 The whole thing about disruptive technology, right, is that if something disruptive can be stopped by the people who are being disrupted, then obviously they're gonna stop it. Hey folks, I'm Adam Yilivine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin, and today we're going to talk about power in the post-Bitcoin era, how and why it's different from what came before. To do that, I'm joined as always by the other host of this show, Stephanie Murphy. Hi. Jonathan Mohan. Hey, hey. And Andreas M. Ansonopoulos. Bye-bye. This isn't a new topic. In fact, it feels like we've been talking about these issues for most of the year and a little bit less on the nose for quite a bit longer than that. But there's a new catalyst that got me thinking about it yet again. And spoiler alert, it's Facebook. Or more specifically, the letter sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from a number of U.S. Senators immediately following, like literally within hours, the announcement that the digital wallet subsidiary of Facebook, Novi, would be launching a pilot program in Guatemala and the U.S., quoting from the... Wait, isn't it going to be Metaverse soon? Yeah, it's going to be Metaverse soon. Well, yeah, so it'll be the Metaverse yet. The Metaverse Associated, Novi. It's probably going to be ethical Metaverse. Yeah. Ethical Black Hole. Yeah. So, quoting from the Coin Desk article, quote, in a Tuesday missive, U.S. Senators Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, Sherrod Brown, and a number of others ordered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to, quote, immediately discontinue the company's pilot of Novi and end its work on the DM stablecoin project. The lawmakers said Facebook cannot be trusted to protect user data or manage a payments network in an open letter Tuesday just hours after Facebook announced it was launching the pilot program. Under the pilot project, Facebook will let users purchase Paxos dollars and custody the funds with Coinbase, quote, we urge you to immediately discontinue your Novi pilot and commit you will not bring DM to market, the lawmakers wrote. Okay, so that's the end of the article as far as what we're going to quote from. These senators are effectively concerned with all the missteps that we've seen Facebook make from data leaks, even locking their users and employees out of their own system for an unprecedented day. They simply can't be trusted to manage a digital currency system. And I think that I actually agree with that. The idea that a company like Facebook would maintain the integrity of a currency system is actually a pretty terrifying prospect, but it got me thinking. If Facebook, an absolute behemoth of a tech company with more than twice the number of users, that I mean, for whether we like them or not, they got them through an open kind of fair market means, at least kind of the majority of it before the monopoly thing started to really amplify them, you know, with more than twice the number of users of China than kind of the largest country in the world. If they can't pull this off, then really who can. And I think that again, this ties us back to this core Bitcoin monetary policy. But that's kind of the framing for today's conversation is like before this was a question of kind of the cleanest, dirty shirt, right? We're looking for the least worst option because somebody has to have the power. But in this world, kind of the implicit thing that that's being stated by these senators isn't that nobody should have this power. It's that we should have this power, right? It's that you are impeding on our power. And so when we are going after you, we are actually throwing shade at a potential competitor. But with Bitcoin, we kind of have moved away from that. So anyways, I'll stop talking now. But like this feels like it's an important conversation today. And in three years, it's going to be the important conversation. But what do you think? Wait, what's happening in three years? I mean, just the pace at which things are going again. Like you look at how many times we've been through this cycle, right? And it's like, how much bigger can something like Bitcoin get, right? All the things that are driving Bitcoin's growth, not about Bitcoin. It's about the world that Bitcoin exists in and where Bitcoin sits in sharp contrast to that, as far as I can tell. Today, we're recording this as we've just kind of passed recent all time high prices. How much bigger can Bitcoin get before this becomes the conversation? I think it's pretty rich for US politicians to be going, hey, allow us to demonstrate how to engage ethically in economic policy in South America. Right. Or even in America. No, but especially on the back of the Guatemala experiment that Facebook is announcing. Yeah. I mean, that's the current example. But in general, like these US politicians are saying, well, Facebook can't be trusted to manage a digital currency that does remittances or or anything else. They can't be trusted with the digital currency, but we can, right? And I agree that Facebook can't be trusted to run a digital currency. Yeah, their their privacy practices are atrocious. But then again, countries can't be trusted to run digital currency. They can't be trusted to run analog currencies. Nobody can be trusted to run a digital currency. That's the beauty of Bitcoin and decentralized cryptocurrencies is that no one needs to be trusted. It's a piece of software running it. And whenever you have humans that have to be trusted, that's the recipe for corruption and abuses and all kinds of problems to come in. So yeah, Facebook can't be trusted to run a digital currency, but so can't anybody. Arguably, the reason Bitcoin was invented was so that you would have a system that runs itself precisely