HERVE LARREN: This Bitcoin Insider Just Exposed the Financial System

21 million Bitcoin will only ever be mined and produced.

2140 is when your last Bitcoin will be mined. The world is actually not interested in capital. The world is interested in credit. And this is why there's a disconnect that is happening right now. The defeat of Napoleon wasn't a military defeat.

It was a credit.

It was a credit. It was a financial defeat. I'm running on a day-to-day basis. I'm strategic advisor of the largest Bitcoin holder in Australia. Trump's Bitcoin advisor is in Puerto Rico, and he handles the strategy for the US from the island of Puerto Rico, is digital capital that enables digital credit that enables digital money.

Truth Report. Today we're interviewing a very great friend of mine who's one of the extraordinary people you'd be lucky to meet. His name's Hervé Larène. He's got 3 passports. Or is it 4?

4.

He's got 4 passports. He's taller than me. He's exceptionally successful. And we're going to talk about Bitcoin. He's a maximalist. We're going to talk about Venezuela, as his mom's from Venezuela. We're going to talk about his love for South Africa and ask him why the hell he's here. And we're going to raise a whole lot of other subjects. But Hervé, welcome to Truth Report.

Thanks for having me. And congratulations about the success of the channel. They say it's one of the big trends in 2026 is citizen journalism. And I feel I'm in the hub of it all.

Well, you're in the hotspot right now, that's for sure. And what are you doing in Cape Town?

So Cape Town is actually my 6th time coming to Cape Town. First time I came was 2016, so exactly 10 years ago. I came to see friends, and since that moment, my love of Cape Town grew, and every other year I try to spend as maximum amount of time here.

All right, and tell me, the fateful day— I know it's related to Venezuela— where you stumbled onto what the hell is Bitcoin?

Yeah, so incredible story. So 2013, um, my, my mother asked my brother and I to send money to Venezuela and to your family there, to, to, to, to my family. My brother and I were living in Manhattan, and, um, and she says, you know, we need to make a wire transfer. There's no banking in Venezuela. So you're gonna need to find a way to send money.

And the money was for family members?

It was for—

To buy food?

Extended family members to buy food via my uncle. So my uncle was gonna get the money and then he was gonna distribute the money.

So for survival, for basic—

It was for survival. This was purely for survival.

And where was Venezuela in those days? Was it already falling apart?

It was already falling apart. Start falling apart 1998. That's when Chávez came into power. So it was one year after Maduro came to power. So he came to power 2012. So it was a 27-year basically, you know, going downhill.

Destruction.

And it was in the middle of the downhill. So the best idea that my brother and I had was to go to the airport with cash in our pocket, to drop the money to Caracas and to come back on the— So you'd actually take money with you, fly on the plane, hand it to your uncle. Handed it and taking the flight the same day. So that was the best idea that we came up with.

You were really creative in that day.

Yeah. And then a friend of mine says, well, why don't you send Bitcoin? And we didn't know what it was. We vaguely heard about it. Some people, you know, very negative about what, what, you know, what Bitcoin was. And I started doing a deep dive in it, not from a investment standpoint, but how to actually send money using Bitcoin. Actually find somebody, actually in our street on Fifth Avenue, there was a guy in a coworking space, which coworking space back then wasn't even a thing. So I was going to coworking space to go meet a guy to send Bitcoin.

And who was this guy? How did you meet him?

Random tech guy through a friend of a friend who was sitting in front of a computer. We gave him cash. He told us, tell your uncle to download this application. And within 10 minutes, he sent $1,000.

Did you do a test amount?

We didn't even do a test amount, actually.

He sent it all.

He sent it all. He did one transaction, sent it all. And on the other line, you know, our uncle on the line, and he says, I received a Bitcoin.

So you're in a— coworking space in a tiny office with some dude that you barely know, sitting at a desk in front of a computer. You hand him the cash.

Yep.

He transfers. You call your uncle, he downloads an app. So your uncle goes, I've got the app, press the button. You tell the guy, press the button. And your uncle goes, I've received the Bitcoin in my account.

