[00:01:42] Preston Pysh: We bumped into each other when I was down in El Salvador and you started telling me about this topic and we had, we had also talked about this at another event, but when I saw you in El Salvador, we had a little bit more time to, to get into it.

[00:01:56] Preston Pysh: And this is just so fascinating to me that the way that Bitcoin is being used in a, in a way that you just somewhat unimaginable.

[00:02:05] Carlos Toriello: It’s the trust that you don’t, it’s the trust machine.

[00:02:08] Preston Pysh: Thank you. Thank you. That’s where I want to go. So give people just an overview. When you shot me an email, you said elections put clown world into hyper drive.

[00:02:20] Preston Pysh: I think that’s such a great way to phrase this, but take it away. Give people a little bit of an overview.

[00:02:25] Carlos Toriello: Sure. So I’m Carlos Toriello. People know me as Carliño. I’m from Guatemala. That’s next door to El Salvador. And I’ve been passionate about elections since 2011. When I first joined the volunteer ranks of Guatemala’s voting system, the way that voting works in Guatemala is a civil, a civilian army is conscripted every four years and called upon and hand given custody over everyone’s ballots.

[00:02:56] Carlos Toriello: And I went through that experience in 2011 and 2015 and in two elections. And I just fell in love with the process. It really helped me understand the value of proof of work as a consensus algorithm and, you know, helped me differentiate why proof of work is so valuable as opposed to proof of stake.

[00:03:17] Carlos Toriello: And so, you know, Guatemala has elections every four years, so you just have to wait around for another four years and, and you get another crack at it. And then in 2019, instead of coming back as a volunteer where I was manning the voting tables in charge of my neighbor’s ballots, I came back as a political party witness.

[00:03:36] Carlos Toriello: And I did that because a few family members of mine were running for Congress and they wanted my help and asked me for money, but I said, I don’t support political campaigns, but I will volunteer to oversee the process. And, you know, that’s where the similarities between how our voting system in Guatemala and proof of work comes into play.

[00:03:58] Carlos Toriello: It’s particularly Bitcoin, so that political party witnesses, everyone that competes in the political, in the, in the election can send a witness to every single voting table all over the country. That’s at this, in 2023, there were 25, 000 of these. So, political parties are supposed to send 25, 000 witnesses to oversee that the rules of the protocol.

[00:04:20] Carlos Toriello: At the voting tables, the custodians handling the votes are doing the job according to the rules, and that basically turns them into validating notes, and the volunteers, the citizen volunteers are effectively mining notes. They’re the ones that give the ballots to the citizens around 400 for it at every table and at the end of the day they dump out the individual ballots and they count every single one individually in front of the witnesses so that they are cast as intended.

[00:04:52] Carlos Toriello: And the tally, the vote tally that this produces is a document that everyone has to sign. And so this document is signed by the miners, the, the three volunteers that do the, the, all the hashing and the mining, but then the witnesses, the political party witnesses, the validating notes have to also sign off.

[00:05:12] Carlos Toriello: And that is what makes that document. And it’s that signature by the validating nodes that confirms that all of those individual votes were counted as cast and that tally sheet or summary document per table eliminates all the votes, tally sheets, or sorry, all the individual votes. And so in that way, this document is eventually made public, and I can show you on my screen an example of this.

[00:05:40] Preston Pysh: Yeah, that’d be wonderful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:05:42] Carlos Toriello: So these documents are all public information. So in this case, I’m showing you the example of table number 21, 000 out of 25, 000. So I just randomly selected one out of 25, 000. And you can see the type of election that’s happening. In this case, it’s the president, the vice president, and these three people down here are the volunteers with their ID, by the way, and then their signature here proves or demonstrates that they agree to what work that they did.

[00:06:13] Carlos Toriello: But then down here you can see that there was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different validating nodes signing off on this. And then up here you can see that, or on the left, you can see all of the political parties and numbers that were assigned to each one. And so the totals of these are what make up this document. In that sense, these documents are a coin join, similar to a coin join, in that they are public, allowing anyone like me to have access to this and verify the total tally, but protecting individuals rights to privacy.

[00:06:53] Carlos Toriello: By even though I could know that Preston voted at table number 21, 000, I would have to basically assume that Preston voted for any one of these. And so you are protected by combining your votes along with everyone else. And since the counting of each of the votes happens in front of everyone, then this is a very widely witnessed document.

[00:07:14] Carlos Toriello: And it makes this into basically the best way to confirm that this actually was integrity. At that point, the ballots, individual ballots themselves just disappear, and this is what matters. There’s 25, 000 of these per election, and each year we do six elections, so there’s over 150, 000 documents of these.