because those who created it realize that no one could be trusted to run currency. This is something we've been thinking about and talking about for a long time, but I think for a lot of people, this idea that nobody should be in control is preferable to somebody who you think is really smart and well intentioned should be in control. When we were talking about this two years ago, I don't think this was a very mainstream topic. I think people were broadly like, OK, well, things aren't great, but they're going OK. And I would rather have the devil I know than the devil I don't know. But it feels like we're increasingly walking down this path towards, well, I would rather have literally anything, right? Just give me something different relative to the system that we have today, because the system that we have today doesn't work and can't really resolve itself in any of these kinds of ways. But I guess the question that I have for everybody is, like, is there even a hypothetical organization, like not even trying to find something out there that exists? I was actually thinking about that. I was like, well, you know, Facebook is this giant organization, but they're not really known for like their competency when it comes to, you know, these kind of more nuanced issues. They clearly know how to run a business. They clearly know how to build kind of social media in the environment in which they did it, because that's why they're so big and successful is because they were really able to offer something that many people found very compelling and then optimize, optimize, optimize around that experience to the point where it's become, I think it's the largest platform in the world with, again, three billion users. How many of those three billion are active, though? I don't disagree with you on that. I'm just saying, like, these are big numbers, right? These are big numbers. And even if we discount, you know, one in 10, 300 million people, that's still a lot of people who are using this using this platform again, taking nine out of 10 out. I think the answer is really simple. I can't think of anyone who could be trusted to run the system. You could maybe point at you could maybe point at a few countries that have a tendency to really, really strong institutional and democratic management. The US would not be on that list, by the way, in my opinion. But it's a very short list. And for the most part, the one thing that is obvious from those examples is that it doesn't scale, right? So, you know, just Germany is a good example of a very good currency manager recently, for obvious reasons. And yet even that isn't scaling so well on the level of the European Union. China, honestly, which would be the second biggest platform for digital currency, is a very good currency manager. Not a very good democracy, but a very good currency manager. What are the characteristics of a good currency manager, though? Not devolving into a hyperinflation disaster within 10 years. OK, so managing the money supply, inflation, anything else? I mean, what else is there to monetary policy? Yeah, well, I mean, I hear sometimes that the the mandate of the Federal Reserve here in the US is manage inflation and keep employment at the highest possible levels. They're failing at that right now. They've failed at it a lot over history, too. I don't know about China specifically. I'm not too familiar with it, but I can't think of any country or any entity really that I think is a good currency manager or even meets that that mandate applying that criteria. Well, the moment you go beyond the very, very narrow monetary goals and you start going into things like unemployment, then it becomes a very political job. Right. And that's a whole other departure for which, you know, arguably the Federal Reserve is not doing well. And one of the reasons is not doing well is because it departed from monetary policy in order to incorporate these other political goals. You can't address unemployment without dealing with much bigger political, microeconomic and even microeconomic issues. And when you're talking about a country like the politics is never going to be able to be separated from the monetary policy, though. But that's the holy grail of monetary policy. That is the false promise that neutral independent central bankers can deliver this kind of technocratic, quasi algorithmic numbers based on politicized policy. None do and the further away you take them from monetary goals, the more you introduce other goals like unemployment, the more impossible that task becomes. Yeah. And when you think about Facebook, I mean, Facebook definitely has political motives that they are probably going to be mixing up with their idea of monetary policy. So if they're, you know, like a digital nation or whatever, I'm sure they're going to have goals that they want to accomplish with their remittance system and their digital currency more broadly that are going to be completely mixed up with what they're doing. That's going to have the same effects it has when countries mix political goals up with their monetary policy. So I think it is inextricable unless you're talking about a software program like Bitcoin, even Bitcoin, I guess you could say maybe there's politics in Bitcoin, but at least there's this consensus mechanism, you know, so that changes in the code itself. There's like a structure to make sure that they are really good and that changes don't just happen unless it's like actually vetted to be a good idea. So the one thing we can all agree on is Facebook would be a terrible company to manage a digital currency and not because of the monetary policy, but because of all of the other surveillance political issues where zero democratic accountability when you add political questions like that is