 U.S. national debt held by the public is at almost $22 trillion, or about $67,000 per citizen, surpassing the country's annual GDP for the first time since World War II. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that it will reach 102% of GDP by the end of 2021 and hit 202% by 2051. The federal government's growing debt burden would increase the risk of a fiscal crisis and higher inflation, as well as undermine confidence in the U.S. dollar, CBO, concluded in its March 2021 long-term budget outlook. If the world were to lose confidence in the dollar, what could replace it? Another fiat currency, gold, Bitcoin? That was the topic of a recent Oxford-style debate hosted by the SOHO Forum. John Valles, a financial consultant and host of the Bitcoin rapid-fire podcast, believes that Bitcoin will eventually replace government's fiat money as the preferred medium of exchange. He argues that Bitcoin's global adoption is a matter of when, not if. Lawrence H. White, an economics professor at George Mason University, is skeptical of Bitcoin's future as money. He believes it may have a future as a financial asset, but isn't suitable to become a global medium of exchange. The debate was moderated by SOHO Forum director Gene Epstein and held before a live audience at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, better known as Porcfest, in Lancaster, New Hampshire. Here is the SOHO Forum debate on the future of Bitcoin as the world's medium of exchange. The resolution reads, Bitcoin will eventually replace government's fiat money as the preferred medium of exchange. Please vote. We'd like to have a substantial vote. Again, you see it's yes, no, or undecided. The program that was specially written for us will make sure that your vote counts only if you vote both times. We can actually trace the flow of voting through the program app. It's a kind of a fascinating exercise to do so. But again, that's the resolution. Please vote yes, no, or undecided. To defend the resolution, we have John Valles, who does the podcast, Bitcoin Fire. John Valles. Please come to the stage. Taking the negative on the resolution, we have George Mason University professor, Larry White. Larry, please come to the stage. Jane, please close the voting. All closed. Thank you, Jane. And John, you have 15 minutes to defend the resolution. Take it away, John. Well, first of all, it's great to be here because I'm actually a refugee. I may not look like it, but I recently escaped the Canadian gulags. And now I'm here in the land of the free. And if my voice is a little hoarse, you'll have to forgive me. I was in Miami for the Bitcoin conference. And since then, I've been having a ton of conversations with Bitcoiners down in Miami, and it's been amazing. So if I'm coughing a little bit, I apologize. Also, I drove up from Boston yesterday, and I noticed on the welcome to New Hampshire sign, it said, live free or die. And you got to imagine as a Canadian, I'm not used to that kind of shit, right? We're more used to, like, do whatever the government tells you to do and everything will be fine. So I thought that was pretty fucking awesome to see that as a slogan. I'm not going to be, you know, we have to keep this narrow because this is the proposition of Bitcoin will inevitably replace government fiat as a preferred medium of exchange. Bitcoin is a very deep rabbit hole. There's lots of stuff to discuss about it. So I'm going to have to necessarily keep a lot of this fairly brief. And I'll focus on the resolution specifically. I'm not going to be talking about Austrian economics today or quoting, quoting dead Austrians or any kinds of economic economists, actually. And that's because I don't think it's necessary. Bitcoin is money. And money is something we interact with on a daily basis. And so I think money is a very intuitive thing. It's just not something that people have had the opportunity to actually think about because we've never really had a choice. You use the government fiat or else. But now we do have a choice. And what this is fostering is a tremendous explosion of people that are for the first time thinking about money and asking these questions about what makes a good money and what money should be and what money shouldn't be. And so what I have done for my own Bitcoin journey is to do that, to think about this critically and not rely on appeals to authority by anyone. So the why of Bitcoin adoption? The thing is that people adopt Bitcoin for different reasons. There's no particular single reason why people adopt Bitcoin. Now, some people may say, well, I adopt Bitcoin because I don't like being stolen from. And I'd like to keep the value of my savings over time and not have the government siphon it off year after year. And in particular, in particularly egregious way over the last 18 months, as I'm sure you're all aware. Other people do it because they want to send remittances back to their family without taking a 10 or 20% haircut. Other people do it because they want to engage in censorship-resistant communication. Other people do it because they don't want to live in fear of saying the wrong thing on social media and having their credit card canceled or their bank account closed off to them. Other people do it out of ideological reasons because it's not right for the government to take your money without your consent, which, of course, is the hidden tax of inflation. So there's many different reasons why people adopt Bitcoin. But the punchline here is why I think it will inevitably become the preferred medium of exchange is because people will continue to see value in it and it cannot be stopped. So if you put those two things together, ultimately Bitcoin wins. And I think what we'll end up seeing happen is it will be increasingly economically disadvantageous not to opt into the Bitcoin system. I don't know if fiat currency is going to crumble and collapse. Maybe it's able to persist far longer than we all think it might. But what I think will happen is more and more people will see the benefits to accrue to you if you adopt or if you opt into the Bitcoin system. Your life becoming cheaper, your options becoming greater, your freedom becoming greater, and many other benefits. And over time, I think the imperative will be to opt into the Bitcoin system and leave the corrupt, unfair fiat system behind. I don't think governments are going to stop Bitcoin. I don't think they can. Governments have tried to ban Bitcoin and in certain places they've been successful at banning it. But that doesn't mean people have stopped owning it. That doesn't mean people have stopped trading it. I mean, we look and see what the government ban on drugs was like. And this is sending tons and tons of physical material across borders. You're telling me that something that exists in the digital ether, they're going to have any chance at stopping that if they want to? No. So I don't think government banning or stopping Bitcoin is a credible threat. The network is too open. It's a global open network where innovation happens on a daily basis. It's far too agile for any centralized government to ever stop. And I think the thing that gets lost in these debates and these conversations is that this is a process of adoption. So what we're witnessing right now is Bitcoin being monetized globally. And that means that adoption will look different in different places by different people and it'll happen at different speeds and for different reasons. And so there's no uniform Bitcoin adoption. What we're seeing is how it's taking place throughout the world for different reasons for people in different situations. So, you know, Bitcoin is at the beginning of an adoption S-curve. And as far as technological adoption S-curves are concerned, it's tremendously rapid. It may not seem like that to us all the time. We may wish it would happen more quickly, but Bitcoin is growing extremely fast and there doesn't seem anything set to stop it. So one of the stunning achievements