#133: Bitcoin Use Case in El Salvador, 1729 Network State, Become a Global Citizen, Speak Foreign Languages in 6 months with Antoine Dusséaux

**Camellia Yang** (0:00)
Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chiwi Journal Podcast. I'm your host, Camellia Yang. My guest today is Antoine Dusséaux. Antoine is a legal tech entrepreneur based in London, and co-founded Doctrine, the first legal information platform in France. Antoine's passionate about law, economics, geopolitics and languages. In today's episode, we discussed network state, Bitcoin user case in El Salvador, Antoine's language learning experience about Russian, Chinese and Arabic. We also covered 1729 Community Initiated Writing Challenge. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Okay, let's start from the 1729 First of all, thanks for organizing the London in real life meetup. That was my first 1729 meetup. So nice to meet you in real life.

**Antoine Dusséaux** (1:07)
Yeah, it was great.

**Camellia Yang** (1:08)
If you could describe 1729 to children, what's the best definition you can give?

**Antoine Dusséaux** (1:15)
So first of all, I wonder how I would describe what is a normal country to a kid. So not only like a network state, like we're doing at 1729, but what is a country? And if I want to describe to a kid what a country is, I would say one part of the world with some limits, some boundaries, some borders with the rest of the world and inside a common identity, a common sense of belongings, common values, it can be like a common language, it can be common ethnicity, common group of people. So that's how I would describe it, what a country is to a kid. At 1729, we want to build a cloud country, a network state, so it's also a country, so a part of the world with boundaries, with national identity and everything else, but it's a new country. Maybe if you're a kid, you live in, I don't know, in France, in China, like countries that are quite old, that have like centuries of history. But a network state, it's a young country, created by a group of people who like the same things, share the same values, and think that they want to live together to have maybe also different kinds of laws, of rules, because in one country, what distinguishes one country from another, it's also the rules inside each country. So that's how I would describe what a network state is to a kid. And when I say that, I realize that it's extremely hard, you know, and that maybe I don't understand it. That's for myself, you know, it's like the faint mind method. If you're able to explain something to a kid, it means you really understand it.
And I'm struggling to explain it to a kid.

**Camellia Yang** (3:16)
So yeah, I think even for adults, not many people can get the 1729 concept. It's a hard question for you. Yeah, I was trying to explain to my friends who are not involved with Web 3 or blockchain. It's hard.

**Antoine Dusséaux** (3:33)
If I want to explain to an adult, it's easier. I would say, oh, I mean, today we all live in different countries, but I mean, you can feel closer to someone who is at the other side of the world because you share the same values. So what if you create a community online and gradually you move to live together in one place and you can maybe start negotiating to have special rights with the local government, maybe lower taxes, whatever. And if at some point you have like 1 million people in your community, maybe you can negotiate with a small country like Montenegro to have one special economic zone. When I say that's like this to adults, they understand it because they have, okay, they know what a country is, they know what laws are, whatever. But explaining to a kid, I mean, you have to explain what a country is and that's when you realize that a country is just like something, a construct, like it's an imagined community. Because what is a country?

**Camellia Yang** (4:34)
Yeah, that's a question I always wondering, especially when people talk about the China, mainland China and Taiwan, and even the Ukraine and the Russian problem. Let's define the country first. Let's define the independence of the country first, then we can discuss more about this topic. It's so hard, because it's such a modern concept, only 200 years old, maybe.

**Antoine Dusséaux** (4:58)
Yeah, because before it was like kings fighting each other. And now, we're defining, oh, this is a country and you belong to it, and you have to respect like this and that, and speak that language to be in this country. And everyone has to be in the same mold. So yeah, this is fairly recent, as you said, I mean, before the rule all around the world was multi ethnic states, empires. And yeah, it has changed a lot.