dangerous, but then nobody else is either. If I can recall correctly, didn't it come out? Mark Zuckerberg spent five hundred million dollars on the last American election. I think the last thing that he needs is his own personal IMF to buy foreign politicians with make it go global. We remember we're talking about the Libra and how they were going to buy munipons and effectively Zuckerberg could just go to each senator for each jurisdiction that he needed to buy off and then just include their zip codes, munibond debt in the Libra token as a way to just bribe whoever he needed to vote whoever he needed in the Senate. And he would just do that to every country's local elections. I don't think a man who spends half a billion dollars on a single election should have trillions of dollars to spend manipulating every election. Hey, listeners, this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin is brought to you in part by EasyDNS.com. EasyDNS and its CEO, Mark Geftavik, have been a friend of the show since virtually the beginning and are the sponsors of more episodes than anyone. Just like us, their interest isn't in making money. 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That's EasyDNS.com. And thank you very much for listening. What actually happened to Libra? Why did they rebrand it? How did it become Novi? Is that the word? So Novi is the wallet subsidiary. Libra became Diem a while back. So that's the stablecoin. The Diem is the name of the stablecoin. Well, so Diem is the name of the proposed stablecoin. It's actually still in a kind of regulatory hell right now, because again, they tried to do it, quote, the right way, which is to say they tried to ask for permission with the US to compete against the US and also every other country out there, right? But the US is particularly where they're domiciled. And so they have to care a little bit more versus everywhere else. The whole thing about disruptive technology, right? Is that if something disruptive can be stopped by the people who are being disrupted, then obviously they're going to stop it. Preferably before it even starts, which is exactly what happened here. Exactly, right? I mean, the last thing that you want when you're running a dysfunctional system is someone competing with you because even if they have a just a slightly better version of bad, yeah, exactly, right? Like if their system is also dysfunctional, but it's less dysfunctional than yours, then you have to justify why your dysfunctional way to do things is better than their less dysfunctional way to do things. The thing that we see over and over again is the intellectual fragility of kind of all of this stuff is that it really only can stand the way that like the financial systems work and stuff like that really only can stand when it lacks a point of comparison. Because to the extent that you have a point of comparison. Well, the way we do things isn't actually very good. It's just kind of the best that people were able to come up with, you know, before, you know, I don't know, 1980s. And we just kind of have carried this same model forward and forward and forward and forward. And it was kind of the cleanest dirty shirt for a long time, but it's not any longer. There's actually a clean shirt now, right? And that's crypto. Well, that's the idea. That's the idea or or no shirt, right? Or just like better no shirt than than having to pick between all of these bad options, right? Wait, what's no shirt? Is that like no money or I'm a little sure no, she is no service. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I've taken the I've taken the analogy way too far there. Let's just move on past that. But I mean, I think that this conversation shirt on. I think this conversation does come down to monetary policy, though. Whether you're talking about Facebook or you're talking about the Federal Reserve or you're talking about really any central bank that's out there issuing currency or even you're talking about, you know, airline miles, right? Stuff that isn't traditionally currency but plays a somewhat currency role within limited situations. The question is, what is the best way to think about monetary policy? And I think that you can get lots and lots of people to say, I think that this monetary policy is best or I think that, you know, this other way is best, right? But ultimately, what you're doing with that is you are changing the nature of the playing field. You are creating the playing field on which people then have to understand the rules of the game, figure out how to maximize their own participation. And so on the one hand, you know, monetary policy can be very good when you're trying to have very specific outcomes, but it is not free to get those outcomes. It comes at the cost of predictability of the monetary policy first off for the most part, because if the monetary policy is subject to change, then you could make the right decision today. But then next week, the monetary policy changes and turns out that decision you made was terrible. So I mean, like think about this in the context of somebody who, you know, like got a mortgage or something like that during, you know, the kind of peak of the bubble. And then while the bubble gets popped, right? And then comes back down and suddenly you're underwater. Well, at the time, it seemed like that was a really great move because prices were going up everywhere. And again, like this is a really monetary policy. Monetary policy influences this. When you're taking these systems of rules that we all then have to find our way to navigate through. And you are making it so that you are trying to generate one particular outcome. It comes at the cost of people who you are not trying to help right then and who still have to deal with the kind of uncertainty that you've introduced to the system. I think the problem that I have with all of this stuff at this point in my life is that I just think that monetary policy while well intentioned only generates mixed results. And those mixed results always fall more on the side of unintended consequences and bad things that happen. Versus here's the reason why we're doing it. Here's what we're trying to generate as an outcome. I disagree that it's well intentioned even or that it's unintended consequences. I really do think it's unintended consequences. I think it's easy to look at at outcomes and be like, oh, this is the result of bad intentions. But I really do think that, again, like it might not be good intentions for everybody intentions for who. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Just the idea that if there's a group over here that needs help, then there's a group over here that you feel like is doing fine. Should you change the system in order to benefit the people who need help? And the answer to that question, if you want to, again, like from a feel good standpoint is yes, like we should have systems that are designed to uplift people and to help people who are in bad situations. But the unintended consequences that come from that, first off, provide cover for the types of bad actors that you're talking about, Stephanie, I think, and then simultaneously just winds up disenfranchising a different group of people. Right. We're not talking about adding prosperity to a system. We're talking about squeezing a balloon where wherever you squeeze, you know, it's forcing kind of the rest of the system to accommodate that. And that accommodation introduces so much uncertainty and to a lesser extent chaos as people try to realign around what is the new kind of equilibrium that it creates winners and losers naturally. And the losers are people who didn't do anything wrong in the system. They just weren't the preferred kind of parties. And so again, it takes me back to this is monetary policy just in general, right? Just the idea of a flexible monetary policy that is designed to address some other purpose rather than simply being like a monetary value conveyance mechanism. Is there any scenario where the where the kind of costs don't outweigh the benefits? You look at it when the system is starting and it's like, OK, well, here's what they said. Here's the kind of plausible outcome that they hope to achieve. You look at what they wound up achieving and almost always it's much, much, much worse. And that's even not recognizing most of the unintended consequences that you can't even see whenever there's people determining the monetary policy subjectively and on a basis that can, you know, change depending on the conditions. Those people always have a certain amount of power that the people who are kind of forced or trapped into using the money don't have. And so I mean, even Bitcoin has a monetary policy. It's just that it was clearly laid out at the beginning and it hasn't changed. It's this amount of inflation over time. And these are the rules of the system. And the rules aren't subject to a committee, you know, changing them based on political reasons. So so Bitcoin has a monetary policy. It's just that it's different because there's not people in charge of it with power who can change it on a whim, basically, or who can change it when they vote on it or something. So I think the counter argument to that is that to the extent that we're considering that monetary policy, we should talk about where the. So so Bitcoin has completely stable monetary policy that does not change and will not change, except in the event that the majority of the network wants it to change and proactively take steps to adopt that change, which is very different from our current system. Yeah. And then practically, as time goes on, that gets more and more impossible because like we've talked about in the past, it's ossification. So it's very stable as far as monetary policy is concerned. But what's not stable about it is its value. Right. Because again, one of the arguments in favor of something like monetary policy is you want to be flexible so that as the situation that the currency is intended to serve changes, you are able to the system is able to adapt to see that change. Now, Bitcoin does not adapt as far as monetary policy is concerned. So instead, what we see, I believe, is this kind of incredible price volatility, right? Because the system isn't adjusting to how many people want it, to how many how much people value it. It's just doing what it does. And then people are pushing the price up, pushing the price down. And so you get a lack of certainty around the value of the thing in exchange for the certainty around the monetary policy. Is that a worthwhile trade off? But there's other things like there's stable coins, at least some of them anyway. It's automatically adjusting so that it does keep a certain value pegged to another currency. And so you can get that stability if you want, but you got to go to a different animal, which is a stable coin. But I think it's very relevant because we've seen again and again and again that it is stable coins that terrify central bankers and governments more so than open cryptocurrencies. It's the possibility that stable coins can be built upon open cryptocurrencies that terrifies the regulators and the central bankers. The IMF has said so and the US government has said so repeatedly. So are we even talking about Bitcoin in that circumstance? Or are we just talking about stable coins? Because I agree with you, stable coins are like they represent like a path that it seems like governments who issue their own currencies would rather not take because it will compete directly with that. I think