of Bitcoin, and again I can't get into all the different ways of why Bitcoin is so great, but one is that it's introduced a concept for the first time that is a paradigm shift in economics and that is that it's introduced the idea of absolute scarcity. And so that means that the supply is totally inelastic. So let's assume the full issuance of Bitcoin is 21 million when it's fully issued in around the year 2140. So that means that no matter how much demand there is for more Bitcoin, there will be no more supply coming online. Now, interestingly, economists and academics that speak on this actually see that as a negative, which I think is actually quite absurd because this is one of the primary benefits, one of the primary innovations that Bitcoin represents. And the reason why, just flip the notes here, is because we've always had to work with the money that does not reflect what it is we're actually trading. When we commit ourselves to create value to work, what are we doing? We're sacrificing our time. Now, in the world of every good up until Bitcoin, if there was more demand, there would be more supply, right? But now we exist in an environment where no matter how much demand there is for it, there's no more supply. And the only other thing that has those characteristics that we engage with or that we experience on a day-to-day basis is our time. No matter how much we want more, we're not going to get it. When we spend it, we're not going to get it back and we have a set amount of it. I guess we wish we knew how much exactly that was, but the punchline is we have a certain amount and we ain't getting any more. And so the reason why Bitcoin is such an incredible innovation is because we finally have something that can reflect the sacrifice of us spending our time. When we spend our time to create value and to do work, now we can get something in return that has commensurate qualities with that sacrifice. We get something that's equally limited as the time that we commit and sacrifice to creating that value. That's a tremendous innovation and I think it's going to rewrite the field of economics because now we finally have a standard unit of measure for economics, not one that's constantly changing. And this also, of course, the big benefit of this is no more theft, right? When the supply can't be increased willy-nilly, that means that the people that create the money no longer have access to your savings just because they can create more supply and dilute the value of what you own. The ratio of how much Bitcoin you own relative to the total will never change and that is a amazing thing. Now, as I said, some people think that that is actually a drawback and one of the reasons why they cite that as a drawback is the influence on prices. And they say, well, it's too volatile for pricing. We need stable prices. And I actually think this is a leftover from the central banking era. Stable prices is a misguided objective. What you want is pristine prices. And why is that? Well, what are prices? Prices are meant to be information regarding the preferences of the market actors. And so when you hold constant the supply of a money, that means that all the changes in prices are reflective of changes in preferences of market actors. Again, we've never had that before, but it permits pristine information to the market. And the more pristine the information the market has, the more it's capable of meeting the wants of market participants and properly and most efficiently allocating the resources that that market has. The other reason, so the punchline there is that pristine prices is what we should be going for and Bitcoin allows for pristine prices more than any money we've ever had in the past. Now, right now, in the period where Bitcoin is becoming adopted, yes, prices are volatile, but that's to be expected for two reasons. One, as people learn what this is and they become to understand what it is and they think, oh, it's a short-term thing. I'll buy it and I'll make some money and then I'll sell it. While the market is figuring what this is, of course, there's going to be some natural organic if you will adoption. But the other reason why there's so much volatility right now is because the speculators and the traders are here. And of course, one of the reasons why they're here is because if you take a hard cap money and you think we're on the path toward global adoption, well, there's a hell of a big upside that you want to try to capitalize or play within. And so that upside, that asymmetric return that's available during the process of adoption brings in the traders and the speculators and this creates more price volatility. But when adoption is finished, that will be diminished because as we go from 100 to 150 million people owning Bitcoin as they do today to 8 billion, well, the asymmetric upside will no longer be there and the speculators will leave. And what I suspect is what we'll see in Bitcoin, the relative change in price from let's say one year to the next will roughly reflect economic growth because of course the price of Bitcoin will have to adjust for the new goods and services in the market that it has to price and transact in. Related to this issue is the one that we're talking about here today which is Bitcoin becoming, people will say, well, it's too volatile to ever become a medium of exchange and that's why we don't see it used as such today. First point here is that you have to accumulate something before you can spend it, right? So the world has to adopt Bitcoin before we're gonna see widespread spending because you can't spend something that you don't have. But I think the greater point here is that people aren't not spending Bitcoin because you can't or because it's too expensive or because prices are too volatile. They're not spending Bitcoin because the opportunity cost of doing so is so great. Again, if you think that Bitcoin is on the path to global adoption and only 150 million people around the world own Bitcoin today, then you would be giving up, you know, you're confronting a massive opportunity cost by spending Bitcoin now rather than waiting until it's fully adopted. So that is why we don't see Bitcoin being used commonly as a medium exchange today. It's not because it can't be used in that function or that it's too costly or that it's too slow. Those are all very common, though very false misunderstandings around Bitcoin. And of course, there's a natural disincentive because of how Bitcoin is treated for tax purposes. If you sell Bitcoin, if you want to spend Bitcoin, you incur a capital gain. However, as the experience in El Salvador is showing us, some countries are choosing to designate Bitcoin as legal tender, which of course removes that obstacle. So the game plan right now in Bitcoin for a rational economic actor is to hoard Bitcoin, to ask to be paid in Bitcoin, which is what we're seeing a growing trend, particularly amongst well-known professional athletes. And you spend the shit money. What do you want to hold on to the money that's being devalued anyways? Right? So you hoard the good, you spend the bad and only spend Bitcoin where there's a distinct advantage of doing so. And of course, right now, the opportunity cost is such that most people are saying, well, there's nothing really, there's not that many advantages to me spending Bitcoin. I don't have that many uses in my life for spending Bitcoin. So I'm going to not incur that opportunity cost and I'm going to hold it for the future. One final thing about what people often say why it can't replace government fiat, particularly the US dollar is the network effects. They say the network effects are too strong. Everyone uses the dollar. Well, I think one of the main points here is that if a technology, if a new innovation is sufficiently superior, the network effects don't really matter. Horses and cars, blockbuster and Netflix, newspapers and online media, if the solution is sufficiently better, it will be adopted regardless of