I received the Bitcoin. Bitcoin was around a few hundred dollars. He says, I received the 5 Bitcoins. And, um, and that evening he went and spent them. And, and I thought to myself, wow, if this can change, um, that situation for me, it might change the situations for, for a lot of people. And then, uh, started doing this every week and sending money, transferring, transferring remittance business, just transferring it. And, uh, and at the same time we, we were seeing the price going up. And I told my brother, if Bitcoin goes up to the equivalent of one year of salary, I will— of your LVMH salary, I will quit my job and focus only on that. No thinking that that would never happen. Was never gonna happen. And after a few months it did happen. And I started to do research about what if the potential of Bitcoin growth could be, and the moment that it really made sense, which sounds logical now, but back then was not logical. Is that I looked at the business model because the business model of Bitcoin is actually, I mean, we talk about Bitcoin as, you know, the price goes up, the price goes down, digital gold, et cetera. But that wasn't the moment where I said, I'm gonna quit everything to do this. I looked at what were the most successful companies in the world, and that company was in 1694. You had a number of English businessmen in London who created a corporation to buy the maximum amount of gold. That company was called the Bank of England. 100 years after, you had Napoleon who said, who summoned the 200 wealthiest families in France and says, I like what the English are doing. We're going to all join. Napoleon became a shareholder and that company was named the bank, la Banque de France, the Bank of France. So these two entities, until their nationalization in 1945 and 1946, were actually the most powerful companies in, in Europe. And their only purpose was to buy as much sound money as possible. Gold and to establish credit on top of that.

Right. So they allow people to borrow with gold as the security.

They were printing money.

Right.

That was the most, the best business model in the world. So I told my dad, you think the best business model in the world is LVMH with their margins, but that money comes from the other best business model in the world, which was the creation of credit on top of sound money.

Got it.

And at that moment in 2010, one of the— there's a few possible candidates about who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and one of them, Hal Finney, in 2010 wrote, the idea of Bitcoin is not a currency, is the assets that bank will hold to issue credit. And I thought to myself, the ultimate collateral, the ultimate collateral, the ultimate collateral where, you know, we don't know how much gold there is in the world. Uh, in order to audit, the Banque de France never got audited, the Bank of England never got audited. The only way to find the amount of gold is actually to melt it and to know what, what it is. It's actually funny enough, it's actually called sound money because when you would receive a gold coin, you would hit it, and based on the sound, you would know how pure the gold was. So that's where the term is actually coming from. And ultimately, just to close the loop about Napoleon, Waterloo. What we often read is that Napoleon got defeated by the Duke of Wellington, who, you know, they basically tricked Napoleon. It was raining.

The Prussians and Blücher.

Yeah.

Is that right?

The Germans were coming and, you know, But the reality is that, well, first of all, Napoleon had more victories than Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar combined. So he was the greatest general of all time.

Correct.

Actually, during the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon killed more of the opponents than his own soldiers got killed. So number-wise, but he was lacking one thing. He was lacking the fact that the English has access to credit. The English had one gentleman banker called Nathan Mayer Rothschild, and Rothschild from 1800 to 1815, and especially within the, the 3 years before Waterloo, starting to issue credits and was able to move money around Europe faster than Napoleon could. So he was able to pay armies. Just by having a Rothschild credit. And that was as good as sound money.

As good as gold.

As good as gold because he had the gold. He had the gold and he was able. So what the English, the Bank of England was actually able to do that would take a couple of days, it would take months to Napoleon to make it do.

Right. To buy other armies, soldiers, ammunition, weapons.

And they did. They had unlimited credit to buy other soldiers that came, fought with the English. Actually, there was more foreigners that fought for the English than the English itself at Waterloo. So the defeat of Napoleon wasn't a military defeat.

It was a credit.

It was a financial defeat. They were, they had something that the bank de France wasn't able to do it. In fact, he needed money so desperately that Napoleon sold Louisiana and the bankers were actually the English. He sold Louisiana for $15 million. The US didn't have the money to pay. The English gave him the $15 million and made them against the bonds of the US. And that ultimately was his defeat. So the access to credit backed by gold was the cornerstone.

And the ability to send it quickly, the speed of execution.

The ability to send it, the ability to send it quickly.

So How does this feed into Bitcoin?

Well, Bitcoin, what is happening right now is exactly what happened 300 years ago. So when we look at the business models and the reasons that I and many others are getting involved within that space is that that gold credit markets that was at the peak, you know, in the 1800s, that means that made the legend of Rothschild. Is actually happening again right now. So when you look at it in terms of the largest Bitcoin treasury companies in the world, you see that the number one is, it's a mix. It's exactly what happened with the Banque de France and the Bank of England. It's a mix of politicians, it's a mix of large corporations and large families that are behind it. In fact, if you would take the name Napoleon, Rothschild and Barron Rothschild and putting Trump and other politicians on it, it would be the exact same, right? The exact same business model. Instead of having unlimited, you know, gold amounts, uh, behind it, you would have a capped supply of Bitcoin. So the idea and the end goal, people see, well, you know, you buy Bitcoin, it goes up, it goes down. This is not the end goal. The end goal is just the accumulation of Bitcoin. To do the killer app. The killer app is digital capital that enables digital credit, that enables digital money. This is what is being built. So there would be the equivalent of Manhattan being 21 million pieces of land, and you want to get as many lands as possible. And the key is—

So it's a limited supply.

