 All right, let's get started. So first question, obviously, is what is saving? This word gets used both in the banking industry as kind of an advertising word, right, savings account. But it actually has an economic definition to it. And in the world of mainstream, Keynesian, classical, whatever you want to call it. But really, this is kind of a fairly modern definition of saving. Yeah, this concept of a savings rate, right, which is how much of the income was not spent on consumption. And then from there, the income can either actually go into savings or it can get invested into producer goods, you know, usually through financial intermediation. But the accounting view, and I think the Austrian view and probably actually the classical view pre-20th century is that you have a cash inflow, right? It can be income, but it actually doesn't have to be income in the accounting sense. It could be, you know, the sources of cash, there's a long list of them, but it could be from any kind of source, not necessarily just income. And then you hold that cash on your balance sheet. And that's where the saving is. That, to me, is what savings is. It's just holding cash on your balance sheet. Now, maybe you borrowed that cash from a financial institution, but if you hold it on your balance sheet, that's still savings. From an economic perspective, it's no different than if you are operating a business and you get a cash inflow from a customer paying you, and then you hold that cash, holding cash is holding cash. So the source of the cash flow doesn't really matter in this framework. And then the reason you're holding this cash is because your future cash flows are uncertain. And it's really great to be giving this talk after the previous talk because we were really talking about uncertainty a lot in that and the pervasiveness and inescapability of uncertainty. So ultimately, we do have to hold cash because future cash outflows are uncertain. And we can list out different reasons why future cash outflows might be uncertain. Not all of them are uncertain. There are some that are actually risks, right? And those risky future cash outflows we can actually insure against. So whether that's life insurance or fire insurance, et cetera. So there are some future cash outflows that are quantifiable risks, but for the most part, they're actually very uncertain. And you might conceptualize an uncertain cash outflow in the negative sense of having a catastrophe, either manmade or natural happen to you, but also in the positive sense, right? You don't know what if you have a very compelling investment opportunity in two years, right? There's no way to insure yourself against that. You don't know what the timing is going to be. You don't even know the size of that investment opportunity or whether you're going to find it interesting and want to participate in it. So lots of uncertain future cash outflows and that's why we hold cash. Okay, so what is cash? Well, in this framework, I would argue that cash is the asset with the least uncertainty, right? Because any other asset that has more uncertainty than it would be inadequate for hedging, right? If you're trying to hedge uncertainty, you're going to want to do that with the asset with the least uncertainty. Now, that doesn't mean that cash is a certain asset in the sense that the uncertainty is zero. That's impossible, right? But we're trying to find the asset with the least uncertainty so that we can hedge against future uncertainty. All right, what is uncertainty? Well, we kind of covered this in the previous talk, but we don't know the possible outcomes and we certainly don't know the probabilities of those outcomes, right? If you don't even know the outcomes in the first place, there's no way you're going to be able to assign probabilities to it in advance. Contrast with the concept of risk where we know in advance what the odds are for each possible outcome. So the set of possible outcomes as known and the probability distribution for those outcomes is known. So these are two profoundly different concepts even though unfortunately, they're often used interchangeably, right? People talk about risk, talk about uncertainty, but they are very different concepts. Let's see, next slide. Okay, so what creates uncertainty in a monetary system specifically? From a savings perspective, right? Of trying to hold cash, easily seized and arbitrary supply create uncertainty. It's uncontroversial that it's going to be impossible for you to insure yourself against the government seizing your cash, right? And the reason that is is because ultimately the insurance company itself would be under the jurisdiction of this pillaging government as kleptocracy. And then arbitrary supply is also something that you cannot insure yourself against. Now, you might be able to buy products that attempt to do that, but the results obviously will be mixed. And the reason is that the supply is explicitly discretionary, right? And that there is a PhD economist at the Fed who is creating uncertainty and they're doing it deliberately. They're not, they're actually not trying to establish long-term rational expectations, right? They're not trying to minimize the uncertainty about supply. In fact, they explicitly want to maximize uncertainty about supply and we'll explain why that is, although from the previous speaker you might guess. And so when even someone is reliable, is Jeremy Powell, someone is respectable and is even keeled, what he will tell you is that the Federal Reserve stands ready to create as much money as needed, right? So it's really maximum uncertainty there. And then on the payment side, you have permission to access creates uncertainty. So having to ask for permission to transfer the cash is by definition going to create uncertainty, right? Versus the opposite. And then being easily censored. So even having your transaction reversed creates uncertainty as well from a payments perspective of trying to, if the savings technology component is holding cash on your balance sheet, the payments technology component is your statement of cash flows, right? Your ability to receive cash and your ability to send cash. And so from a permission to access perspective, if you are unable to receive cash because you need to get someone's permission to receive it, that creates uncertainty. And then from the