the network effect. And in this particular case, Bitcoin is literally trying to disrupt government's monopoly on money. They're trying to separate money in state. So I don't think Bitcoin is going to have too much respect for the network effect held by the government. So basically in summary, what I'm saying is that people will adopt Bitcoin for a variety of different reasons in different places in different times and they will do that because it's better money and the benefits that accrue to them by doing so are supersede the detrimental effects of holding fiat. Thank you, John. You went 30 seconds over. Good summary. You got to let me have this one, Gene. You got to let me have this one. One final thing. Ludwig Wittgenstein is a famous philosopher and he said, tell me Wittgenstein asked a friend, why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the earth, rather than the earth was rotating? His friend replied, well, obviously, because it just looks as though the sun is going around the earth. Wittgenstein replied, well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the earth was rotating? And so what I would say to all you is what would it look like if it did look like a new superior form of money was in the process of becoming adopted globally? And I think it would look exactly like what's happening with Bitcoin right now. Thank you. Larry White, for the negative Larry, you get an extra 60 seconds on top of that 15 minutes. Okay, thanks. So our resolution is that Bitcoin will eventually replace government's fiat money as the preferred medium of exchange. Let me be clear that in taking the negative on this proposition, I'm not coming here to bury Bitcoin. In fact, I'm happy to praise Bitcoin. I'm certainly not here to praise fiat money or central banking. Let me tell you where I'm coming from. My whole career has been criticizing central banking and fiat money. If you've heard of the concept of free banking, I wrote the book on free banking as an alternative to central banking. So my kind of vision, at least in that work, is of a world where there's a gold standard and free issue of claims to redeemable in gold. And that's the kind of system that was approximated by some historical examples. And so my research has been on how they worked and how well they worked. I think we should appreciate Bitcoin, but we should appreciate it for what it is, not based on a vision of what I don't think it's headed toward being. What it is is a valuable new type of asset. And it's valuable because it provides, as John said, a censorship-resistant way of transferring value. And that's a very valuable thing to have. However, that doesn't make it suitable for buying coffee. Bitcoin hasn't replaced fiat money, of course. But the point I want to make is it isn't getting any closer. And the resolution mentions a preferred medium of exchange. And as John already indicated, a medium of exchange means something you get paid in or sell your wares for and then hold on to intending to spend it later. All right, so you acquire it in order to spend it later. So if you get paid in dollars and then use the dollars to buy coffee, dollars serving as a medium of exchange. That's not the usual pattern with Bitcoin. Few people are paid in Bitcoin. I used to say nobody, but then I met somebody who worked for the Bitcoin Foundation. He was actually paid in Bitcoin. But his salary was written in dollars. He got paid the equivalent week to week, depending on the current exchange rate. There aren't that many goods or services that can be bought with Bitcoin. There are a few here. But in the world at a whole, not that many. As far as we know, less than 3,000 merchants in the U.S. The usual pattern with Bitcoin is people buy it in order to hold on to it or hodl, as they say. And when they un-hodl, people trade their Bitcoin back for the same fiat currency they bought it with. So that's Bitcoin serving as an investment, serving as a store of value, not serving as a medium of exchange. People invest in Bitcoin. John mentioned the use of Bitcoin as a medium for remittances, sending money from one country to another. I would count that as a medium of exchange use, but it's not all that popular. There are cheaper ways to send money from country to country, cheaper and faster. As a medium of exchange, Bitcoin's trajectory has actually been negative in the last five years, let's say, because Bitcoin used to be the number one way people bought other cryptocurrencies. If they wanted to buy Zcash or Dash, I should mention one of the sponsors here, they would use Bitcoin to buy them and other cryptocurrencies were priced in Bitcoin. That's no longer true. The number one medium of exchange in cryptocurrency markets today is Tether, Tether U.S. dollar. Number two is U.S. dollar coin. Number three and four, other dollar stable coins. Bitcoin has dropped to number five in that market where it used to be dominant. So on its current path, Bitcoin is serving as an investment vehicle. It's serving as a censorship-resistant medium for transferring value. And those are great things. That's quite an accomplishment, actually, to go from basically zero to what's currently about $600 billion. Have to check coin market cap each morning to know how large that number is. That Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange and in my view is unlikely to become a medium of exchange. Isn't to say that it's useless. Isn't to say that it's going to disappear. Isn't to say that the value is going to go to zero. So it seems to me there is a case for having Bitcoin as part of your investment portfolio. I recommend diversification. I don't recommend putting all your retirement funds in Bitcoin. But, you know, be happy with it making you rich. Don't think that it needs also to be a medium of exchange, to be the unit in which you purchase your coffee. Sometimes when I say that on Twitter, I get the reply, well, have funds staying poor. I'm not saying don't invest in Bitcoin. I'm saying don't expect Bitcoin to be an everyday medium of exchange, but it doesn't have to be a success at what it's actually good for. So there are good reasons why it isn't happening and the resolution says eventually, I don't know what timeframe that is, but let me first talk about in the foreseeable future like the next 20 years. And then later I'll talk about on an infinite time scale. There are two main reasons and John has mentioned them for Bitcoin not currently serving as a medium of exchange and for it being unlikely to become one in the immediate future or the foreseeable future, sorry. And the first is the volatility of Bitcoin. Its purchasing power fluctuates quite a lot. And second, as John already mentioned, the network advantage. People want to be paid in a medium that they can turn around and spend that has a large trading network already adopting it. So there's an incumbency advantage to existing monies. Now that can be overcome. And as John said, technical inventions all the time overcome network effects, but they have to be improvements to overcome the network property. And as a medium of exchange, the volatility of Bitcoin means that for ordinary purchases, groceries and so on, it's not an improvement. You don't want your rent money in Bitcoin when it might drop 10% the day before the rent is due. Now, it's been argued by some Bitcoin maximalists that there's what's called an inevitability sequence. Bitcoin is going to keep growing in market cap, which clearly it has done year over year, not always week over week, but year over year. And that this will lead to declining price volatility. That will encourage wider use as a medium of exchange. That will lead to further decline in price volatility. Problem, there's no evidence of declining price volatility now 12 years after Bitcoin being launched. Second problem, there's no reason to expect it. And actually for reasons John already mentioned, which is the supply curve for Bitcoin is vertical. Every change in the willingness to hold