[00:07:36] Carlos Toriello: I work at a non profit. Locally, we produce civics and Guatemalan history textbooks. This is, you know, our little website. We, you know, produce these, these textbooks. And basically, what I realized is there aren’t enough young people involved in the election process, and we needed a way to creatively gamify this ability that Guatemalans have to don’t trust, verify our election system.

[00:08:04] Carlos Toriello: And so, Since these documents are all just posted on the internet for anyone to be able to verify, I figured what we needed was a way to get the crowd and the internet to all collaborate and verify all of these documents. And that’s literally what I proposed and, and, and published open source software for us to do in 2019, especially because in that year, there was just a very bad election outcome in terms of how this was being published.

[00:08:35] Carlos Toriello: There was election fraud accusations, the documents were being changed. Anyway, it was a nightmare, like the one you could imagine elections could become. And so I figured we could use the trust machine, you know, Bitcoin to bring trust back to elections. And so the first thing to understand is if you get involved in election auditing, and you end up auditing all of the documents.

[00:09:00] Carlos Toriello: And your results contradict the results that are being presented publicly by the election authorities, at least Guatemala, where I’m from, that is technically treason. So, there’s, you know, a lot is on the line if, when you publish these documents. And so I realized that I needed something to be able to prove that I never tampered the documents myself.

[00:09:27] Carlos Toriello: And this is where Bitcoin really shines and we found this tool that was built by Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer who I highly recommend everyone research and understand the things that he’s built. One of the things he’s built is the Open Timestamps Protocol. And what this does is it uses the OP_Return function within a node, so a node runner can utilize the OP_Return function to include a piece of data into any transaction, and that information is included on the Bitcoin time chain or the blockchain.

[00:10:05] Carlos Toriello: I will caveat, I highly respect folks that believe that Bitcoin is only money, and I highly recommend researching the details on how OpenTimestamps works, specifically OP_Return, because this is all prunable information. The difference between the work that we did, and some of the work that’s being done, that’s causing such a concern is that all of our information is basically optional for nodes to run.

[00:10:33] Carlos Toriello: They can always prune this information, but nodes that do choose to include opportune data can include the open timestamps protocol, allowing anyone to anchor some piece of data to the Bitcoin blockchain as a independent participant. Digital notary or witness a certain piece of data, thereby kind of carbon dating digital information famously, actually, in the recent emails revealed through the Craig Wright case, where we learned some of what Satoshi Nakamoto’s more private beliefs were.

[00:11:13] Carlos Toriello: One of the things he shared was that the use of the time chain for this purpose was something that he did envision. So, this is just, you know, a coincidence that we are using the time chain in a way that at least you can go back all the way to Satoshi Nakamoto and more recently Peter Todd and the Open Timestamps Protocol is attempting to use the time chain in a voluntary manner for Node Runners.

[00:11:38] Carlos Toriello: So what this means is, You can use Bitcoin as a, an anchor for digital information, going back to what I was saying in terms of our election audit before unleashing the internet on an audit on documents, on official election documents, the first thing we did, and the first thing anyone should do is timestamp all of that information to Bitcoin, because you could prove then that anyone could replicate whatever your process was, Because they could prove that the information, the data that they used is the same that you used from that point in time, therefore eliminating all possibility that you could be accused of election tampering.

[00:12:23] Carlos Toriello: And so in 2019, we did this, but we failed miserably at achieving kind of the mass of users that we needed and the work to achieve this because we just made a bunch of mistakes. But really when the authorities came out with the results, all of our volunteers or the majority of our volunteers kind of died off.

[00:12:43] Carlos Toriello: And I was trying to find ways to motivate them continue to do the work, but I just failed. However, again, you can always wait for a few years and elections are always clown world. It will always go back into hyperdrive. You know, I, I did a bunch of research and, and attended a fair number of Bitcoin events, particularly the human rights foundations event in Miami in 2021, where I met some folks from stack work who are a company that are lightning company that enable anyone that has hyper growth issues to use their systems to develop repetitive tasks on a marketplace and then pay users or allow users to earn sats in exchange for that work. And so, this was just a match made in heaven, and so this year, or rather at this point last year, in 2023, when the elections happened in Guatemala, both in June and in August, we prepared the machine, and essentially were able to be ready as soon as the documents were made public.

[00:13:53] Carlos Toriello: And we’re ready to hash them to Bitcoin, but we’re also surprised because the election authority decided to listen to our recommendations from 2019. We had presented a lot of information on how to improve the election system and and how they could use this tool themselves. And to our surprise, and maybe now I’ll share my screen again, but to our surprise and great luck.

