🎙️ My guest today is Carol Souza, co-founder of Area Bitcoin, one of the largest Bitcoin education platforms in Latin America, reaching hundreds of thousands across Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking world. Her path began not in tech or finance, but as a dentist, where Brazil’s inflation, POS payment fees, and daily operational fragilities pushed her to study money and ultimately adopt Bitcoin as a survival tool for her clinic. We discuss Brazil’s long history of hyperinflation, savings confiscation, and the deep fiat mindset that still shapes economic life. Carol explains how PIX, open banking, and the proposed Drex CBDC form a sophisticated financial-surveillance architecture, and why she sees Bitcoin as a sovereignty instrument rather than a speculative asset.
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We talked about:
00:00 - Coming Up
01:42 - Intro To Carol Souza: Bitcoin Advocate
03:40 - Carol’s Journey to Bitcoin
07:00 - Bitcoin & Broken Money in Brazil
11:15 - Ad Break
12:40 - Outcomes of Bitcoin Education
13:50 - Challenges of Accepting Solutions Like Bitcoin
18:30 - Is Digitalization a Barrier?
21:20 - Crypto vs. Bitcoin
23:20 - Brazil’s CBDC - Pix & Drex
26:55 - Ad Break
29:05 - CBDC in Brazil Contd.
31:30 - Big Tech Censorship & Surveillance
34:00 - Bitcoin Education and Activism
37:00 - Open Source Education, AI & Vibe Coding
45:00 - Designers & Developers Training in Bitcoin
47:00 - Teaching Complex Bitcoin Concepts
48:40 - The Future of Bitcoin Education
My takeaways from this interview:
Carol describes how running a dental clinic in Brazil exposed her to inflation, abusive POS fees, and the structural fragility of operating a small business under a coercive financial system
She began buying Bitcoin in 2017, but only reached conviction when she realized she could accept it directly from patients and eliminate the payment rail friction that was strangling her clinic
Área Bitcoin grew from simple YouTube and Instagram videos explaining wallets and peer to peer payments in Portuguese, a direct counter to Brazil’s dominant trading and speculation narrative
Brazil’s monetary history is central to her mission: multiple currencies in a few decades, hyperinflation in the 1990s, and outright savings account confiscations still shape the national psyche
She argues that Brazilians see price inflation and corruption daily but have no map for opting out; Bitcoin becomes intelligible only after dismantling the fiat mindset
PIX, open banking, and IRS level data linkage form what she calls a pre CBDC surveillance apparatus, far more advanced than most countries realize
Drex, the proposed CBDC, is largely a political psyop; with PIX already integrated into taxation, digital ID, and financial tracking, Brazil can impose CBDC level control without ever announcing a CBDC
The temporary shutdown of X and Twitter during São Paulo’s election triggered mass interest in VPNs, privacy tools, and Nostr; censorship unintentionally accelerated Bitcoin aligned digital literacy
She notes that Brazil’s digital divide remains large: millions lack devices, connectivity, or basic internet skills, making analog meetups and local leaders essential for real adoption
Her biggest pedagogical obstacle is the crypto mindset, which pulls newcomers back into speculation and makes them vulnerable to surveillance friendly stablecoin and CBDC narratives
Open source education, her Bitcoin For All course in Portuguese, English, and Spanish, is designed to be remixed, screened at meetups, and fed into AI models to counter fiat and crypto narratives
She sees AI driven vibe coding as a breakthrough: non technical educators can now build tools, learning platforms, and prototypes that previously required development teams
Bitcoin Creative and Bitcoin Coders emerged from a flood of people wanting to work in Bitcoin; they provide structured paths for designers and devs to build tools the ecosystem still lacks
Her teaching method starts with listening, mapping someone’s background, fears, and lived experience before using metaphors to connect Bitcoin to what actually matters in their life
She measures success not by follower count but by feedback loops: concrete stories of people accepting Bitcoin, teaching family, hosting meetups, or building projects
What sustains her is a strong sense of justice: discovering the Cantillon effect made her viscerally angry, and Bitcoin became the only system she trusts to enforce equal rules for everyone
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I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