Bitcoin, every change in demand is fully reflected in its price. There's no reaction to buy its quantity. So contrast toilet paper, when the price of toilet paper went up in during the pandemic, eventually more toilet paper came online and the price came back down. If you think about the long run supply of gold, when the purchasing power, and this is why gold was such a successful money for centuries until governments put an end to it. When the purchasing power of gold goes up, it encourages miners to dig a little deeper, prospectors to go out and find more sources of gold. And in 20 or 30 years, the purchasing power of gold is back on track. Whereas in Bitcoin, there's no supply response either in the short run or in the long run. So that's a problem. If you want a medium of exchange where you don't have to worry about it losing value between payday and grocery shopping day. Second claim I've seen is that if you think about the evolution of money as described by the debt economist Carl Menger, Menger had talked about how money emerged from barter. The inconveniences of barter led people to use techniques of indirect exchange where if you can't sell what you came to market with for the stuff you really want to go home with, sell it for anything that is more generally accepted and then you have a better chance of being able to purchase what it is you want to consume. And then once people are using this indirect exchange which means they're using various things as media of exchange, the stage is set for people to converge on a common medium of exchange because they're on the lookout for what's most generally acceptable. And so there's a kind of self-reinforcing property. If I see a lot of people accepting payment and salt, I'll accept salt. That means one more person is accepting salt. That'll help it spread even further. But if you understand that story, it's saying that the convergence is taking place because there's a network property because it's advantageous to accept as a medium of exchange what other people are already accepting. And that implies that there's a strong incumbency advantage to existing media of exchange if they're not too terrible. So Manger's story should make you more skeptical about Bitcoin dislodging the US dollar until the US dollar starts to break down in a really serious way. The US dollar is of course the world's most commonly accepted medium of exchange not entirely through unobjectionable reasons because the US government of course has spread its use in ways we would all disagree with. But I think the dollar as long as the inflation rate remains below 5%, let's say, is unlikely to be displaced by the Euro or by Facebook's proposed DM currency or by Bitcoin. What kind of inflation rate would it take for the dollar to be displaced? Well, we can look around the world and look at countries that have switched their currencies from the bottom up through a spontaneous process. Look at countries in Latin America that have had really high inflation. What inflation rate did it take before people put themselves on a different monetary standard? And it looks like it's something like 15 to 20% inflation is kind of the lowest bound at which people start to dollarize themselves. I don't expect inflation of more than 20% in the US dollar in the foreseeable future. And if it did happen to the dollar, there's still the Euro. There's still other fiat currencies, the Swiss franc. If we look at what's happening in Venezuela and Lebanon right now, people are not adopting Bitcoin, they're adopting US dollars. For the two reasons I already mentioned, the purchasing power is a lot more stable. And the payments network is a lot larger. It's awfully hard to adopt Bitcoin in a place where the electricity goes out 10 hours a day because you can't get online. If you look at Venezuela today, most transactions are in US dollars, about 65%, followed by the local currency, like 27%, then the currency of, sorry, Columbia, the country next door, that's about 5%, fourth place, euros, fifth place, Bitcoin. So there has been some use of Bitcoin by Venezuelans, but not very much. There aren't enough on-ramps and off-ramps is one way of explaining the network effect. Well, what if all the fiat monies in the world become as bad as the Venezuelan Bolivar? Would that usher in a Bitcoin standard? Well, it's a pretty big if. I would put the odds below 20% of all the fiat currencies in the world hitting 20% inflation in the next 20 years. But if that were to happen, I would say don't sleep on gold. Gold has a larger network, actually, than Bitcoin. The amount of monetary gold, that is coins and little biscuits and billion owned by the world is more than $2.5 trillion worth, whereas I checked Bitcoin this morning. All the Bitcoin held is worth $640 billion, billion with a B. So that's about one-fourth of the monetary gold that's held. It's true that gold has a somewhat volatile exchange rate against the dollar, but it's one-third as volatile as Bitcoins. Bitcoin fluctuates three times as much. John mentioned the interesting experiment going on in El Salvador. So El Salvador has passed a law making Bitcoin a legal tender, but more than that, making a compulsory to accept Bitcoin if you are set up to do so. And it's not clear exactly what that requirement means. Maybe it just means if you have a smartphone. We're not sure yet. Will Bitcoin then drive the dollar with El Salvador is currently dollarized? Will Bitcoin drive the dollar out of El Salvador? I don't expect so. People, even if they have to accept Bitcoin, can immediately swap it for dollars. And dollars is what they think in. Dollars is what they're accustomed to buying and selling. On an infinite timeline, fiat money could go to zero in value, but so could Bitcoin. So that's an uncertain horse race. Why could Bitcoin's value go to zero? There could be a second cryptocurrency that fixes all the weaknesses in Bitcoin and has all of the virtues, right? Bitcoin could conceivably become the my space of cryptos. Another currency could be better for smart contracts, more private, less volatile in value, easier to transact in, lower fees, all those things. But if all the currencies explode, my money is on a tokenized private gold. It's true, it's sadly true that governments can quash gold, but it's also sadly true that governments can at least drive Bitcoin underground, where the only people who are able to use it are trading it peer-to-peer on the dark web. And that is not a formula for becoming a commonly accepted medium of exchange. Thank you. Five minutes to reply to all from John. Check it away, John. Well, a lot of that, I feel like I addressed in my opening remarks, but I'll say one of the things that's peculiar to me from the academic class is that they don't seem to appreciate the importance and how special it is to have a non-discretionary monetary policy. And that means no rulers, right? Rules without rulers. And the reason why that's important is because the minute you and the fact that Bitcoin has and the reason why it's not other cryptos and it's Bitcoin is because Bitcoin can most credibly enforce that non-discretionary monetary policy. It can resist censorship better than any other option. And it seems to my mind the academics always want to get that discretionary back in there. They want to say, no, we need to have some say in this. We want to put some inflation in there or we want to, you know, we want to, like Larry was saying, a gold-backed crypto. And then we reintroduce not only discretionary monetary policy but trust back into the equation. And that's why we're in this mess in the first place is because money worked on a trust-based model up till now. And what it's done is it's favored the very select few that have the power and influence over that money to create that money, to determine its flows, to determine how much of it is made, to allocate new issue when everyone else is subject to the breaking of that trust. Right? So again, one of the most important