 See, the great trouble is that the money wasn't allowed to develop further. After two or three hundred years of coins, all governments put their hands and stopped any further developments. We were not allowed to experiment on it. Money hasn't been improved. Money has rather become worse in the course of time. Governments say it must not develop any further. And what we have had since in development, there are matters of government inventions, mostly wrong, mostly abuses of money. And I have come to the position of asking, has monetary policy ever done any good? I don't think it has. I think it has done only harm. And that's why I'm now pleading for what I've called denationalization of money. I don't believe that we should ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, and we can't take them violently out of the hands of the government. All we can do is, by some sly roundabout way, introduce something so you can't stop. Free banking as a concept is one of the cornerstones of the Austrian School of Economics, where currency is not owned and created by a government monopoly, but by many private issuers competing against each other. It makes some very big assertions, especially in today's worldwide economic situation. And for just about all of the economic crises that have ever been observed, by laying the blame of them at the feet of central banks. First of all, a central bank is an institution that is given a monopoly on the creation or printing of a currency within a country, granted by government through law. So only the federal reserve is allowed to create the US dollar, only the Bank of England can create the pound sterling, only the European central bank can create the euro, and so on. This obviously means that such institutions have total control over an economy's money supply, and therefore huge control over the economy itself. And what good has been achieved thanks to such control being afforded to governments? Government control of the money supply has always been justified as the best way of stabilizing the economy by ensuring a stable currency, and indeed that is what every single person in government and private banking will tell you it achieves, but let's look at just one chart here to tell us that all is really not as it seems. What you're looking at here is called the Consumer Price Index, or CPI for short, and in quick and easy terms it's a measurement of the cost of consumer goods over time, aka how much more expensive the stuff becomes that you and the average household regularly buys. 1913 is an important and standout year because that is the year that the United States Federal Reserve was created. And as the central bank it was given exclusive responsibilities to control the rate of supply of new money put into circulation in the country. This means the government was given a monopoly of control over the issue of currency in the United States and therefore huge control of the capacity of credit aka lending of money by commercial banks to customers for loans, mortgages and things like that. I'll link a great article by Robert Murphy writing for the Mises Institute which details the events that led to the Fed's creation which had partners from huge investment banks such as JP Morgan and Citibank helping in its formation. If the intention truly was to curb the power of the evil and greedy financial system with its predatory capitalist fat pigs then why were they leading the charge to make it come into existence in explicitly secret meetings? Well there's obviously one answer to that which is that they're telling you a fat bunch of lies. Anyway, this video isn't meant to be focused on just the Fed so I'll skip to the 1970s. That is where the CPI chart clearly starts on a path to outer space as Richard Nixon's government officially ended the US dollar's ties to the gold standard of which it was the last remaining country in the world to be using it. Different reasons for this happening are given depending on how apologetic to government stupidity the person that you're asking is but the truth of the matter is that the Federal Reserve had in order to fund the Vietnam War devalued the dollar so much against the value of gold that German banks noticed this and were going to the Federal Reserve on a weekly basis to exchange their dollars in cash for the Fed's gold reserves which was basically giving the Germans free money. What exactly was Nixon to do about this? Well closely behind unicorns and fairy dust there are few things as rare as a government reversing its mistakes and this is just another example of them making a mistake and instead of fixing the huge and dangerous cracks in the wall of a house they just paint over them and decide to build a whole new floor above it. So from this point on the School of Modern Monetary Theory completed its path of world domination and now all currency in the world was fiat and upheld by fractional reserve banking in which a unit of currency is just a note of promise from the government not backed by gold or any valuable asset but backed by the taxes of the country's citizens which came from the promissory note which backed the note which come from the note which backed the note and so on and so on. The only value of the money in your wallets and bank accounts is the worldwide belief that the government who issues that money is not going to collapse so if citizens for a large enough part don't pay tax that illusion of stability disappears and the house of cards comes crashing down over their heads and this is exactly what happened to Greece in the early 2010s just look it up. Governments have to maintain inflation in this system to force people to remain employed because if they're employed then they pay income tax and if the money that they've saved remains at a set value instead of being devalued then they're much more likely to retire early or work less. So the government has to keep you working for as long as feasibly possible in order for you to pay as much tax as possible in order to stop everything from falling apart and they still overspend and rack up insane levels of debt but Christ I really should bloody move on now. So bada bing bada boom one day in 2009 after the government assisted bubble burst Hayek's prediction at the start of this video became true a Japanese man going by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto saw the state of the developed world where millions of families lost their savings and their incomes but as the big banks crumbled and all the governments gave the banks billions of tax dollars to save them while the tax payers drowned in the flood. He knew something had to be done and coded a simple yet brilliant piece of technology and within the data for the first ever block of Bitcoin that was mined are the words of a newspaper headline the Times 3rd of January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks what a legend this isn't going to be a ramble of computer science jargon telling you what makes Bitcoin what it is just what it means for economics in the context that has been provided so far nobody can ever control Bitcoin it is mind on using the processing power of computers by individuals and companies and is not issued by a government it can be transferred almost instantly over the internet and across any border it can be stored in online wallets or even on a memory stick for total security every piece of Bitcoin is unique