ability to actually send that cash to someone else, if that is impaired, it creates uncertainty as well. So this can actually be summarized to the fact that trusted third parties increase uncertainty. And it's kind of axiomatic because you're not going to increase uncertainty for yourself unless you've got some weird masochistic monetary issues going on. You're not going to censor your own payments and whatnot or create supply uncertainty for yourself. It's kind of a logical absurdity. It has to be someone else doing it to you. And so trusted third parties are the problem in a monetary system. They are the chaos monkey that is throwing wrenches into the gears. Okay, so on the opposite side, what reduces uncertainty in a monetary system? Well, for savings, having seizure resistance. So the more seizure resistant your asset holding is, in the sense of what is the cost of taking your cash? Well, the less uncertainty you have, the greater that cost is. And then on the monetary policy side, the most uncertain, or sorry, the least uncertain monetary policy is one that is fixed ahead of time. One that says there will only ever be 21 million. Now you could dial that back and have a little more uncertainty, for example, with gold, where you have some boundary conditions but that you're still introducing more uncertainty relative to a system like Bitcoin. And then we already talked about Fiat trying to maximize uncertainty on this particular point. For the payments, you really wanna have a technology that allows you to generate a private key, generate a public key, drive an address without asking for anyone's permission. So you can spin up your BTC pay server instance and be sending and receiving Bitcoin on the internet over Tor or using a satellite. There's all sorts of different ways for Bitcoin to be permissionless and censorship resistant. And the full scope of that is kind of outside of this particular presentation. So this can all be summarized by decentralized verification decreases uncertainty. So if you are able to verify that the system is operating how you expect it to operate in a trust minimized manner, right? Where you are running this own software on your own computer, you might even have evaluated the underlying source code yourself. So you're not even trusting the developers. You're really putting all the trust in yourself and that is what is going to decrease the uncertainty as much as is possible. So this is my argument. Bitcoin is the least uncertain monetary system in existence. However, Bitcoin is still uncertain, right? So access to the network can be disrupted. Your private keys can be compromised. We've seen that happen. Now, nobody brute force the private keys, right? So we're not talking about that aspect of it but in terms of being able to hack into your computer and whatnot. That's what famously happened with Mt. Gucks. Another component that we haven't touched on yet is that Bitcoin has very volatile transaction fees. So high transaction fees could make the system using the system on economical and low transaction fees could undermine long-term transaction finality. And that is the topic that is going to be discussed at the conference today, the long-term transaction finality of the system. So there is still uncertainty in Bitcoin. There's not, by no means am I saying that Bitcoin is a system with full 100% certainty, that's not possible. Okay, so what increases risk in a monetary system? The first one is the cost of using the system holistically, whether that's the transaction fees for sending transactions or the cost of running a full Bitcoin node. Those are risks. And then the loss of purchasing power is also a risk. You could argue that on both of these that the positive side is also a risk, strictly speaking. Although we generally don't conceive of increasing in purchasing power to be a risk for us personally or a negative risk. Like we want that to happen. But in any case, the reverse is true. So decreasing risk in the monetary system, if it's getting less expensive to use the system or if you're purchasing power is increasing. The reason I argue that that decreases risk is because you're moving further away from the negative downside risk. So if the price of Bitcoin goes up relative to when you first bought it, you are moving away from the risk of the price of the value going down relative to when you bought it. So in this sense, Bitcoin is the riskiest monetary system. And this is why people talk about how volatile the price of Bitcoin is, or they talk about the cost of transaction fees being volatile or the cost of running a full node potentially being volatile. So Bitcoin is a very risky system. And I think that the focus is on the purchasing power. It is on the price stability as was discussed by the previous speaker. Thankfully, because these are risks, they are insurable. So you can actually start insuring yourself from the cost of running a full node by sinking one today. So go get yourself a computer to run your own full node on. It generally works on most laptops or desktop computers. You just might need to upgrade your hard drive because it is several hundred gigabytes at this point. Transaction fee risk, you can actually hedge by opening lightning channels today while on-chain fees are low. And then the exchange rate risk, you can buy Bitcoin derivatives. We'll talk about that. So you should evaluate Bitcoin or holding Bitcoin as an asset on its fundamental uncertainties first because you can hedge the price risk away anyway. So it doesn't really matter what your view is on the price risk, you could be fundamental, you could be bearish on the price risk but be bullish on the fundamentals of the system. So you could build a portfolio where you own a large amount of physical Bitcoin, but you also, and here we go, you can also hedge risk by buying put options or selling futures. And that way you've constructed a portfolio that has a, you are mitigating the risk of the downside exchange rate, right? Don't want devaluation, but you're also benefiting from minimizing the uncertainties associated with the rest of the monetary system outside of the exchange rate risk. So in conclusion, Bitcoin is the best savings technology and I will argue with you unhesitatingly if you disagree with me and I hope you enjoyed this presentation. Let's talk about it in the speaker sessions.