things here is the fact that it has non-discretionary monetary policy. Just a couple of points. Again, I think Larry is failing to zoom out here. He's asking people to act against their economic interests. As I said, people don't not spend Bitcoin today because it's volatile or because it's expensive or any of those reasons. I ask people that make those arguments to familiarize themselves with the lightning network that's allowing for those transactions on Bitcoin and in the case of remittances. I'm afraid Larry's wrong. There are not cheaper, faster ways to do that and the experience with strike in El Salvador is a perfect example of that. But the point is that the reason why it's not used as spending right now is because rational economic actors that accumulate Bitcoin that begin to understand what Bitcoin represents know that it's against their interest to do so. They stand to gain far more if they hoard the good money right now anticipating greater adoption in the future and at such point where Bitcoin is more broadly adopted where we go from 100 million to 8 billion people and the upside of holding Bitcoin the appreciation to be expected is far lower well then you'll find that the opportunity cost is lower as well and people will make the decision that hey, spending this Bitcoin is worthwhile now because I'm not giving up so much to do so. Checking notes here. Yeah, and I think the final point I wanted to make is that people in desperate situations like Venezuela, for example, where they need to spend their money immediately well, yes, perhaps Bitcoin is not advantageous for them to adopt right now. Now, lots of Venezuelans do because a lot of them are trying to figure out ways to either get money outside the country or keep their savings away from government's inflationary policies or government's overt confiscation of their money and Bitcoin is useful for that. But yes, if you need to earn Bitcoin today and spend it tomorrow and you're afraid of the volatility that you may incur over the 24 hours then maybe Bitcoin is not the solution for you. But what I think is happening is the world is waking up to the fact that discretionary monetary policy where trust has been breached and where they've been victimized by the people who create money and who can siphon their wealth away through inflation. People are waking up to that and those are the people that are adopting Bitcoin and they're hoarding it, waiting for the day where they make a switch over to actually spending with Bitcoin. And I can tell you that people who are into Bitcoin and understand Bitcoin, they are demanding Bitcoin as payment for their work and for their services. And that is a trend that I think we'll see continue. So again, not for everybody all at once. This is why we can't zoom in on a particular element of Bitcoin and say, ah, look, see, it's not being spent, it's not being used as a meme exchange right now. We have to zoom out and look at the whole picture. What economic incentives are acting on people and what's driving their behavior at this stage in Bitcoin's adoption? And I think it's all entirely rational the way it's taking place right now. Five minutes are enough for you, Larry. It used to be said that Brazil was the country of the future and always would be. And I kind of feel the way about Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It's the money of the future and it always will be. Let me be clear. I'm not here to defend discretionary monetary policy. I tried to make that clear at the beginning of my remarks. A gold standard is not discretionary monetary policy run the way I want it to be run, which is in a decentralized way where nobody has control over the quantity of money. It's an automatic process where the market for gold mining basically is governing the long run supply of money and governing it in a way that stabilizes the purchasing power. Now, Bitcoin's design is a kind of alternative model. So John said that it was unprecedented, but actually there is a precedent for this kind of way of assuring people that the value won't be hyperinflated. And that's in numbered art prints. If you buy an art print and it says this is number 160 out of 3,000, that tells you that only 3,000 will ever be created and that's your insurance that the market won't be flooded with those prints after you've paid what is obviously more than it cost the company to put the ink on the paper and sell it to you. So it's a very clever design on the part of Bitcoin to have a pre-announced release schedule that maxes out at 21,000. And that has made it a valuable investment and continues to make it a valuable investment, but I think it actually inhibits its use as a medium of exchange because it makes the price so volatile. And I don't see any tendency for the volatility or any reason for the volatility to go down anytime soon. It is a kind of a chicken and egg problem. If everybody used Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, then you would get less volatility in the price. Just as gold today having been demonetized has a more volatile purchasing power than it did when it was a commonly accepted medium of exchange. But gold has an additional advantage of a long-run response in the supply, which stabilizes the purchasing power and people anticipating that know that the purchasing power is not going to move too far. If the price goes up, they know that it's going to come back down and that helps it come back down sooner. But the Bitcoin dynamic is very different. People see the price going up and they say, oh, well, this is leading to greater adoption. The price is going to go up even more and there's no tendency for the price to stabilize, which is great if you're investing in it. You want the price to keep going up. But the design of Bitcoin with the vertical supply curve with no response in the supply means that the price is quite volatile from week to week as people's confidence about the price continuing to go up waxes and wanes. So it's not on a path to become a commonly accepted medium of exchange, but that's okay. We can still celebrate it for the achievement that it is. So I'm not supporting discretionary monetary policy and I'm not supporting in any way the suppression of Bitcoin. I think it's great as a way of transmitting value to let's say people in Belarus who are fighting the government. You can't wire them US dollars. That payment will not go through because the government controls the banking system. You can send them Bitcoin. That's a great thing. But that's a kind of niche use. It's hard to get from there to using Bitcoin to buy coffee. I'm certainly aware of the Lightning Network which is making it less costly to send Bitcoin by deferring the amount of settlement that actually takes place on the Bitcoin blockchain. But there are people today who use other cryptocurrencies instead of Bitcoin because the fees are lower. So we're still a long way from Bitcoin being an economical medium even to denominate and ultimately if not immediately settle payments. So again, let's celebrate freedom. Freedom means choice among currencies. I wish I don't want Bitcoin to be subject to the discriminatory taxation that John mentioned but I think even removing that we would still see that Bitcoin would function in other ways than a commonly accepted medium of exchange. Thanks. We now go to the Q&A portion of the evening. We have 30 minutes for that. You may want to line up to ask your questions and you guys can take the prerogative of asking each other a question at any time. I actually wanted to plunge in and ask a moderator's question a couple of them from Larry which of course you could come in and John. I get the impression that the volatility of Bitcoin has a lot to do with the fact that the flow is not worth that much as you said. I think you said gold, the float of gold is worth three times what Bitcoin is worth. I'm surprised it's even three to one. Is that about it three to one at this point? I said this. No. I said the stock