It's a limited supply. Divisible.

But limited supply.

And the world is actually not interested in capital. The world is interested in credit. And this is why there's a disconnect that is happening right now. To give an example, if you give your son a piece of land in the middle of Mayfair, Manhattan, and says, this is $10 million, in 30 years you can sell it for $100 million.

Or Atlantic Seaboard in Cape Town.

Or Seapoint. He will say, okay, that's great, but how do I live for 30 years? It's great that I'm 50 years old, I'm going to get $100 million. But if you tell him, listen, every month starting when you're 18 years old, you get $10,000, they'll say, oh, that's amazing. I want the $10,000. I don't want the piece of land, the volatility, have to build and build something. So Bitcoin is the digital capital, is the piece of land, but the real value is what we're gonna build on top of it. That is gonna be income-producing asset. And this is what the world is gonna— the world is interested in.

So if you take the BlackRock ETF, which is a way to buy into Bitcoin.

Yeah.

Or you take MicroStrategy, I think it's called Strategy now, Michael Saylor's business. He's the biggest holder of Bitcoin. Omara, which of those three are using their holdings of Bitcoin and offering credit?

It's a very good question. So there's different business models. The Bitcoin world started with mining. So mining is the core of it all. You have the biggest Chinese company called Bitmain, who was the largest miner for a very long time, and they were the largest manufacturer of—

And mining is producing Bitcoin.

Mining is producing Bitcoin.

It's a machine, buzzes away, solves algorithmic problems, creates Bitcoin on the blockchain.

Verifies the blockchains. The best way, because I was a miner when I started, the best way that I explain it, the same way that you swipe your credit card and it's being put on a ledger, the miners were doing the same thing with Bitcoin transactions. Fine. So that was the initial business model, which was a little bit like a real estate business model. You bought machines, they were amortized over 2 years, and after that you get, you know, the output higher than the, than the input. And these became publicly traded company and their trade in a very traditional way based on cash flows, right? So that was multiple of cash, multiple of cash.

Nothing that exciting.

Nothing, nothing excited. The second wave that came was, was the ETFs. I mean, it came simultaneously, but the ETFs—

exchange traded fund, exchange traded fund, BlackRock being the biggest one in the world.

And the reason why this was something that brought a lot of confidence in the market is that you had regulated entities, the most respected names in finance who were able to offer Bitcoin. So all of a sudden it became from something niche, risky, dangerous, potentially illegal, to all of a sudden something that's stamped of approval.

You buy a financial instrument from a respected financial institution and you own underlying Bitcoin.

And, and, and you own Bitcoin. So, but when you own it, there's two advantages. The first one's accountants understand it because it's shares. And, uh, the other one is that it's deemed 100% legal, uh, and you don't have any custody risk.

But the only business model there is you buy it and the price goes up and you benefit. I mean, there's nothing more sophisticated.

You follow the trajectory of the price, of the price itself. Now the killer app became, um, what we call the preferred equities. That's the killer app. So what Michael Saylor often says, it took me 20 years to come up with a billion-dollar idea, which was MicroStrategy. Then 20 years after, the other billion-dollar ideas was Bitcoin. And last year in 2025, he came with 5 billion-dollar ideas within a period of 9 months.

Ideas.

Ideas. And these ideas were IPOs. And we often say, oh, 2025 was the year of AI. Actually, when you look at the numbers, is the year of digital credit. The fastest growth in finance or technology was the creation of digital credit. And that came around mostly from strategies with $5 billion IPOs. Some of the desk, you probably remember Vivek Ramaswamy, who has one of the largest, uh, also Bitcoin company, uh, within this, the thing. His investor actually, JD Vance, Peter Thiel are investors within his, his company who's doing actually the same thing with his company. Strive.

And how, Strive, right?

Strive.

And how does that work?