it speaks to the trade off you talked about, which is if you have something with a fixed monetary policy where the monetary policy is predictable, but the price is extremely volatile, that thing is only appealing in crisis economics, or at least that's what central bankers think. And therefore it's not a big threat. If, however, you can take that thing and build on top of it or around it stable coins and then you can get predictable monetary policy to a certain extent or monetary policy not controlled by central bank and you can get stable value, that combo is killer. So we're talking about an ecosystem then rather than just a single because again, you look at something like the US dollar, right? And sure, it has a digital component and it has a physical component. But the monetary policy impacts both of them pretty equally. Whereas what you're describing is very different from that. You've got Bitcoin over here with its fixed monetary policy and its volatile price. And then you've got stable coins over here with, I would argue, a lot of counterparty risk, regardless of like the counterparty risk comes in different flavors, right? Algorithmic stable coins have kind of a different potential stability risk in so far as like the collateral can lose lots of value. And there can be other things that are kind of untethered from the currency itself that then cause problems for the currency because of the way you do it. On the other hand, if you've got a company that's got a vault full of dollar bills backing their thing, which arguably is one of the safer ways to do it compared to taking on debt or something like that, as we've seen from some of these earlier stablecoin projects. Then the risk is that gets confiscated or frozen or embezzled. Yeah, I mean, if we keep this focus, this isn't the government worried about Bitcoin or about a company building something based on even loosely Bitcoin's technology, not at all. What they're talking about here is a private company with enormous clout being able to build something that resembles a cryptocurrency that gives them full control over the monetary policy, which is not algorithmic because nobody's suggesting that Libre, DM, et cetera, are algorithmic monetary policy. And at the same time, deliver that packaged as a stablecoin. That's taking away both authority and providing massive competition. And they might even do it on the back of dollar reserves, which they can actually secure. And that's a terrifying combo. They're worried for different reasons than we're worried. We're worried because that's a surveillance privacy nightmare and it's neo feudalism for a company to have that much power. The regulators and Congresspeople are not worried about that. They're worried about competition, I think, primarily. I don't know. I think there is at least when it comes to the people who are thinking about sort of the longer term reserve status of the dollar. I think that there is this sense that Bitcoin presents a problem. And I don't think it's a shorter term problem. I think to the point that you're making the stablecoin thing is a much more kind of immediate problem. The concern that I would have if I was in that situation is effectively the subversion of the traditional nation state with this kind of network state concept, right? Where instead, where like you're still a citizen of a country, but your money is actually being managed by a company like Facebook, right? That is not really a national company. It's a super national company that has entities and kind of tentacles all around the world and that is connecting again, like just from a bypassing sanction standpoint. We talked about this kind of when Libra was first announced, like it seems like the big concern to the point that Jonathan made earlier is that the amount of power that such an organization and such a combination of this currency with the sort of behemoth tech company would have would actually present a meaningful threat, even though they have no territory, right? No traditional country, but they could represent a country collectively. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, like the Zuckerberg Facebook metaverse thing is kind of hilarious. How they're just like, man, our name really isn't going well right now. What if we just jump on this trendy term right now? Like I wouldn't have been surprised if they would have called it like blockchain or something like that too, right? But they're just putting it out there like they just want to take over a space, a virtual space, I guess, and be and create like a parallel existence, I guess, with their products. Yeah, but to Andreas's point, when we talk to death, the Facebook money conversation a while back, going from a two body problem to a three body problem brings about so much more freedom. I mean, there's a reason why America is supposed to have three checks and balances for branches. Three body problems create very stable solutions. Maybe the problem to the IMF is we need a thousand IMFs. Maybe the problem isn't Facebook being the only one. It's let's have a thousand of these corporate fascistic frameworks trying to create their own IMF and have them all battle each other until all of them only have half a percent of the power of the IMF. And the IMF is a fraction of what it used to be. I just know I'll be here holding their coin. Yeah. So OK, OK. So so again, like just from drawing it back to kind of that that opening question, right? Like what would be like an organization, whether hypothetical or not, that could pull off something like this without having these externalities? And I mean, like assume for a second that, you know, that there were no people involved and there was monetary policy that was simply, you know, that run by a super smart AI, right, that