provide a more recent example. Mormonism was founded in New York in the 1820s, but the church had to move from one place to another to escape persecution. Ohio, Missouri, and then Illinois, where they built Nauvoo, a startup city bought by Mormons to escape conflict with the state government in Missouri! Unfortunately, tensions with their neighbors continued, so in 1847, 70,000 Mormons migrated from Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley. They colonized the desert and tried to set up the massive State of Deseret—with its distinct Deseret alphabet. The US government didn’t recognize Deseret, but Utah became a state in 1896. Today, Utah is still 61% Mormon. Like a cloud country, Mormons started as a simple community. But today, some consider them as a nation: “One cannot even be sure, whether [Mormonism] is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.” (historian Sydney Ahlstrom)

Armenians are another successful ethnic diaspora. When the Armenian State in the historical Armenian highlands disappeared in 1045, Armenians fled to the Mediterranean coast. They created the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, called “Little Armenia” or “New Armenia,” as a sort of government in exile. Then this kingdom fell in 1375, and for centuries, Armenians lived scattered across the region without their own State. The short-lived First Republic of Armenia (1918–1920) was the first modern Armenian State since the loss of Armenian statehood in the Middle Ages, and Armenia had to wait until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to fully regain its independence.

These precedents tell us that founding a cloud country may not be a peaceful process. Jews, Mormons, and Armenians all faced discrimination or even genocide. Persecution was often the very reason for building a country of their own.

Several other nations have independence movements: Catalans, Kurds, Sikhs, etc. Some even control territories. Tamil poet Kannadasan’s quote about the Tamils as a stateless nation could apply tomorrow to a cloud country and its reverse diaspora before moving to a land: “There is no state without a Tamil, there is no state for the Tamils.” (try replacing “Tamils” with “Bitcoiners” in this sentence…) Actually, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Tamil militant organization (designated as a terrorist organization by 32 countries, including the EU, the US, and India), had de facto control of Tamil Eelam for most of the 1990s–2000s, until their military defeat in 2009. It was the only rebel group in history with a navy and an airborne unit. Will cloud countries need well-developed military wings?

On the other hand, some groups, such as Romani, have always claimed nationhood without statehood: “non-territorial nations.” Nizaris also have a mighty prince, the Aga Khan IV, without a land! Per Wikipedia: “He is unique among the richest royals in that he does not preside over a geographic territory.” (Besides, the Aga Khan’s power, inherited from his grandfather, relies on social backlinks from his followers to him. This social tree structure and its institutions are enshrined in the Isma’ili “World Constitution,” which provides ideological alignment to the group.) These stateless groups sometimes describe themselves as part of the “Fourth World,” but could we build that Fourth World in cyberspace?

[2024 edit: the Nizaris are even more fascinating as they used to have a network state! From 1090 to 1310, the Nizari Ismaili state “consisted of a nexus of strongholds throughout Persia and the Levant, with their territories being surrounded by huge swathes of hostile as well as crusader territory. It was formed as a result of a religious and political movement of the minority Nizari sect supported by the anti-Seljuk population. Being heavily outnumbered, the Nizaris resisted adversaries by employing strategic, self-sufficient fortresses and the use of unconventional tactics, notably assassination of important adversaries and psychological warfare.” The Nizazi state was also called the Order of Assassins or simply the Assassins. Their "unconventional tactics" were so good that “the modern term assassination is believed to stem from the tactics used by the Assassins”!]

Besides ethnic and religious groups, cloud countries could be founded on other centers of interest. I see Freemasonry as the kind of community that would be built in the cloud today. Born in authoritarian Europe, the movement also thrived in the US: from Paul Revere to George Washington, many—although far from all—of those who shaped the US in its early history were freemasons. As Todd Creason wrote: “they all had a dream to bring ideals they learned within Craft to an entire nation of people.” For George Washington, the US was “the second Land of promise.” It was a “cultural fork” of Old Europe.