[00:14:17] Carlos Toriello: The National Authorities of Guatemala, for the first time in the history of the world, decided to use Bitcoin in this way, and sorry, I’m just going to try to find this real quick up here in my tabs. Essentially, this is the website, and if anyone wants to look at this, you can go to trep.gt. That’s the website.

[00:14:41] Carlos Toriello: It’s the preliminary results website. And the authorities decided to publish all 100, you know, hundreds of thousands of election documents online and show these documents to whoever wanted to see them, like we’ve done in Guatemala for decades now. And for folks watching my screen, I just input the same table number 21, 000.

[00:15:05] Carlos Toriello: Now it’s showing you the results of that voting table, and you can go by district, by whatever, you can go hammer into specifically your one little table where you could check your vote, and you can see, oh, here are all the votes, but. It shows you a database and you’re like, well, how do I verify instead of just trusting this database?

[00:15:24] Carlos Toriello: They included this little blue button that shows you that document that I was previously showing you as an example. But again, the question would be, how do you trust that election documents aren’t being tampered with throughout the election night and potentially later? Yeah. And that’s where those that are watching this on the screen will see a very obvious yellow button.

[00:15:46] Carlos Toriello: That appears on this official election results website that when you click on it, it takes you to a website called Simple Proof. And what Simple Proof did was effectively build a government tech solution for this problem powered by OpenTimestamps. It’s a Guatemalan startup, tech startup. And what they have is essentially, they always write down at what moment they receive the document.

[00:16:17] Carlos Toriello: Immediately, they obtain the SHA 256 hash. Of that document that they received, they then added to the open timestamps protocol, which I’ll briefly say is kind of like you send transactions to Bitcoin every 10 minutes and within those 10 minutes to reach every block. You basically fill up the timestamping protocol with as many hashes of as many JPEG files that you received within those 10 minutes as you want.

[00:16:47] Carlos Toriello: It could be 10, it could be 10 million, it could be a hundred trillion, literally any amount of data can be hashed into one final root hash. And that is what’s included in the OP_RETURN transaction that’s sent to the Bitcoin blockchain. And so then they include the information as to what time that block was confirmed and provide you download access for the original file which you can see here.

[00:17:15] Preston Pysh: This is unreal.

[00:17:17] Carlos Toriello: Yes, or also the Open Timestamps file, which is what you see here.

[00:17:22] Preston Pysh: Yeah.

[00:17:22] Carlos Toriello: And so this, you know, for those that are listening, what you’re seeing now is one final root hash that is a end result of a series of mathematical hashing operations that all. down to the exact information mathematically and cryptographically that is sent to Bitcoin.

[00:17:44] Carlos Toriello: So then, for example, you bump into this note that says probably a Bitcoin transaction. So you can take that information and you can plug it into your node. Or, for example, you can go into mempool, include the transaction ID, and then ask to see the details.

[00:18:04] Carlos Toriello: And you’ll see that this information, this hash was included here in this transaction back in June 25th at 924.

[00:18:17] Carlos Toriello: And so therefore there is a transaction in the past. That includes that SHA 256, which you can then just

[00:18:27] Preston Pysh: plug in and find.

[00:18:28] Preston Pysh: And for people that are hearing this, it got minted into a block or got wrote into a block about, what was that, 20 25 minutes after, and that was probably just, I mean, it could have been that amount of time just because there wasn’t a block found.

[00:18:43] Preston Pysh: That’s like 20 minutes after they actually created this document that had hit the blockchain. So this is, this is mind blowing, mind, mind blowing. What people that are listening might not have heard, because I think when they’re listening to this, like, yeah, it’s, it’s. There’s still people that can tamper with it.

[00:19:01] Preston Pysh: And I think that that’s obviously a true statement, but what I would, what I would really emphasize is the fact that this document that’s being generated and then the sheer number of people that have to sign it to collectively together. And then based on the, I saw a documentary before we recorded this.

[00:19:20] Preston Pysh: I saw they’re taking these forms after they create them, they’re sticking them straight into a scanner, it’s automatically then scanning the document, and there’s multiple, like, hard copy versions, and once that one gets scanned, it’s being generated straight into this simple proof that, that we’re looking at right now, is that correct?

[00:19:40] Carlos Toriello: Yeah, so, I mean, the, I’d say invite them over to go into the, like, really nitty gritty of it, but effectively, that’s what is published here, so, you know, the best criticism against this that I’ve heard is, well, but they, you know, how do you know that the JPEG file that you showed wasn’t, you know, tampered with fire, right?