So they buy Bitcoin. So basically they realize a couple of things. The first one is that, like I was saying, people are interested in credit. They're not interested in capital. Instead of saying, hey, you buy Bitcoin, you buy the ETF, it might be down 30%, it might be up 30%. What people want is a stable percentage every year. So what he says is that I'm offering you a 10% return every year. So do you give me your US dollar, your depreciating fiat currency, right? I go buy Bitcoin. The Bitcoins that I purchase, our prediction is that it's gonna go up, in his case, 29% per year. And people don't want to deal with the volatility of potentially getting 29%. They want the certainty of getting 10%. And basically what these companies are doing is to say, I manage, I take the volatility risk, and for the volatility risk, I pay you a coupon per year that's going to be lower than the volatility. And people prefer 10% per year. Then maybe 29%.

So he takes the difference between 10 and 29.

Yes, because the volatility for Bitcoin, yeah, we often see it as a bug, but he sees it as a feature, and I see it as a feature. So he's saying we're gonna get capital where we buy the best performing asset in the world. Yeah. Which then goes straight in the Bitcoin treasury. And on top of that, because that asset is appreciating, we're going to give a percentage back to the, to the shareholders. If the price—

so this year has been a bit of a Bitcoin winter. Sorry, 2025, last year. Bitcoin was at the end of 2024 at around $100,000. During 2025, went to $126,000 per Bitcoin, and it's now at $90,000 per Bitcoin, roughly.

Yeah.

So over the course of the last 12 months, he, Vivek Ramaswamy's company Strive, would have lost on average in paying the coupon.

So we, we have to look at the data. The data, there's been 3 bear markets over 80%. The biggest bear market was 2015, 2017, down 85%.

Down 85%.

Yeah. From the moment of the bear market starting, to being back at the price, it has been, it was a 2-year period.

So for 2 years it languished at an all-time low.

So for over 2 years. So as long as the company has the potential to pay the 2-year coupon, then you're going to be out of the bear market and you're going to be able to—

And are we in a bear market right now? Not for someone that bought in 2014. Yeah, it's, it's just bouncing around at the top.

But for someone that bought a year ago, again, I look at the, at the number. So I try to remove completely myself from the emotion of are we in a bear or not based on my emotions. But I look at the numbers. Today you have 450 Bitcoins that are mined. This is the new supply that is coming to the market. The purchase today on a daily basis, the purchase by ETFs, Bitcoin treasuries, exchanges is 3,500. So you, you're at 8x a day.

So demand per day exceeds new supply, new supply, 8 times.

8 times.

So in order to, for the price to stay where it is, they need to buy from, from sellers, existing holders.

They need to buy it from the supply. So the production versus the demand, you're at an 8x difference.

Got it.

So In a situation, if that number, by the way, let's compare it to gold. Gold is 1 for each ton produced. You have 1.26 demand. 1.26.

There's only 26% more.

There's only 26%.

This is 8 times.

This is 8 times. This is 8 times more than it's worth. And gold has been performing really well in 2025. And here you are in a situation that 8, every day you have 8 times more the demand. And this is not slowing back. Right now you have, you had the Gini Act, you have the Genius Act, the Clarity Act that are coming to play and that are open the floodgate to banks. So right now we're in an 8x situation. So any market where my demand is 8 times the value of what is the industry, has to kick in. At some point it has to eat.

And so is the investing in Bitcoin play, put the credit part aside, simply investing in Bitcoin, buying and holding, it's an adoption play. If adoption continues to grow, the price is going to go up.

It is an adoption play in the sense that it is, has been the best performing asset for the last 10 years. And investors are looking for alpha and the alpha in the market right now. I have yet to see a better potential business model than Bitcoin is today.

Quickly do the potential business model for our viewers. The first Bitcoin was mined, get, tell me I'm right, January 3rd, 2009.

2009. Yeah.

Was it January 3rd?

Well, there's, we count the first day as the pizza day, the day that 2 pizzas were sold for 10,000 bitcoins. So that tends to be the anniversary date, which was in January 2009. The white paper got written in 2008. Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. I've read it.

It's simple. It's 6 pages.

Peer-to-peer electronic cash. That was the title of it. And so 2009 was the kickoff of Bitcoin.

And 21 million Bitcoin will only ever be mined and produced, correct?

Yes.

And that might happen In the 2140.

2140 is when your last Bitcoin will be mined.

So 100.

So we have, um, yes, we have 100+ years.

But every 4 years there's a halving. Just explain what that is.

So the last halving was in 2024. So every 4 years we cut the supply of Bitcoin that is coming into the market.

By half, or you increase the cost of producing by— by— is it the same thing?