of monetary gold held by people in the world is three times, four times actually based on today's price. Four times wouldn't you say, yeah, that's the stock in terms of the dollar or the value. But let's say Bitcoin went to a billion dollars a unit. I mean let's say it became much larger in terms of. Well, there used to be a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin. Now we're 640 billion. Okay, I'm fine. I'm trillion dollars worth. Okay. Well, I'm saying is that short? Sure. But the point is that if the float I named a number. I said a billion dollars per unit. The point is let's say that the float of Bitcoin grew by many fold. Wouldn't that greatly diminish the volatility? Wouldn't it be no more volatility at all? You're talking about the transaction volume? The economic mass of Bitcoin is bigger. Multiply the 21 million units times a billion dollars per unit and you get the value of the float. I thought that's what you were referring to. The value of the complete amount number of Bitcoin. Yes. Okay. But it's not a billion dollars per unit of course. If it did, I'm just saying is the fact that Bitcoin in terms of the value of the amount outstanding is so much smaller than say gold. Does that have a lot to do with the fact that it's volatile? If it were worth many times more per unit would that greatly diminish the volatility? As long as the demand for Bitcoin is a speculative demand the way it is today and not a medium of exchange demand the price will be just as volatile. And that's what we've seen as Bitcoin has moved from having a market cap of a million dollars to having a market cap of a trillion dollars. We did not see any decline in the volatility of the price. And then the transition then to becoming a medium of exchange would be compromised. Do you want to comment on that, Sean? Yeah. Is this on? Yeah. Yeah. The point you're making Gene is that as the economic size of Bitcoin grows then it requires more money to shift the price, right? Like if Bitcoin is a million dollars and global wealth is just for argument's sake 10 trillion then there's a lot of global wealth that can influence Bitcoin's price. If Bitcoin is half of global wealth then there's far less excess money outside the Bitcoin system to influence the volatility of Bitcoin. Now I actually disagree with Larry. I think Bitcoin's volatility and I've seen data on this has been going down but perhaps it's not going down as sharply as people want. But again to put this in perspective we're at $650 billion for the economic size of Bitcoin in a market with global wealth of let's say, you know, three, four, five hundred trillion dollars. So there's still a lot of money out there X Bitcoin to influence Bitcoin's price. But again my point is that because of the asymmetric return that Bitcoin represents in the adoption process of an inelastic supply money the speculators and the traders are here and they will be here for a while because they are trying to make money in this sandbox. Once it's more adopted and the asymmetric upside is no longer there they will leave and again Bitcoin's price movements will reflect pristinely changes and preferences and I can't imagine why you would want anything other than that why you'd want to dilute the changes and prices why you'd want to introduce information into prices other than preferences such as changes in supply because markets, the efficient functioning of markets is predicated on the best information possible to allocate resources and to meet wants and that's what a pristine money with only preference information in the prices does. I see a lot of questions, questions lining up so let's give the priority to those please don't identify yourself don't thank anybody, don't praise anybody just ask a question and phrase it as a question take it away. So my question is for both debaters do you foresee if Bitcoin and the theoretical universe for Bitcoin does become the money where everyone uses do you foresee a deflation problem? For example, if the natural rate of interest was 5% and Bitcoin was deflating at 5.5 like does that freeze up lending or does that present a problem where we have a permanently too high rate of interest like nominal interest rates? Do you want to come? Is there a deflation problem? You want to comment, Johnny? I think in general there is not a deflation problem from having a fixed money supply because then you have deflation when output grows so you have the same amount of the same number of units of money chasing more goods the price per good goes down that's fine that's how people enjoy a higher standard of living by prices falling and if you look at the history of the gold standard there were periods in which that's an approximation to what happened prices were falling because output was growing faster than the supply of gold that doesn't create any big problems it doesn't create negative interest rates or trouble like that But if the deflation rate of the currency or the money was higher than what the natural rate of interest would be would that create a problem? If the deflation is due to people hoarding money then that can cause problems I don't think it does it changes the economic calculus so if you have money depreciating at 4% a year or appreciating deflating at 4% a year the interest rate will be higher the economic calculation for what goods and services get produced will be different part of the problem that we have in the world today is that interest rates are artificially low capital gets allocated to places where it should not be allocated there's malinvestment and capital destruction because of these artificially low interest rates so people becoming wealthier because their money is appreciating is not a problem will we get less plastic trinkets in the world? probably but the economic calculation the hurdle for things to get produced let's put it this way the demand required by the market to garner the investment to produce it will have to be greater because it has to overcome the hurdle of people wanting to hoard money because it's appreciating 4% or 5% a year but it doesn't fundamentally change the calculus of interest rates or investment or any of that my interjection it might be helpful to you to recognize that that capitalist entrepreneurs will bid factors of production low enough to reflect the expected prices to sell their goods nothing will ever disturb that the natural rate of interest is not going to be out of line the market will adjust you'll bid your labor and your land at a low enough price to reflect the expected price which could be lower next year but the factors that you bid for will be very low now to anticipate with a price that you can get a year from now but unfortunately we've probably exhausted that we should get to the next questioner but thank you for your question the idea that that Bitcoin is just going to there is like a cap market I kind of disagree on that I think it would be just diluted down into smaller and smaller amounts into some version that would kind of be like fractional reserving a fractional reserve and also there's large that are holding a large amount of Bitcoin which would also as they're releasing it to the market which would be in theory or your position that people would only release their Bitcoin as an investment they're holding it as an investment but they would let it go as the market would find the right place so there's two groups that are saying there's people that are smart and holding it as an investment and there's people that would go ahead and buy it because it's the investment of the future so in practice who's going to be using it if all the new people that are buying the Bitcoin are actually buying it to hoard it in order because they're also smart investors so it's just more and more people buying as an investment what is your question? in practice who's going to be using actual Bitcoin if your position is that holding on to Bitcoin is a good investment who will be using it? first it's important to