[00:20:00] Carlos Toriello: And that’s an excellent concern, And to that, what I would say is now I’m going to show you my screen and actually show you an altered document of that same one. And on the left, I have the exact same, but you might, you may notice that over here down by over here, there’s a hundred. Over here. So basically I altered this document.

[00:20:21] Carlos Toriello: And so if this happened. Now, you know, if we have time, I could just obtain the hash, the SHA 256 hashes of both of these documents and cryptographically prove that they are not the same. And so if someone was able to get, to doctorate and alter a document and get it into the database that was published to the internet, then what that person has done is a crime, A, but number two, is there is immutable tamper evidence proof But that crime was committed and all you have to do is find any one of these people that signed the original document and call them to be a witness on the stand.

[00:21:02] Carlos Toriello: Also, all of these people who signed this document, they all took, you know, photographs of the original with their own device.

[00:21:09] Preston Pysh: Oh, wow.

[00:21:12] Carlos Toriello: And there’s a paper trail with the original, you know, that also should be there, right? So. The point here is, this is not the panacea that will eliminate election fraud, but it makes it so that 99 percent of the attack surface, is gone.

[00:21:32] Carlos Toriello: Holy moly. There’s like 1 percent of an attack surface, which is effectively that 25 minute timeframe that, that you pointed out. But even if they take advantage of that, which would be, there’s, we could go into the quantum computing that they would need to really, you know.

[00:21:50] Preston Pysh: Well, you can also, you can also look back at that moment and you can see how long it took for that block to even be found, right?

[00:21:56] Preston Pysh: So like if you’re looking at that and you could see the fee that that it was published with, you could see all of this, that if there was a delay that didn’t make sense, like all of that is traceable.

[00:22:08] Carlos Toriello: The whole point is right now elections that rely on paper ballots and paper results are by considered by most respectable computer scientists as the most trustworthy elections that you will find paper ballots and paper totals and audit trail than anyone can use to get to the actual results.

[00:22:32] Carlos Toriello: are the safest way to carry an election. It’s when those documents merge with the internet that things get crazy. If when you jump from paper to digital, If at the start of that, you go, you start through the filter of using Bitcoin as your, your witness of the original, then it doesn’t matter if AI, someone with artificial intelligence creates a million copies, you can always use your attestment, your witness data to Bitcoin as the way to differentiate the signal from the noise.

[00:23:13] Carlos Toriello: But again, even if someone hacked you and was able to put the wrong information, A, they would have had to do it in a very, very small window of time, and B, you still have the paper trail so you could prove that election tampering occurred, which is very helpful, right? Instead of just, you know, point fingers at each other.

[00:23:34] Carlos Toriello: So this is basically the layer one of what happened that allowed us as an auditor to trust the information that was being shared. And I was mentioning our work focuses on young people. And what we’ve believed was we need to make a gamified version of auditing because these documents are boring. Like, like the only thing that people care less about than, you know, monetary theory from a hundred years ago is doing grunt work of just data entry of digits.

[00:24:08] Carlos Toriello: Like that is enough to, you know, make anyone want to do something else. That’s where we came with our partnership with Stackwork who built a custom workflow to adapt to what we needed.

[00:24:23] Preston Pysh: I’ve done this by the way Carlos sent this over to me and I did this and it was really neat. It’s, it’s really a kind of a fascinating thing.

[00:24:31] Preston Pysh: Go ahead, pull, pull it up on the screen and then walk people through this, Carlos. This is really, really fascinating.

[00:24:38] Carlos Toriello: Sure. So first thing you’re seeing on our screen is our top 10 users. So this is like, Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the users do a lot of work. You can see our top number one user earned 385, 000 Satoshis for their work.

[00:24:55] Carlos Toriello: It was about two weeks of nonstop data entry that this person did along with a few others. And so what this means is now we can remind people every election cycle, how many Satoshis you earned in 2023 by just being an election auditor. By gamifying this, it turns elections into an opportunity to reach young people with an interesting way of caring about elections.

[00:25:23] Carlos Toriello: And of course, If they then want to redeem those Satoshis, then they’ve experienced their first lightning transaction. And that’s where my main message to Bitcoiners that are listening is, we really want to replicate this in other elections, where you can work with the official election results and gamify the auditing portion.

[00:25:44] Carlos Toriello: Because we believe that the don’t trust verify philosophy that is at the root of Bitcoin, if we bring that to elections, we can expose people that have concerns about elections and young people, those are the two primary populations of people that showed up to help us do this work. And I can’t imagine a better group of people that’s basically better primed to grok Bitcoin than someone that’s already a suspect of the state or a young person and just expose them to their first lightning transaction in exchange for doing auditing work. And so going back to the, what I showed you earlier in terms of the, the example. So basically what this turns into, this is an OCR problem, an optical character recognition problem when you have to go through millions of these documents that have handwritten digits corresponding to individual political parties and their in contained the results.