Well, it's algorithmically, the production of Bitcoins will be cut. Satoshi Nakamoto, his white papers explained that, and he says every 4 years we're gonna cut. So that 450 Bitcoin number that I just mentioned, if we were 2 years ago, I would tell you we're producing 900 Bitcoins an hour. So we went from 900, 4 years before that we were at 1,800.

And in 2028, which month? Is there a month that it happens?

Yes, I think, I believe it's in April.

In April 2028, you go from 450 to 225.

So if you're kind enough to invite me in 4 years, I will tell you we're at 225 bitcoins that are produced every day.

And it happens overnight. Boom.

Happens overnight. Happens overnight.

So 21 million only will ever be produced. How many have been produced to date? 19 million.

So over 19 million, 19.5 million has been—

There's 1.5 million only to go. And I believe 6 million of the 19.5 have been lost.

Have been lost.

So what happens when someone loses Bitcoin?

They— Well, generally they tend to be— It's generally the first few years of Bitcoins that when it was worthless, that—

They didn't believe it.

That, that's, you know, they, you know, It was an experiment. The same reason that, you know, the person sold 2 pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin. And, you know, at that time he was upset. There's a famous story in the UK of a guy who threw his computer, his hard drive, his hard drive. And for years he was, you know, trying to figure out where it was and going to—

I think he offered the town municipality in Wales, yeah, £90 million or 50 million pounds to go and find his hard drive in the dump because he reckoned it was worth double that and they wouldn't let him.

Yeah, there was a lot of these stories at the beginning. So over 95% of all bitcoins has already been mined and 95% of the population don't have Bitcoin. Right. So when we look at the math, when we look that the supply is shrinking, every 4 years and the demand is growing.

It's a one-way ticket on the price.

It's a one-way ticket. And it's, you know, often I'm just astonished that people don't see that one-way ticket.

So I don't see Bitcoin as a currency. I don't, I don't look at it as, I'm not gonna buy things with Bitcoin. I'm not. I look at it as a store of value without a doubt. 'Cause it's got a, in my view, I hold, I don't sell, and it's a one-way ticket. I keep a lot of my liquidity in Bitcoin. I don't sell them. I hodl them. Where does hodl come from? H-O-D-L. Yeah, I think it was hold. Why isn't it? Why is it hodl?

These are part of the terms and the folklore of the Bitcoin community. But he actually said something very interesting. And the way that I explain it to my mother, because I'm trying to make it accessible to a lot of my family members and explain to them how it works, is I says that Bitcoin is your saving account and the stablecoins is your expense account. So you spend using your stablecoins. These are built on another blockchain and you save with your Bitcoin. Beautiful. So the concept of, well, Bitcoin is gonna fail because I cannot buy my coffee with it, is it would be the same thing that says, well, gold is gonna fail because I can't buy my coffee with it. It's not made to buy coffee.

You can.

You could eventually, but it's not even the best way to actually do it.

Correct.

So physically you could, if both parties accept, you can make the transaction. But the reality is—

That's a good description.

It's not made for that.

Some people say to me, quantum computing is going leaps and bounds, and very soon, or not too far away, they're going to be able to crack the code and steal your Bitcoin.

Yeah, that has been for the last, for as long as I remember, from day one, the quantum computing. It's funny because it moved from narratives to narratives. So first it was, you know, it's, you know, the blockchain, somebody's gonna figure it out and there's gonna be an error within the blockchains. Then it was the government is gonna stop it. Then right now we're at the quantum part. So for the quantum part, there's two things. The first one is that if you had the quantum computing technology, well, first of all, there's only countries that could have it. Individuals don't have it. Google don't have it. The largest companies don't have it.

Gangsters don't have it.

Gangsters, unless they're a country, they're the only potential to have. Now, if you have quantum computing, You have one shot to steal or disrupt an entity before the entire world goes after you. Correct. So you have two options. Either you're financially greedy and you're going to say, well, I'm going to go to the largest pot of money. So banks. You would go to banks? Yeah. I would go to federal reserve.

Why go after Bitcoin with its super complicated security?

In the list.

Just going to steal people's bank accounts.

And it's going to be much easier to break into a bank with quantum computing than breaking in the Bitcoin blockchain. So that's one. The other option is you say, well, you're not interested by money, you're doing it for an act of terrorism. Then you're gonna go after a nuclear facility, right? And you'll have, you'll have one shot. Well, you'll have one shot at it. Bitcoin.

So it's almost impossible, but it's impractical too. It's like, it's expensive, impractical, and the repercussions are huge.