could never, ever, ever. And we all and it was, you know, 100 percent true, could never, you know, like lie or anything like that. And it has, you know, like outcomes that it is attempting to get to, like, you know, stable prices and high employment, right? And I don't want to take us down the the paperclip optimization route. I mean, that sounds like what Facebook is trying to do. I'm sure their currency would be run by a super smart AI, just like everything else they do is run by a super smart AI. I mean, it doesn't really change anything, I think. Yeah, it would be a super smart AI trains on models from various national governments and because they forgot to exclude some from the training set, it would gradually gravitate to the monetary policy of the Weimar Republic. Just like all of their chat box turned into Nazis, their currency monetary policy would turn into a hyper-inflating Weimar Republic mess. That would be really fun, actually. In a hypothetical, technocratic, like, like perfect world, right? Where where like they're here, the metrics that you you work it off of, like, is that still preferable to no metrics? Or is that what we basically have with Bitcoin? Just a much kind of lighter touch when it comes to deciding, you know, how the policy should be run. There's no touch to how the policy should be run. The policy has not changed one bit since the very beginning. I don't see how light touch or high touch. There is no touch in Bitcoin, but that's a giant exception. And arguably it's very difficult to bootstrap that kind of thing ever again. And maybe that niche is completely filled quite nicely. In fact, by Bitcoin, you don't really need two of them, although others have tried. So the bottom line is that you can't do it half-sees. You can't do light touch monetary policy. Any touch, by definition, introduces all of the incentive structure of a broken system to start touching more and more and more heavily. So that was creepy. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. But yeah, you're right. Right. It's like the problem here is that if you can make decisions and those decisions have economic impact, which is unevenly distributed, that economic impact that is unevenly distributed is by necessity political because you have to decide who gets which end of the stick, right? Who gets the uneven distribution? Which means all of that becomes inherently political. And if you have any touch, it's already too much and it's only going to get more. That's the fundamental problem that Bitcoin solves. And Libra isn't going to solve it any better by pretending to do it in a more technocratic way. After all, central bankers are neutral and independent, right? Right? Right? What you were saying was making me think about Ethereum, though. I don't know if you guys want to go down the road at all. But like, I haven't kept up with Ethereum like I have with Bitcoin. It was Bitcoin was my passion from the beginning. Not that I'm like a maximalist or anything. But like, I just remember following Ethereum over the years, like there has been kind of like smart people. I don't deny that they're very smart, you know, smarter than me. Making changes to the protocol and doing kind of like a monetary policy thing. And they've had some issues and they've worked through them. And maybe that's the best example I could think of where people are doing monetary policy and it's working out OK. Still, I think I kind of prefer having no one in charge. Yeah, I mean, watching Ethereum try to do monetary policy with a light touch is a bit like watching Bitcoin try to do smart contracts and DeFi. It's embarrassing. Stick to what you do well and figure out that that niche is already taken by a very, very successful alternative. And there's no reason to even try to compete in a niche that doesn't fit you well when that niche is already fully occupied by someone else who fits perfectly in it. And it goes both ways. If Libra was to try to do low touch monetary policy, they'd run into exactly the same problem. The idea that you will get good results as long as you keep hiring or electing as the case may be great people to the job is a flawed model. I think to your point, Andreas, I don't think that Ethereum has ever really aimed to be, you know, like a money, right? Like they've been pretty clear from the word go. And certainly this is, again, like it's a decentralized protocol. So there's lots of different opinions about this. But they've been pretty clear that what they're doing is more of kind of this experimental distributed compute thing. I mean, Ethereum has been pretty clear that they're everything to everyone in every way. And if they're not that way yet, it's because in the future, there's an update that will make them that way in the near term. So just hold on because it'll be that really soon. OK, right. Absolutely. That's what they made clear. And that's how you get some groups within Ethereum who are now saying, oh, look, EIP 1559, ultrasound money. It's the same story. Jack of all trades and trying to do everything and trying to emulate other successful strategies, even if they're not a good fit. I get asked almost on a weekly basis if Bitcoin can do DeFi, NFTs and smart contracts. And I also get asked on an almost weekly basis if Ethereum can also deliver sound money. And the answer is no for both. Well, my my favorite story is it's the case study of when McDonald's and Starbucks went to war. And it was the it was it was a war that was beautiful because they were both gearing up to destroy the other. And both were that me where the guy sticks the stick in his bicycle. It falls on the ground and starts crying because McDonald's said we can do frappuccinos. That's pretty good. I mean, let's just make a coffee shop. If you've gone to