and serialized and cannot be duplicated for the purpose of fraud or inflation there is a limited amount that will ever come into existence it cannot be issued at will in the name of stability which as we've shown is a completely fallacious effort for these reasons it is the closest thing we currently have to digital gold a lot of the initial value of gold comes from many of those sources that I listed for Bitcoin like Bitcoin has intrinsic immediate value from the incredibly expensive task of mining it it's decentralized in the same way but it has its own pros and cons the pro is that gold is incredibly desirable and stable specifically because it has been humanity's primary means of money for thousands of years and nothing can come close to replicating that factor of ensuring perpetual demand but it's huge flaw in the face of Bitcoin is the ease of transfer any government with the technology these days can scan all of the parcels being sent into its country from another and economically oppressive countries like the Soviet Union banned gold precisely because a decentralized use of money directly threatens their economic control so if a country bans gold and then its agents find a parcel of it addressed to your house you can expect a rude awakening just before sunrise as armed men blow up the front door of your house and throw you in a cage but now if you have access to the internet and VPN there is no place on earth where a government can feasibly track or prevent anybody from receiving owning and trading Bitcoin it honestly makes me happier than I can express to know that from this point on in human history the individual will forever have access to a means of exchange free from arbitrary inflation and centralized control this truly is the most important invention for individual freedom against tyranny since guns became cheap enough for individuals to harness and I really can't stress that enough but despite this monumental achievement Bitcoin is not the final answer anybody who has heard of it will probably associate one word towards it volatility the price has shot up astronomically to now where at the time of writing a single-hole Bitcoin is worth around ten thousand US dollars to put that in perspective in 2010 a pizza was famously ordered from Papa John's using ten thousand bitcoins so I really hope that pizza was worth what is now one million dollars just a decade later it seems ridiculous to propose that the key to solving the instability of government money is a form of digital money which seems apocalyptically worse in comparison and so now I reveal why I have been banging on about gold for so long the Genesis will not be complete until there is a successful launch and widespread adoption of a cryptocurrency backed by either gold or silver if you watch the whole interview of Hayek that I got the clip at the start from he says that the new denationalized money will very likely be a creation of metal companies issuing receipts and accounts backed up by the value of their own business almost like a share once a trusted gold company creates their own cryptocurrency they will unlock the final key of the puzzle and other similar companies will do the same allowing money to once again be unrivaled in its stability thanks to the forces of value and private market competition this seems inevitable at this point in time and the only thing stopping it is the risk a company would obviously be taking by being the first to try it and the whole purpose for precious metal companies existing in this age of post gold standard is the purpose of avoiding risk the great contemporary Austrian school economist Peter Schiff owns such a gold company and it really makes me wish that he would stop painting bitcoin as some kind of boogeyman and take it upon himself to try and start Hayek's incredibly intuitive vision by introducing the absent merit to the realized concept of cryptocurrency the day that something like this happens is the day when the world is once again economically free and starts the ball rolling for the return of all other kinds of individual freedom along with it that we have lost over the years the world revolves around money if you take the revolving of the world out of the hands of government and allow it to be expanded upon in the way that Hayek describes you almost unlock a new level of human potential and progress and can harbor in a world of absolute innovation in all the key areas that threaten the future of humanity that government constant regulation and intervention and mismanagement is putting at such severe risk when government can't control money they can't control what you buy meaning you can buy things that don't harm the planet meaning you can buy things that improve your standard of living meaning that your wages increase higher than inflation if you look at charts of wage growth compared to inflation you'll see that average wages from the middle class downwards have been stagnating where inflation overtakes the rate at which wages grow which is why my generation as a 23 year old will be the only generation in about 400 years that on average will probably earn less in real terms than their parents this is what government has done to our money and now we have the capability to begin to take it back there have been several attempts before to try and make a cryptocurrency that is linked to the price of gold that's not exactly backed by gold and they are all essentially marked as failures the key here is to make a gold standard cryptocurrency and you can see why there should be the case if we go back to our CPI chart here before the gold standard was abolished there was hardly any inflation which means there is more individual freedom to own your own money not a government prescribing you a currency and then deciding how much it's worth the fact of the matter is the dollar and no nationalised currency will ever return to the gold standard they should never have left but that's a separate argument we need to look forward past the notion of a nationalised currency and look towards a borderless decentralized one backed up with inherent value it is the future to ensuring that once again we own our money our money is the product of our labor our labor is the product of ourselves if we do not own our money we do not own ourselves governments will never rightfully give back anything that we have given up a right lost once is a right lost forever the next stage is upon us bitcoin is the start of the road not the end of it the cryptocurrency that will lead us into the future is not bitcoin it's not a theorem it's not a ripple it's not a cryptocurrency that currently exists it's a new technology you don't take the first car ever mass produced and still drive it a hundred years later there is innovation that comes from competition cryptocurrency is a competitive market the innovation is yet to happen and when it does happen that is it we're off off to a blazing future the idea of bitcoin maximalism or shouting from the rooftops about how ethereum is the currency of the future is not true it's not here yet the foundations are there and they need to be fully realised but bitcoin evangelism just means you make a lot of money from investing in it you're not going to use it your children are not going to use it they're not going to buy a house with it that is yet to come and we should be so excited to see what the future holds in this regard