And the repercussion, well, it's gonna be the end of the person who actually did it.

Yeah. Okay. So what are other criticisms of Bitcoin? We've solved a lot of them already. I mean, it's a perfect economic system. Bitcoin is the only investment that I've found that is uncorrelated to the world economy. If you think the world economy has issues, has problems, the dollar's going to devalue or the rand's going to rapidly devalue, where do you put your money? Bitcoin. Secondly, I see investment opportunities every day. And every investment opportunity, you've got to look at the management team, your partners, the shareholders agreement, the operating costs, the leases. There's 500 levels of complexity of why most companies fail. Bitcoin is just the easier, simpler, smarter investment. I'm struggling now to invest in anything else other to keep myself occupied than Bitcoin. I look at a deal, I go, I'd rather buy Bitcoin. Yeah, I've reached that point where I'm I'd completely orange-pilled. Is that the word?

I think you're one of the rare who understand it. When we usually say you will understand the technology, the technology existed when you were born. It's very rare people who understand a technology and embrace it when it appeared You know, are you calling me old? I'm only 65. I'm calling both of us that we weren't— we were born before 2000, right? Yeah.

I call it French.

And when you look at the generation that was born after 2000, they understand Bitcoin, but they don't have the money. The money in the world is people over 60 years old and institutions.

Correct.

So their investments are going to be small investments.

So Tell me your new business idea. Are you happy to tell us on this show?

Yeah.

You told me at dinner the other night.

I'm like, when I looked at the world of Bitcoin and I went through several different movements, and I think that now we're at the killer app movement. Now we're at the iPhone, the iPhone moment, which was the digital credit. And the digital credit, I think that now we're finally in a situation where we're not buying Bitcoin and putting the Bitcoin and just waiting for the volatility like the ETF. Yeah.

Draw.

Yeah. But, but to develop credit and what I'm, what I'm building after, you know, a decade with it within the space is to establish digital credit. So I'm based in the, in the Caribbean. I'm based on the island of Puerto Rico.

Why? This is interesting to me is why you're American citizen.

Yeah.

And you live in Puerto Rico.

Yeah. So Puerto Rico is actually a US territory in the middle of the Caribbean. So you're 45 minutes from St. Barts one side, 45 minutes from the Dominican Republic on the other. It's very close to Cuba.

Barbados, Cuba.

Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands. It's all— it's all in the middle.

White beaches.

White beaches. But most then the tourism that is happening in the region is actually the 5th largest financial hub in the world.

Puerto Rico?

The, the Caribbean. The Caribbean. Between Cayman Islands, BVI, et cetera. 40 of the 50 banks in the world have a branch in the Caribbean. You have 75% of all hedge funds in the world who are in the Cayman Islands. And you're basically a bunch of islands with 17 different currencies, including European, American currencies, and 12 different jurisdictions. So this is the biggest hub of offshores. Actually, half of the wealth of Latin America is in the Caribbean. Right.

And there are tax treaties and there's offshoring and there's protections. But why Puerto Rico?

So Puerto Rico is in 110 years ago, the US government took over the island of Puerto Rico, the Paris Treaty, and they made it a territory. So Puerto Ricans are Americans. Bad Bunny, the number one singer in America, is Puerto Rican.

With American passports.

With American passports.

Okay, not a state.

They're not a state. They weren't granted statehood, which has been a very big source of discussions for Puerto Ricans. Do we want to be the 51st state? So are we going to continue fighting for it or are we going to give up on it and remain a territory? And remain a territory with financial benefits. So if you—

Are the US Virgin Islands a territory?

The US Virgin Islands are a territory. At the same way as Puerto Rico.

So how many people live in Puerto Rico?

So you have 4 million people that live there and you have 11 million people that visit. And the reason why 11 million Americans go and visit is that you don't need a passport to go to Puerto Rico. So you You can take a flight, go to the Caribbean with your ID, and 80% of Americans don't have passports. So because there is no representation of Puerto Rico, there's no taxation. And so Puerto Ricans don't pay federal taxes, and federal tax can get up to 37%.

You don't pay federal tax.

You don't pay federal tax.

Puerto Ricans don't pay.

What taxes do you pay? So Puerto Ricans, pay, uh, territories taxes, their local taxes, which, which, well, that can be quite high. But what they try to do is to make it, uh, being part of the international competition of attracting talent. So Miami has been attracting talents from New York. You had, um, uh, Austin and Texas from California. And Puerto Rico said, if you come build a business in Puerto Rico.

As an American citizen.