[00:26:44] Carlos Toriello: Like I said, this is not tallying individual ballots. This is tallying the coin joins that occur at the 25, 000 tables. That means that in our case in Guatemala, we have 9 million voters, so For anyone saying, Oh, you guys, it’s a small election. It’s like, well, I don’t know how many counties in the United States have more than 9 million voters, but Guatemala has more than 9 million voters, and that is then turned into 25, 000 documents per election, and we had 6 elections, we had 150, 000 of these documents. Inside each one of them is anywhere between 25 to 40 individual data points that are handwritten. Of course, we attempted to read these things using machines, and we were successful about 70 percent of the time.

[00:27:34] Carlos Toriello: So most of the numbers you’re seeing on your screen were read by machines. But 30 percent of the data was a failure. And that’s where we needed humans to actually go through the process. And so, here I have the Stackwork environment that was set up for us, and all you need to do is literally just look at the number with your phone, input the data, and then afterwards, so Maybe your folks are seeing this.

[00:28:06] Carlos Toriello: I have a snippet of something that says CNN zero, zero, zero. And obviously this is a scanned image of something that was written by hand. And so all I need to do as a human user is read the numbers, input the data, click done, and boom, I just earned two points. And those points just so happened to be Satoshi’s that I can redeem.

[00:28:32] Carlos Toriello: But in order to redeem, I would need to learn how to generate a lightning invoice. And so we did these jobs, these data inputs over 3 million times. Our end results I have the final data here. We did a total of 7. 7 million OCRs with machines. So machine readings. We did 1. 7 million human jobs, we rewarded 33 million stats, and the total number of data points was 2. 8 million. That was just for 2023. But we also got information for Guatemala’s elections from 2019 and 2015. So we actually audited three separate elections over 450, 000 documents. And our users earned over 66 million satoshis in exchange for their work. My message is we should run full nodes on elections.

[00:29:32] Carlos Toriello: And the tools are ready to do this as long as you live in an election system, a voting system. that cares to provide you with the primary source information that is needed to do an audit. And that’s the key, right? It’s I’m very passionate and proud to be Guatemalan, and I believe the Guatemalan voting system is effectively the best voting system in the world.

[00:30:00] Carlos Toriello: You know, people say, oh, democracy, this democracy, that, but they don’t understand that not all democracies are created equal, not all democracies allow a citizen to don’t trust verify their own election. And so I’m a little concerned that as big winners, we’ve kind of like given up on democracy. And I’m not saying I’m not imploring you to believe in democracy.

[00:30:29] Carlos Toriello: I don’t think you should. That’s up to you. But I also don’t think we should allow dictatorships or autocracies to have an advantage over adopting Bitcoin. I think democracies have these elections, and they provide us the opportunity to reach people. that may need to find the don’t trust verify philosophy and all of that energy that clown world is using to pit us against each other. We can use that to actually reach people with Bitcoin. And when people that distrust elections, discover Bitcoin, I think they discover hope. Yes. Because, The option that Clown World gives them at the moment is just hate your neighbor, and I am concerned that a lot of people hate their neighbors right now, and if we could just get them to love Bitcoin, then I think democracies will prove to adopt Bitcoin faster than autocracies and dictatorships.

[00:31:34] Preston Pysh: Carlos, this is crazy. This is unbelievable. All I keep thinking though, as I’m watching this, I’m saying, how in the world can other countries take what is built here, this protocol that you guys have come up with and replicate it into other nations? That’s, I’m just looking at it like, how in the world can we get this into other countries hands to help assist them?

[00:31:58] Preston Pysh: Have you been consulted about this? Like, where is that at? Or I’m just kind of curious your thoughts on it.

[00:32:06] Carlos Toriello: Sure. So again, just for my, what I lead is digital witness, the election auditing piece of this, which kind of like brings together all of the pieces to do this. We use the work of simple proof to make sure that our documents are trustworthy and then we partner with Stack Work to allow our users to do this.

[00:32:28] Carlos Toriello: People can reach out to simple proof. Their website is simple proof.com. You can watch the documentary that tells the story of how this happened in Guatemala, and I’m sure they are open to receiving inquiries. Regarding our work as election auditors, you know, the next election in the hemisphere is Mexico.

[00:32:46] Carlos Toriello: So if there are any Mexican Bitcoiners watching this or hearing this, I would like to do this in Mexico in June. However, the timetable at this point is so tight. that I don’t know that it’ll be possible. Mexico turns out has essentially the same kind of system. Panama has elections and Dominican Republic have elections as well.