understand that saving is using you don't have to use a currency or any investment by spending it your use case, the value that you derive from it is as a vehicle of savings in a way to not have your savings be inflated away so that is a use case but I'm not super clear on the question you're saying that the volatility of Bitcoin would go down because more people start using it but more people won't be using it as they would be hoarding it as an investment the distribution process is where we're seeing all the volatility once it's fully adopted and distributed but it's not being distributed because more people are hoarding it everybody is buying it, it's not distributed if everybody is just holding on it but people get it by buying it from exchanges and this is what markets do they find the price where people are willing to let go of it that's what a market price does yes, but you're saying it would for an exchange for the dollar people are not buying dollars in order to hold dollars so they can use it in the future they're using it as a daily exchange so if more people are buying it for the sake of using it that's the hope of what you're saying but on the side of that you're saying it would be the smart decision to hoard it because it would go up in value so who's the market of people are going to be actually using it on day to day basis well thanks for your question but one final response if you have a comment from Larry I'm not 100% clear on the question but people will buy it and hold it until the opportunity cost of spending it comes down a comment from Larry I just want to comment that there are two senses of adoption one is buying it as an investment and the other is holding it as a transaction balance and those are two different things next question so one of the arguments for bitcoin was that there's a certain amount but I can give you four examples like when it's not so certain so first one was already discussed that there are now different blockchains and there's bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold so more cryptocurrencies so more cryptocurrencies in circulation second example you're saying don't use bitcoin on blockchain go to lightning network go to stripe but some of those services I'm not so certain about a third example nine years ago among libertarians there were physical bitcoins but nothing stops people from scamming physical bitcoins and printing used bitcoins or the same code and it's not happening maybe in New Hampshire but in other countries there were cases when people would buy some physical bitcoin or whatever only to learn later that it was not what they paid for so your question is how about those problems that you proceed I used one last example so you said put your pension money into bitcoin portion of it I did just that, I put part of my IRA but I cannot use directly I bought stocks in grayscale bitcoin fund but as some of you know like there's a fractional reserve in stock exchanges so once exchanges trading in derivatives and bitcoins the use fractional reserve so you cannot be certain in the supply and they can manipulate it yeah I mean I think the point here is that there's a learning curve to understanding how to use bitcoin properly if you're self-custiding your own bitcoin and you're verifying your own transactions then you are not going to be subject to scams to fractional reserve to any of that stuff so you know all of those issues to me are about using bitcoin properly and regarding the other coins of course that does not change the supply of bitcoin you know does the amount of gold does the amount of gold or does the amount of silver change the amount of gold no it doesn't, they're different things so bitcoin is different than all of those things and if you use it properly you can verify exactly how much of the total you have and that's it no I agree with John on this other cryptocurrencies are not perfect substitutes for bitcoin any more than the Zimbabwe dollar is for the US dollar next question yes my question is for Professor White so I guess for both of you guys bitcoin is not an input to either a good or service like it's only value is sort of exchanging right the purpose that it serves so I guess Professor White your contention in this debate is that bitcoin will not become money why then did you advocate at least partial investment why not say this is not going to be valuable it's going to zero why put any money into it at all well bitcoin does have a niche use as I said and that makes it valuable but it pays to diversify so own some bitcoin own some gold but and own a broad array of stocks what I was saying do you own bitcoin Larry not currently Larry just not own bitcoin currently which means that eventually I have been paid in bitcoin I have been paid in bitcoin he's been paid in bitcoin do you want to comment on the question John why do people value bitcoin at all is that the question well no it's if bitcoin is not going to become a money and because it's not an input to a good or service like gold is an input to things gold doesn't rust that sort of thing so it has industrial uses stocks I mean they're companies that are producing value so they have value backing that beyond just exchange whereas bitcoin is exchange like that's all it is it's only exchange so if it is not going to become money why hold any at all yeah well I think I take your point bitcoin is exchange it's also savings right you can say that's exchange with your future sell right look the reason why some people have such a difficult time understanding bitcoin is because it's so novel and new bitcoin is pure monetary premium it is valued exclusively for its monetary attributes not like gold to say oh well you know if things go to hell and the government swoop in and gold is no longer money well at least we can make a necklace out of it you know people Austrians in particular and many people that make that argument actually think that's a good thing for money to have a secondary use to regress back to the value of that secondary use bitcoin is pure monetary premium what the market is doing it's saying look at these attributes that bitcoin has those attributes are phenomenal monetary attributes and that's what the market is valuing and that's what people are valuing when they buy it yes that's my next question so sometimes people use bitcoin to mean just the currency the currency itself and sometimes they use it to mean cryptocurrency in general and I was just hoping you could clarify if the statement is just bitcoin itself or cryptocurrency in general it's bitcoin only next question I have a question for John I do not understand his argument about why people now don't spend bitcoin because the amount of bitcoin I have is not a number handed down from heaven it's the result of my rational choices if I want to hold three bitcoin in order to because that's the amount of investment I want to make in bitcoin I buy three bitcoin I then if it's true that I wanted to use it for transaction there's nothing to stop me from taking some of the money that I was going to hold as dollars use it to buy another bitcoin or fractional bitcoin to engage in transactions so there is no conflict the that particular argument if you were does not seem to me to make any sense so explain it let me clarify that I wasn't saying that you can't or people don't I'm saying the reason why we're seeing more volatility right now is because a majority of people hoard bitcoin I wasn't asking about volatility I was asking about your argument but I was telling you what I was saying so yes any individual can spend bitcoin if they want and again my point is they can spend it cheaply and efficiently and quickly but what I'm saying is they're confronted with a choice and that choice is the opportunity cost that they incur in spending bitcoin sure if you want to spend bitcoin for a fridge today and give up the potential upside of holding it for the next 10 years then absolutely that's your choice to make I can spend