Then, as Balaji explained in another article, the US culture itself—born in the East of the country—forked again:

“These people [tech founders and investors] had the intellectual horsepower to compete with the best of the East. Yet they chose to found something rather than inherit it. And that's how tech became a cultural fork of the East Coast. It's the same root but different branches, like the United States and the United Kingdom.”

The Esperanto movement has also long tried to build an Esperanto‑speaking state and almost succeeded in the small condominium of “Neutral Moresnet.” Many in the movement criticized this goal and instead defined the Esperanto community as “a stateless diaspora linguistic minority” based on freedom of association, sharing humanist values, and not only a constructed language. [2024 edit: the Republic of Rose Island was also a short-lived Esperantist micronation on a man-made platform in the Adriatic Sea.] Today, Esperanto is thriving online and is the 53rd most popular language on Wikipedia (more popular than official languages with millions of speakers, e.g., Swahili or Urdu). Thanks to the internet, Esperantists may eventually create their State, but they need new tools to do so.

Indeed, the movements I previously mentioned were the offline versions of “network unions”: “Large groups of people organized online to advance their collective interests via a series of tactics, culminating in coordinated exit as customers or residents if an accord cannot be found.” Many ethnic diasporas are well organized and defend their members and “their interests as a sovereign collective” at all costs. They tend to live in ethnic enclaves with solid kinship networks, which offer solidarity and trust. However, none had the current technology to structure themselves and scale. In particular, they didn’t have access to blockchains. And, to quote Balaji again: “blockchains change social technology.” The internet, Wikipedia, and Duolingo resuscitated Esperanto, which was slowly dying. Similarly, crypto revolutionizes communities if they organize around a token. With encryption, members can communicate and sign documents without interference from the State. With crowdfunding, they can easily shape their common future: they can commit to buying plots of land in the future; instead of just pledging to move somewhere with no skin in the game, such as in the Free State Project. They can set up a decentralized mutual aid society, a form of mutual insurance for group members. They can use a common token to trade inside the group and give incentives to early adopters. Indeed, tokens can represent shares in a real estate investment trust (REIT). This REIT could own the properties occupied by all members worldwide or own the land of their new city. This will be the legal and technical way to unite the disjoint enclaves of this non-contiguous country. Moreover, governance protocols help communities organize themselves; it gives them the backbone and the administrative infrastructure of the modern State in open-source software. These super online communities will then gradually become full-fledged countries. I can’t wait to see which ethnic minority, religious movement, or interest group will be the first to issue its token. (Or maybe cryptocurrencies are already religions?)

Enlightened Europeans exited to the US. Entrepreneurial minds from the East Coast exited to the West Coast. The next step would be for Silicon Valley, its original culture, values, and ideals, to move to the cloud. And then to live a diasporic life, joined by entrepreneurs from everywhere who share these values, until they can finally settle in a territory and build the third “Land of promise.” Will it be an online Hanseatic League? A digital merchant republic? No one knows because cloud countries and network states are a utopia, and that’s why they’re great.

“Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.”—Eduardo Galeano

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Do you know other ways to relax? Please share them!

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Antoine

“The Science of Well-Being” is a 10-week course taught by Laurie Santos, cognitive scientist, and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. I strongly recommend it: Laurie Santos explains why we’re not as happy as we would like, and she gives actionable strategies to increase one’s happiness, all backed by scientific research. Here’s what I learned.

First, Sonja Lyubomirsky found the breakdown of factors that determine our happiness:

• 50% Genetic Setpoint,

• 10% Life Circumstances, and

• 40% Our Intentional Actions and Thoughts.

So even though our genes determine a large part of our happiness, we can increase it.

However, what we think makes us happy often doesn’t, or not as much as we think. For instance, Nobel Prize Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton proved in a 2010 article that “emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000.” Said otherwise, after your yearly household—not personal—income reaches $75k, your happiness stays flat! I knew that money couldn’t buy happiness, but it’s better to have scientific evidence for it:

And yet, 71% of American freshmen answered that being “Very well off financially” was “very important in life” in the 2005 American Freshman Survey. They were 42% to answer similarly in 1967. On the other hand, in 1967, 86% answered that it was “very important” to “Develop a meaningful philosophy in life,” vs. only 52% today. A total inversion of values in 40 years!