[00:33:07] Carlos Toriello: And so if anyone wants to audit those elections, please reach out. You can find me on Twitter, on, on, you can find our effort on Noster. I’m sure we can, you know, include some of that, you know, links in later. But we want to do this now, so it’s a little tight for those elections, but come November for the U. S. elections, generally what I understand in terms of how the election system works in the U. S. is you have 50 states that all 50 have different election laws, and then within those states, you have county clerks. who I think more often than not are the ones responsible for implementing the election law.

[00:33:44] Carlos Toriello: And so it depends on which state and which county it effectively allows anyone to have access to the primary source data that’s produced on election days. And so there, I just say, reach out if you live in the county. Step one is just go visit your county clerk and ask them. Hey, I’m a Bitcoiner, let’s pretend like I want to audit the election and I come here, you know, day after the election in November, and I just ask using a Freedom of Information Act request, you know, using the law and my rights as a citizen to have access to the registry.

[00:34:21] Carlos Toriello: Let’s pretend like I’m a person that cares about that. And I ask for access to all of the election documents. What would I get? Would I get the primary source data that’s built by the voters and the people running the election, the voting centers? Or do I get some kind of secondary data? That’s a machine, you know, spewed out and that I’d have to trust the code in order to, I think it’s useful to know for yourself as a Bitcoiner, whether you live in a county where the election system enables you to don’t trust verify or for you to find out that you live in a county where it’s don’t verify trust the election outcome.

[00:35:03] Carlos Toriello: And I would bet that in the 10, 000 or so counties around the United States, there’s got to be a few where there’s a don’t trust verify philosophy and because this isn’t rocket science, no one’s going to Mars with this thing. This is literally just all I want to do is see the see the results. I’m not even here to fight you on who won.

[00:35:23] Carlos Toriello: All I care is that I can look at the data and I can prove to myself that 1 plus 1 equals 2. And that’s it.

[00:35:33] Preston Pysh: Carlos, I’m, I’m enamored by your passion for this topic and this subject and everything that you’ve, the, the proof of work that you’ve done to help construct this. I’m curious, what is driving your deep passion for this?

[00:35:48] Preston Pysh: Is it something in your past or what is it?

[00:35:52] Carlos Toriello: My mission in life is to get Central America to be the first region in the world to adopt Bitcoin. That’s 50 million of us and I just constantly think of, you know, what can I do to help accelerate that? And knowing my own voting system, having worked there, I just love how it works.

[00:36:12] Carlos Toriello: And so it’s, to me, it’s, I can, I saw a path to teaching Guatemalans about Bitcoin through our voting system, but then also teaching the world about the Guatemalan voting system and the characteristics that our voting system has, which make it the best voting system in the world, because instead of trusting anyone else, it’s literally your neighbor.

[00:36:35] Carlos Toriello: Who gives you your ballots and then you mark it, you know, and then he, you, you put it in the little bag and then your neighbor is the one that counts it in front of everyone. And that’s just in this decentralized way. And so it’s teaching Guatemalans about Bitcoin through democracy, but then, you know, teaching Bitcoiners about the best way to run a proper voting system. And I’m just concerned also that electronic voting, e voting is coming to Guatemala. I’ve seen a lot of people make that push and I believe that would be the end of our system. If I can turn all, you know, 9 million voters in Guatemala into, into Bitcoiners, then I’d say we have a fair shot at beating the rest of the world and, and in general, Central America has many things going for it, where we will, the fact that we’re kind of last in most of the other races for human progress means that we have an advantage in the only race that matters, which is adopting Bitcoin.

[00:37:32] Preston Pysh: That was a really interesting comment that you had about the physical paper copies versus using voting machines. And what I find so interesting about Bitcoin. And the comparison to what you just said is at Bitcoin’s core is this, that you have to consume energy, which is tethered to physical reality, right?

[00:37:52] Preston Pysh: And in voting, if we’re not tethered to physical reality of literally a pen and paper to write down the vote, it almost seems like you can’t do fair, a fair election. If you just go straight to the digital, is this accurate?

[00:38:10] Carlos Toriello: You can use, I’ve seen models where they use the voting machine to allow you to like, click on the party, person, whoever you want to vote for, and then they print out your individual ballot, and then you can take that ballot and personally deposit it into a backup paper system, and then The argument, I believe, has been that, especially for something like the U. S. where you have something like 150 million people voting on a single day, and so the argument is the counting, right? It’s how quickly could you generate the block, right? With all the transactions. And the argument was 150 million transactions. In a single day, there’s no way we could compute that without the help of machines.