As an American citizen, you can keep your American citizenship and have preferential tax treatments if you come.

So you've moved there, you've set your business up there, you live there, you live in the center of the old town.

This is the center of Old San Juan, which is the oldest city in the, uh, on American soil. And, um, and the idea is to build the largest Bitcoin reserve in the Caribbean. Okay.

And you've started it.

You started it.

What's the business called?

The business is called BitBonds PR.

B-O-N-D-S. B-O-N-D-S.

So Bitcoin bonds. BitBonds PR. PR for Puerto Rico. Okay. And, um, and the idea is to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. So you have investors coming in, giving their fiat currency. That fiat currency—

Converts to Bitcoin.

Converts to Bitcoin. That Bitcoin generates yields. They get a preferential tax treatment for the yield that they receive. And at the end of the durations of the bond, they get years of yield plus Bitcoin back, uh, at the end. So the amounts that they put in—

so let's take a case study. Let's say I have a Bitcoin, let's call it $100,000. Mm-hmm. And I forget the fiat, I give you my Bitcoin that's worth $100,000.

Yes.

The day I give it to you.

Yeah.

And it sits now in your account.

It sits.

But I still own it.

You, so it sits with some of the largest custodians in, in the world. So Coinbase Prime, BitGo, Anchorage.

But it's on my hard wallet.

It, it's in the hard wallet of the custodians. The same way, the same custodians that BlackRock uses and, and others.

It sits there.

It sits there. So it's transparent.

Under my name still?

Under your account name. Under your account name. So you can see that your $100,000, the moment that you get the $100,000, the company gets $100, they buy Bitcoin with it.

No, but I'm giving you a Bitcoin. Is it, can I do that too?

Well, the idea behind it is for people who want to exit the fiat system.

Got it. So I have $100,000 cash.

Yeah.

I send it to you, you buy Bitcoin.

Bang, that day one Bitcoin is bought on day one, and then there's yield mechanism that is going to give you a guaranteed 6% return on the Bitcoin, right? Plus a bonus depending on the price of the Bitcoin to up to 6%. So assuming that there's a bear, a bull market, and the price of Bitcoin goes up drastically, you hit the maximum amount of 12%. So the $100,000 hits the 12% for a number of years that the funds is there. And at the end, so the fund is for 10 years, the first 3 years are locked. After 3 years, you can get your money out either in fiat and says, hey, I'm taking my $100,000 back. Thank you for the—

And after 3 years, I'd have made, let's call it $36,000.

$36,000 plus your principal in fiat currency. So the principle is in fiat, out fiat. In fiat, out fiat, or there's an option. So for example, if $100,000 comes in to buy one Bitcoin and then the price of Bitcoin to $200,000, then it will be half a Bitcoin that will be received at the end of the 3 years. So the value is in the value of fiat itself. So the coupons plus the fiat. So it's Like a bond.

And is this just for American investors?

This is for worldwide investors.

So what tax treatment would I have via BitBond?

So, so, uh, it's actually for American investors is actually the, the, the, it's a different tax treaty.

Yeah.

For, for them, uh, there's 3 kinds. There's the Puerto Rican residents, the non-US investors, and the US investors. Um, so it depends on how they treat, it depends on which country and what's the treaty with them, but there's basically all the countries with all the different tax elements attached to it, and we can see what's the tax that goes behind it.

So some very big billionaires have moved to move their bases to Puerto Rico. You want to give an example of a couple of people?

Well, some, the largest real estate holder in Puerto Rico is John Paulson.

Paulson Funds.

The Paulson Fund who got, who got famous during the 2008 crisis and he, basically shorted the market and made off rinds and made a fortune. So he's the largest investor on the Four Seasons, car dealerships, et cetera. So I would say he's one of the most famous. And then you probably, you have less than 10,000 people who moved to Puerto Rico, such as myself. In terms of, I would say more in the entertainment, the Paul brothers, Jake Paul and Logan Paul, The boxers and YouTubers have moved to Puerto Rico. And then you probably have the vast majority of people within the Bitcoin space. One of the— Trump's Bitcoin advisor is in Puerto Rico, and he's, you know, handles the strategy for the US from the island of Puerto Rico. And most of the major Bitcoin, and for that matter, crypto investors are based on the island of Puerto Rico.

So until you launched BitBondsPR.com, is that the address?

Yeah, BitBondsPR.com. Yeah.

Until you launched it, how did you pay the rent? How did you have any income? Because you obviously are a long-term holder of Bitcoin.