Dozens of articles also prove that comparing ourselves to others makes us less happy. For instance, men declare they are less in love with their wives and find them less attractive after looking at models in magazines. We hate feeling ourselves lower so much that in a study, students preferred to be paid $50k if others got $25k than getting paid $100k if others got $250k!

That’s why social media and advertising can be bad. They push our drive to compare to each other. On Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, you see the best of other people's lives: they don't broadcast the boring part of their lives. So an easy and proven way to increase your happiness is to delete social media. I almost stopped using Twitter, and I do feel better.

Another easy way to be happier: don’t invest in things (house, car, jewelry…) but in experiences (holidays, restaurants, museums, outdoor activities…). Materialistic people are less happy, and it’s proven that your happiness goes back to normal a few weeks after you buy something because you get used to it. This is hedonic adaptation: our tendency “to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”

Paradoxically, because experiences don’t stay, we don’t get used to them, so they have a long-term effect. If you have a great weekend getaway, thinking about it before and after feels pleasant. Experiences are also less susceptible to social comparisons and cooler to relate to others and discuss. In contrast, if you discuss your new Jaguar with others, they may be jealous and judgmental.

They are different techniques to thwart hedonic adaptation:

• Savoring: The act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. Deeply think about what made you happy, share it with others, think about how lucky you are.

• Negative visualization: Imagine you would never have had or done this.

• Gratitude: When we recognize and appreciate what we have received in life. Each night, write down 5 things for which you are grateful; research shows that it’ll make you happier and even healthier. Gratitude is extremely powerful; when you express gratitude to someone in person, it has positive effects even 3 months later!

A huge part of our life is our job. People often think that they’re happier during leisure than at work, but the opposite is true when measured. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this disconnect in our beliefs about work and leisure:

Contrary to what we usually believe […] the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Leisure isn’t challenging, whereas we often find these challenges at work. When these challenges are intrinsically rewarding, we enter a state of great happiness called flow.

Research shows that if you use your top “Character Strengths” every day at work, you’re happier, and you call your job a calling. This free test finds your top strengths. If you try to use your top strengths in new ways, this will also make you happier at work!

Social connections are another vital source of happiness that has unfortunately been negatively affected by Covid, lockdowns, and “social distancing.” The effect of “feeling alone” on happiness is 7 times bigger than the effect of having your salary multiplied by 4! Research shows that happy people spend more time with others and have a richer set of social connections. Even talking to a stranger on the street can boost our mood. Meaningful social connections are even more powerful. Acts of kindness to others also make us happier. That’s why Laurie Santos asks students to talk to strangers and do random kind acts every day. For instance, when we have a bad day, we want to be alone at home, but the best way to feel happier is by talking to others and spending money on them!

But the most impressive way to be happier is to control our minds. When the focus of your attention temporarily shifts from what you are doing, you are “mind wandering.” This default mode of our brain is also called auto-pilot. The problem is: when we mind-wander, we tend to think more about unhappy things, so mind-wandering makes us less happy. Unfortunately, we do it almost all the time. Actually, sex is one of the only activities when we do not mind-wander, and that’s partly why it makes us happy.

The solution? Meditation! It turns us away from mind-wandering toward a single point of focus such as breath. Regular meditation practice can curve mind-wandering even after meditation. Studies also show that 30 minutes of daily meditation increase the size of your gray matter after 8 weeks and improve your score in cognitive tests.

In addition to meditation, physical activity and sleep also make you healthier and happier.

Using the tests suggested in the MOOC, I measured my happiness before and after the course: I’m about 5% happier now than I was a few weeks ago :) I also learned a ton of useful things about myself and others. I would love to know your methods to be happier. Do you know other ways to boost your mood?

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