{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Privacy Podcast","title":"Bitcoin in Costa Rica: A Love Story","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1410,"description":"\nHummingbird: The Bitcoin Jungle Story shows a community coming together around new monetary ideas.\nIt began as a five-minute film about bitcoin in Costa Rica. It became a full-length documentary called Hummingbird: The Bitcoin Jungle Story.\nIn this week’s episode of of Privacy Podcast, host Ben Schiller speaks with Paul Keating, one of the creators of the documentary about the people and ideas behind a growing Bitcoin community in Costa Rica and what happens when the principles of Bitcoin move from the internet into the real world.\nKeating’s own story is part of that experiment. After leaving California for Costa Rica near the end of the COVID era, he found a community of Bitcoiners and eventually began living almost entirely on Bitcoin, converting his paychecks and later being paid directly in Bitcoin.\nHummingbird draws its title from the prophecy of the eagle and the condor, representing different cultures and ways of understanding the world coming together. The film asks whether Bitcoin can provide common ground between communities that might otherwise appear very different.\nMerchants in Costa Rica can accept Bitcoin, how users can move between Bitcoin and local currency when necessary, and why adoption doesn’t require people to first understand every aspect of monetary theory.\n\nThe conversation then expands beyond money into another form of sovereignty: social media.\n\nPaul discusses his work with Primal and his belief in Nostr, an open social protocol designed to give users greater control over their identity, content and connections.\n\nInstead of rebuilding a social network every time someone joins a new platform, Nostr makes that identity and social graph portable across compatible applications. For Paul, the philosophy behind it closely parallels Bitcoin: users own their data and maintain sovereignty over their stack.\n\nIn This Episode\nBen and Paul discuss:\nPaul’s decision to leave California and build a life in Costa Rica\nWhat it’s actually like to live...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/vpEuAfjPdK-wDcHhqYiQw4VjsckbaPox0yUDwiaMCsg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS82ZmI4/ZTgwY2E4YzI2Zjky/ZGRhZTVkZjIxMzU5/ZjFlNi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}