[00:39:00] Carlos Toriello: And that’s when the compute went into the digital realm. Now, that’s not inherently evil and wrong. What’s inherently evil and wrong is not giving people then the paper backup to, you know, deduct, you know, for themselves and retrace that path to how you actually got to that. And you could have a system where you’re like, you don’t necessarily are using pen and paper, even though for us in Guatemala, that just, you know, there’s a lot of people that will never trust the machine.

[00:39:30] Carlos Toriello: And so your trust in the voting system basically boils down to the lowest common denominator of. If it’s ham, that just allows most people to trust it. Like there’s no way people can’t see that as, as, as real. In our case, we also solve for the double spend problem by putting ink on people’s finger and it’s indelible ink.

[00:39:49] Carlos Toriello: It’ll last for a few days. And so, Alright, let’s say you were able to dupe someone into, you know, believing your election, your, your ID is not yours and you went to vote in another district, like, props to you, man, all you did was, you know, gain one vote. What you need to protect is the ability for someone to digitally, you know, turn themselves into a million voters.

[00:40:10] Carlos Toriello: Which, you know, the paper does allow for that as well. And so it’s the counting, right? And that’s where it’s beautiful to understand that the analogies with Bitcoin of how the nodes achieve consensus in that you have all of the witnesses, all of the interested parties there, when the transactions are happening, they see for themselves, they can check that all the rules are being followed and then they sign on the block if the transactions aren’t followed. Sorry, if the protocol rules aren’t followed, then your node will, will recognize that. So it’s just bringing that back to, to people and empowering communities to do, don’t trust verify.

[00:40:52] Preston Pysh: This is one of the, this is so profound and if you’re a person that’s listening to this and you participate in any type of voting system, I don’t care what country it is, that trying to exercise democracy, you got to share this with somebody that can take action and Carlos, I hope that your, I hope your social account goes wild.

[00:41:14] Preston Pysh: I hope you get contacted by so many people because This is just such important stuff. This is vital for the elimination of clown world. It really is vital. Like, Oh my God, man.

[00:41:27] Carlos Toriello: And I’ll say doing, doing this work has obviously forced me to work with a great many people who work in elections and there are a lot of volunteers that power elections and a lot of really Good hearted, well meaning people who, if it weren’t for them, we would never have been a democracy in the first place.

[00:41:49] Carlos Toriello: So, you know, try to lower your, your time preference when you talk to them and don’t see them as your enemy. And like, you’re the problem with clown world. They’re not, they’re, they’re trying to do their best in an extremely dysfunctional system. And more often than not, people working at elections. Do not have any technical background, have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes, have never coded a, you know, anything, and are very intimidated by all of this.

[00:42:20] Carlos Toriello: Not to mention artificial intelligence. This is probably going to be the worst selection by far in terms of, reality and, and, and fakeness and what the amount of damage that this is going to do to people in communities everywhere. And so your county clerk, whoever is in charge of your registry of your neighbors, they are probably not ready for the tidal wave of insanity that is barreling towards them and will hit them no matter what happens on in November.

[00:42:52] Carlos Toriello: And so basically throw them a lifeline. Like they say. First of all, I’m sick of people saying Bitcoin fixes this because, you know, Bitcoin doesn’t fix anything. It’s people using Bitcoin that fix, you know, cloud world. And B, they say Bitcoin is, is, what is it? The lifesaver or the, you know, the life raft.

[00:43:11] Carlos Toriello: The life raft, right? It’s like, There are so many people that are about to get hit by the tidal wave of clown world come November in the U. S. They need this life raft. And just ask them, Look, what’s your plan on election night when a million fake documents hit your Twitter feed and Facebook feed and all of this?

[00:43:34] Carlos Toriello: Like, what is your plan? Do you have any anchor to reality? Or, are you just say, no one can have access to any of the data, because if you say that, that’s just worse. If you hide the election information, then that’s just going to, I mean, you’re going to get nuked. And so, it’s telling those folks in the driver’s seat.

[00:44:01] Carlos Toriello: that are usually like, you know, very well meaning Gen Xers or boomer moms who like, are driving their kids to soccer, you know, practice. And they’re already starting to sweat bullets and have sleepless nights. So just tell them like, here’s your anchor. This is just one thing that happened in Guatemala.

[00:44:18] Carlos Toriello: And by the way, the election authorities in Guatemala were in part, able to avoid going to jail because of this. There was a criminal accusation against the election authorities for election tampering. And because of, I’ll share my screen again. This is crazy. Let me see. So, So we, as an auditor, obviously, we, we published the report.