McDonald's, you might have seen that having little coffee areas. And Starbucks said, hey, we can do breakfast, but it's really easy to just be breakfast. So what happened was McDonald's couldn't handle teaching the people how to do barista coffee. And one really wanted a McDonald's coffee. And at Starbucks, the breakfast that they were making was cooking eggs and made every Starbucks smell like a McDonald's. And no one wanted to take their colleagues there to have a meeting. And so just by the nature of the products that they were offering, it literally created an aromatic atmosphere that was contrary to their core business model. And so they backed away from going towards each other because they just posed a flat on their face. Please tell me that this lawsuit was popularly called the acid reflux wars. There was no lawsuit. It was just both of them trying to enter each other's market and then realizing that intrinsic to what they were meant that they couldn't go after the market of the other. But for a brief period in time, Alka Seltzer was winning. There will never be a day a theory will be money. It can't even do multi-sync. Right. Maybe it wasn't really a multi-sync, it's a trillion dollar work cap. It still won't have multi-sync. That said, Bitcoin will never, for a single second, for a single block, be open-minded enough to allow a billionth of the innovation or ability to figure out what Ethereum does. And with that comes products and innovation. I think that's well said. I don't know why we went on this tangent, but it's a good demonstration. I think that, like many other things, algorithmic monetary policy is a design feature and it involves trade-offs. And those trade-offs are not easy to make. They cut you off from a lot of things that you might want to do. There's a very good reason why Libra won't ever be able to do algorithmic monetary policy of the type that Bitcoin does. But they're not competing for that. I think what they're competing for is to sell basically political patronage algorithmically and compete with the US government and other governments on selling political patronage algorithmically. That they can do. So what is the world that we not necessarily want to have emerge? But what do we think emerges from kind of all of this turmoil that's going on right now? I know this is a big question. We'll definitely have to do a whole show about it. But I'm just curious if there's like the thing that I'm wondering is in a world that I don't think is going to walk away from the idea of trying to fix problems with monetary policy. Could it be made more efficient or is it a natural step to use something that is, again, like Bitcoin, you know, serve the role that kind of gold did in prior eras, which was kind of like a cross border compatible constraint on the like dumb things that any given government could do with their monetary policy because the market would basically self adjust against them in the digital world. Bitcoin does seem like it is pretty well situated to play that role. Should it be desirable? But in order for it to be desirable, it feels like there would have to be a lot of humility that would come into the limits of monetary policy. You know, in the fiat world as its practice today, I'm not convinced that something like that would happen. And like I expected something far more like that, right? Like a country like Greece to say, we're going to leave the euro and we're going to back our currency with these Bitcoin. And here's the transparency so you don't have to trust us versus what I think we've seen in the first country to adopt, which is basically kind of a by fiat mandate that Bitcoin become an acceptable medium of payment. That is a more extreme version than I think I certainly expected. And so I'm really kind of curious what direction it feels like this will go irrespective of what happens with El Salvador. I think Facebook is very powerful and they will find some way to make monetary policy from within their metaverse and they'll suck a lot of people into it. Meanwhile, outside the metaverse, there will still be lots of viable alternatives, including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that people can use. And if they don't want someone who's dictating monetary policy to affect their money, then they can use Bitcoin. It's kind of what I what I expect to happen. Yeah. And, you know, as someone who grew up in Greece and got to experience how things work, it's sad to me to say that Greece is far more likely to adopt Libra as their national reserve currency than Bitcoin any time soon. Why is that? Or is it DM? Or is it I mean, whatever we're we're called. It's it's the Facebook thing, right? It's the it's the Facebook stablecoin Facebook's. I like to call it Facebook's. Yeah, exactly. Facebook's we that's what we called it originally. Let's just say the nation that hired Goldman Sachs to defraud an entire subcontinent is not the one that's going to want radical financial transparency. That's fair. There you go. The only silver lining in all of this is the amount of pushback and political risk that is being generated by this project for Facebook. Well deserved is so high. I predict that they never launch without completely watering it down to the point where it's pointless. But then you'll see Mark Zuckerberg become like the chairman of the Fed or something after they launch the watered down version. OK, folks, that's all the time we have for this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin. Thank you very much for listening. Today's episode featured Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy and Jonathan Mohan and also myself, Adam B. Levine with Music by Gertie Beatz. You can send us an email at adametspeakingofbitcoin.show. Until next time, thanks for listening.