Yeah. So, uh, or hoddler, hoddler. I was fortunate over the last, the last year, um, to be involved in the trends of the Bitcoin treasury companies. Uh, so I invested in, um, the largest ones, uh, whether it's in Europe, in Asia, uh, in the US. In terms of day-to-day, I had to, to pick which one I wanted to spend time on, and it was very important for me to stay within the same narrative of 2 things that were interesting to me was a market that understood gold in the store of value, and the second one who had the strongest international criteria in terms of bringing institutional capital.

And you made money there?

Yeah. Well, well, and I'm running on a day-to-day basis, I'm strategic advisor of the largest Bitcoin holder in Australia. So Australia is actually the second largest gold producer in the world after China. So it's China, Australia, Russia.

We used to be number one, South Africa.

South Africa.

ANC destroyed us.

Yeah, the— now, now Australia has that. Obviously, in Western Australia is, is known for, for gold. Um, and they were actually, um, there's actually one company, a Bitcoin treasury company on the Australian Stock Exchange, that got, um, um, the possibility to buy Bitcoin on their balance sheet while being publicly traded. So I'm strategic advisor of this company and we decide on the directions where we're going. So, um, it was very important to be on the understanding of the store of value, which Australians understand very well, store of value. And I felt that was the perfect market, uh, for that. The second thing is that they have the fourth largest pension fund, superannuation, they call it, the fourth largest in the world. And these companies, these superannuation funds, can only invest in publicly traded companies on the ASX, and we're the only play for them for Bitcoin.

And have they bought into your company?

So they've bought, they're being educated about it. They, you know, understand now the narrative. They see what is happening, uh, internationally. They're very big investor in, in gold, and, um, they're a little bit the, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the you know, the, the large entity, the large well entity that we're slowly, uh, having, uh, coming towards, uh, uh, the Bitcoin space. But Australians are, uh, big in casinos, big in trading. Yeah. And, uh, so, uh, so I spent time in Australia to understand that, that market. We became shareholders. So me on a personal basis, not only as a strategic advisor and guiding the company, but I brought, uh, as well the 3 largest Bitcoin investors in the US. I actually put the deal together and became the largest shareholders within that entity. So now you are working. Yes. So now it's the responsibility to do that. And, you know, and evangelizing. I've done over 100 conferences speaking.

Tell the story at Harvard Business School. We're gonna wrap up quite soon, but tell me the story of your speech at Harvard Business School.

Yeah, so I started on my first year at Harvard Business School. I asked a professor, if I could have an hour for lunch.

When was this?

That was 2000, that was 8 years ago. That was 8 years ago. I asked the, no, more than that. It was 10 years ago, 2016. I asked the professor if I could spend an hour to explain the other, my other colleagues, my other, the other students explain them about Bitcoin. And that enabled me to, you know, do my first presentation, explain what's the concept. I actually brought a miner and put it on the table and explaining them how it work and, you know, answer the room was full and for 30 minutes presentation, 30-minute Q&A and we demystified the concept. At that time, if the students would've bought Bitcoin from, uh, the day that this happened to now, they would've made 15x, uh, 15 times their, their, their returns. And, and I remember one of the questions, um, one of, um, the, the student said, um, uh, well, why should we buy Bitcoin if Warren Buffett says we shouldn't buy it? And I, and I answered, we should apply the Warren Buffett principle to Bitcoin, which is you have to understand it before investing in it. And we saw two categories of people. You said the people who went down the rabbit hole and one by one they got converted in it. We often say we get, you get Bitcoin at the price that you deserve. And the other say that I like a lot is 10% of the difficulty is to buy it and 90% is to hold it. So true. That got me, you know, started and it actually quite, quite interesting because on the same day we all went to the amphitheater and you had Larry Summers, president of Harvard, who did a talk. And within the talk, he made a point that we shouldn't touch Bitcoin. So I had all the students turning around looking at me. And actually I took a picture of that day with Larry Summers. And telling him I just did a Bitcoin presentation before your talk.

Hervé, fantastic. What a great treat speaking to you. And final thing, I'm just thinking, you're such a great friend. I love listening to you. I love talking and debating and hearing more. How do we keep this buddy of mine, Hervé, in town? Well, I have an idea. You have been married. You have a beautiful daughter who's 20—

18.

18 years old, going to university. But you're currently single. So come on, South African girls, get this guy and keep him in South Africa.

Or come to the US with me.

Or come to Puerto Rico.

Cheers, buddy. Well done.

Congratulations.