[00:44:46] Carlos Toriello: We have a 270 odd page report, which is available for free download on our website. You can see we’ve published this latest version in March of 2024. And at the very end of this, We can show you basically what the criminal justice department of Guatemala that was basically weaponized by the losers of the election.

[00:45:09] Carlos Toriello: What people are seeing on their screen are two boxes. On the left, these are called heat maps. On the left, you see three lines around out certain hours. This is what the election authorities claim were the time and date of the creation of the files. And so there are two very obvious lines, but then there’s a weaker line here and the number of documents before the 18 hour, which is, you know, 6 PM versus on the left, on the right, sorry, people are seeing the heat map of what Bitcoin is saying, and it’s a single column.

[00:45:55] Carlos Toriello: And so this is, I kid you not, the main argument. of election tampering is what you see on the left. They’re saying that there were documents created prior to 6 p. m. on voting night, and therefore that proves that certain documents were created prior to the voting tables doing the counting, thereby proving that there was election tampering.

[00:46:20] Carlos Toriello: And the way that they found this, you know, miraculous evidence was that this is what they said to the press in their press conference. When you right click. The JPEG file and you go into properties, you will see a created by a metadata field and we plotted those and we can see that some of these created by meta metadata fields were prior to polls closing.

[00:46:43] Carlos Toriello: However, you know, that’s very concerning for many, many, many reasons. But then, when you look at the information on the right, Bitcoin is saying that none of these documents exist prior to the moment in time when the tables started doing their work. And so what we were able to prove is that what actually happened was that the contractor that delivered the scanners around the country made a mistake when they configured the time zone of the scanner.

[00:47:12] Carlos Toriello: The scanners just had the wrong time zone and that’s why you see two, two lines. And you know, this is the kind of mistake that lands people in jail, you know, but for some reason the contractor made this mistake. And obviously it was hard for them to prove that mistake. But now what matters is that. The strong line over on the right here that’s claiming that a lot of the, most of the files were created eight hours after the election, that line disappears when you contrast that to Bitcoin.

[00:47:42] Carlos Toriello: So that would mean that someone had access to a time machine that was able to create files in the future, but then plug them into Bitcoin six or eight hours before. And so either the criminal justice system provides evidence of time travel or now because of Bitcoin, they can show that there was just a, an honest mistake that explains this situation.

[00:48:09] Carlos Toriello: I’m still expecting the Guatemalan criminal justice system to issue an arrest warrant for Satoshi Nakamoto. So, you know, any time now. But the point is, this is what saved, one of the things that saved people from going to jail and for the whole voting system to, to crash. Just because a few people misconfigured some hardware.

[00:48:28] Carlos Toriello: That could be, if that’s what, you know, finally destroys your, your democracy, like, wouldn’t that be ironic? And here’s a tool that can keep that from happening.

[00:48:39] Preston Pysh: All right, Carlos, I’m sure people are going to want to have the full list of resources. I’m going to just tell them right now in our show notes, go into the show notes.

[00:48:48] Preston Pysh: I’m going to have a ton of things listed. If you were going to highlight one, the three things to the listener that, that you think is really important, I’m just going to say the documentary was amazing to kind of watch the documentary that you sent me. I know there’s another one that’s only in Spanish right now.

[00:49:04] Preston Pysh: I’m looking for my note here on what it was called. What was it?

[00:49:07] Carlos Toriello: Paper Democracy. That is currently available in Spanish soon in English. It’s much more about the details of the ins and outs of how our voting system works. It’ll be out in English soon. And basically it’s let’s not let Clown World take so many people that just haven’t heard Bitcoin in a way that makes sense to them.

[00:49:28] Carlos Toriello: And you know, I’m a huge fan of sound money and I’m sure that many people will be reached with that. But I think we’re kind of reaching the limits of the sound money argument. and information integrity and being able to an anchor of truth in a sea of different versions of reality is incredibly valuable and potentially provides a different avenue to reach people with a message that will resonate with them and will pique their curiosity.

[00:49:57] Carlos Toriello: But in this event, it’s just involved young people, right? It’s like, this is exactly the kind of thing that young people will get engaged in and just expose them to their first lightning transaction and see what happens. I guess my, my message is just, you know, don’t give up on, on your neighbor and let’s, you know, try to, to, to fight back with truth.

[00:50:14] Carlos Toriello: And that’s just what’s driving me.

[00:50:17] Preston Pysh: Well, Carlos, I can’t thank you enough. This was so fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and folks, if you’re listening to this, here’s the guy to talk to. We’ll have his Twitter. We’ll have all the contact information there in the show notes and Carlos, thank you for making time, sir.

[00:50:34] Carlos Toriello: Anytime. Thank you.

[00:50:57] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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