At the frontier of governance
Long-form conversations from inside the global movement to build freer societies.
What good is cheap electricity if you can’t rely on the people supplying it?
Timothy Allen catches up with Dušan Matuška, co-founder of AmityAge, for a conversation recorded in Próspera about Bitcoin education, mining and the practical work of building greater independence.
Dušan was one of the podcast’s earliest guests. Since that first conversation in San Salvador, he has taken his Bitcoin Educators Academy around the world and expanded AmityAge’s mining operations across continents. But cheap power has come with expensive lessons. He explains why the company left Paraguay, the difficulties it has faced in Ethiopia, and why its next chapter involves acquiring gas wells and power-generation infrastructure in Alberta, Canada.
The idea is to control more of the business themselves: produce the gas, generate the electricity and mine Bitcoin, with other options available as energy prices and demand change. Timothy gets rather enthusiastic about the engines, engineering and outdoor work involved. They also explore how the rush into AI data centres is changing the opportunities for Bitcoin miners.
Then the conversation returns to Próspera. Dušan describes what has worked well when running an international company there, alongside the difficulty of making the Bitcoin education centre financially sustainable. They discuss families, walkability, everyday amenities and the challenge of attracting small businesses before there are enough customers to support them.
There is also a revealing story about a basketball court the Bitcoin community helped renovate, and a wider discussion about local distrust, public perception and what it takes to turn a promising governance experiment into a thriving place to live.
In this conversation:
Enjoy the conversation.
Timestamps (audio version, includes Timothy’s episode introduction):
Guest: Dušan Matuška on X | AmityAge | AmityAge on X
Links from Timothy’s introduction:
The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities and governance innovation worldwide.
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Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Freedom-oriented communities in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, with opportunities for greater independence in energy, food and everyday life. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases.
Show sponsor: AmityAge - Bitcoin education, mining and energy infrastructure. The team are looking for accredited investors to help build their next chapter in Alberta, Canada. Follow the link to find out more.
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Episodes · 204 conversations
"I want people to start thinking of liberty not as a legal framework, but as a culture, as institutions, as a way of thinking and being that is reproduced. It can be translated into legislation and can be manifested in very many different things."
"It's 30 hectares that we've reserved for building our own city this time. So we're working with the Tipolis architecture guys and saying, okay, let's design a European town in this one."
"If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years that has made my life magnificently better, it's that reality is not what it seems like in any meaningful sense. And there's so much more out there."
"People simply don't believe that it's actually happening. That is the first challenge, that it's real and that it's actually happening. And it's better to be real and controversial than to not exist and be irrelevant."
"We have to be humble about the vision in that sense, and then very bold in our attempts to achieve these underlying goals."
"It definitely feels like an uphill battle all the time. But I think anything's possible."
"A very realistic possibility is that you see governments get themselves into increasing amounts of problems. Governments go bankrupt. Their currencies do collapse. And they then blame the Bitcoiners and the gold bugs."
“You know, to just say no. It’s the most important word in the English language.”
"I believed in it very much, to the extent that I waged my own career and my own life by coming here. It had to resist. I used to joke that if it hadn't resisted I would have stopped practising law, stopped believing in it."
"I'm an entrepreneur. I love technology and innovation. I think the tools that are now available to us are beyond extraordinary… I think I'm an incredible optimist as it pertains to AI." "When you hear a lot of these AI evangelists talk publicly about AI, maybe there's a 10% chance that it could be dangerous or a 5...
"Many free zone initiatives have been pushing on a string. They've fallen in love with a particular location and then push, push, push to try to make it happen... So the big takeaway for me was that these efforts to set up free areas by funnelling money into a predestined spot were exactly the wrong way to start."
"We are building a social safety net that is global and ultimately our plan is to launch the first country on the internet, which will allow people to become member-based citizens and have that safety net follow them everywhere they go."
"It was London in the 1800s. It was Spain in the 1600s. It was Portugal in the 1500s. It was the Netherlands before that. And right now it's the Americas."
"If you have a bad owner, the people will leave. If he's not doing what he promised, if he's not keeping them happy, customers leave all the time. The worse he is, the sooner people will leave, he'll go bankrupt, and someone else will buy the property that can do a better job with it. That's the way business works."
"When you build for nomads you build for everyone else. If you build something good enough to attract a digital nomad to whatever you are building, you are building something good enough for 90% of the people... That's why I say you should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client."
"The real reason that I wear the mask is because it doesn't matter who I am. Anybody can be doing what we're doing thanks to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin node network. The message, the idea of free speech in a worldwide mesh network, does not depend upon any single person's identity. Everyone is building the mesh network."
"As we progress through this movement in general, I think this might be the key to unlock the critical mass. I really do think that. I think families are overlooked because the old family thought process, or the people who were families when we were younger, may not have been ready for this. But now everyone who's...
"It's good to have a norm against racism, but when you go to a taboo, that's a very black and white thing. There's no nuance, there's no grey zones, and all of a sudden this is a powerful piece of kryptonite that somebody can weaponise."
"Imagine we had the technology and we would say, oh, for a reason X, Y, Z, we don't allow people to use it. That would be like withholding life-saving medicine from someone, which is equivalent, ethically speaking, to killing someone."
"I'm going to say for full-time employees that spend over a billion on talent, I'm saying there's going to be 40% layoffs. And they might say only 10%, but in reality, they're recalibrating easily up to 40%."
"I came to visit, just to visit. On the second day, I bought a motorbike from Facebook Marketplace just to lock in. Okay, this might be my place."