bitcoin for a fridge today and tomorrow I can buy that amount of bitcoin back with dollars and that amount of bitcoin that I'm holding is an investment well why would you use bitcoin to buy whatever the thing is if you incur transaction cost of repurchasing it the next day if bitcoin is a more convenient money which is what you've been arguing as I understand it then you've been saying that the reason people wouldn't spend bitcoin is the opportunity cost but there isn't an opportunity cost there's a transaction cost but there isn't an opportunity cost you have to spend dollars and I would then have fewer dollars I spend the bitcoin and now take the dollars that I saved by using bitcoin and use it to buy bitcoin so I maintain the same level of bitcoin holdings right well what I would say is that's a choice that you make to incur the transaction cost of going out of fiat into bitcoin making the purchase and then the next day turning around and replacing the amount of bitcoin that you spent that's absolutely a choice that you made in my opinion people would rather hoard bitcoin because the opportunity cost of spending it they'd rather spend the fiat because that's of lesser value to them than the bitcoin that they're hoarding comment Larry next question okay so we just heard John's position about altcoins but my question to Larry is do you think that different altcoins or different proxies to bitcoin solve some of the issues that you have raised about it such as the raise the mic a little bit please to you okay so we just heard John's position about altcoins which is negative my question to Larry is do you think that different altcoins or proxies to bitcoin solve some of the issues that you have raised with it such as the hard cap and so on I'm sorry you're saying my position on what outcome altcoins well I think in general a lot of altcoins have proven not to be very useful but those that have survived have offered something at least on some dimension that they do better than bitcoin so Ethereum famously is an easier medium to use for writing smart contracts and some others claim to be easier for doing decryptify decentralized finance some are more private some have faster throughput so let a thousand flowers bloom sorry to quote Mal but bring a quote it was originally 100 flowers so let them compete but my question is specifically about about use as a medium of exchange so stablecoins are being used as a medium of exchange so that's a design that keeps the purchasing power just as stable as the fiat to which they are connected so that's turned out to be useful for many purposes and so their holdings have grown quite dramatically thank you next question so I wanted to raise the same question that David Friedman raised which is that basically money is fungible and therefore you can spend your bitcoin and then buy bitcoin to replace it and I want to put forward an example of friction that currently inhibits that and that is capital gains tax in all but 13 countries soon 14 countries bitcoin would be taxed on capital gains that would introduce complexity in your life and maybe a headache that you don't want to deal with that presumably will fall and bitcoin adoption rises and then we'll get to see in countries like El Salvador how bitcoin use will change in the context of the removal of those points of friction um question about capital gains I totally agree with that it's a point of friction in spending bitcoin right now in jurisdictions where they impose a capital gain because of the classification the asset classification of bitcoin and so I agree in places where that goes away like in El Salvador you'll probably see more spending of bitcoin the point is that there's all these different forces and economic considerations that people confront when they decide if they're going to spend their bitcoin or not capital gains, taxes transfer fees, exchange fees the opportunity costs of the future bitcoin all these operate you know my what I'm putting forward is my I'm suggesting that the opportunity cost is one of the strongest ones and that's why we see more hoarding than spending right now in bitcoin's life cycle life cycle but it doesn't apply to everyone there will be use cases where it is worth the opportunity cost of spending bitcoin because people value the transaction that they're engaging in so much and I think that will change as we move forward into the future as bitcoin becomes more adopted as the laws change etc etc as was the case with Lazlo yeah I just wanted to add I made that capital gains tax so I do object to it question yes I'm I've just noticed with cryptocurrency as a whole that it seems to have an inverse relationship with the US dollar and its value and I was just kind of wondering why bitcoin specifically as it just seems like when I look at the charts for Dover, Ethereum and bitcoin cash they're all pretty similar sorry are they all similar to bitcoin well just like similar like patterns in like in the charts and I was just wondering why bitcoin like and it just seems like the less confidence there is in the dollar the more cryptocurrency as a whole goes up and I'm wondering why bitcoin would win out well like I said before I think bitcoin has the most credible non-discretionary monetary policy the ability to enforce that more than any other coin to resist censorship more than any other coin and that's what makes it really special but you're right I mean as the US dollar becomes increasingly devalued then all sorts of relatively hard assets are going to go up in value be it real estate, artwork or other crypto coins the market is still so nascent and still still so new and in my opinion the market hasn't figured out how to value these things properly yet so there is kind of like a momentum trade in the market that everything kind of moves in tandem but if you look at the charts all of those other coins against bitcoin you'll see that in fact over time bitcoin is the one that's diverging from the pack well I mean remarkably bitcoin has arisen during an era I mean I hate to be the bearer of good news of low inflation in the US dollar so I don't really see the connection if I was looking for an indicator of loss of confidence in the US dollar I would look at the exchange rate against other fiat currencies and as far as I know that's not correlated with the price of bitcoin question oh thank you yes next question yeah I mean it seems that John's whole argument is predicated on a scenario where where bitcoin becomes very widely adopted that is that it wins out over other crypto currencies and I don't know how you can assume that when there are advantages with other currencies including crypto currencies have have advantages have some advantages over bitcoin I mean in terms of stable value and what not how do we know that bitcoin is going to be the one oh okay yeah I mean of course nobody has a crystal ball and we can't know the future we can simply look at the attributes and determine how much we value them and then we look at the market's response to the attributes that are you know that are represented in in those coins and thus far the market seems to be suggesting that bitcoin is the most valuable and so that's why when I make these assumptions about the future I make them with bitcoin and I believe that the trend in bitcoin is going to persist okay this might have to be the final question yeah I have a question for Larry I agree with him that a system of competing private issuers is the right system the question is why does he either want or expect that it will be in gold gold as he points out has some stability effects with a lag of 20 or 30 years one can easily enough create a currency using a commodity bundle which would be stable in purchasing power sort of day to day wouldn't that both be both a more attractive and a ultimately more likely system yeah okay Larry well let's give it a try I'm all in favor of giving it a try there is a certain fanciness about the multi commodity standard and there is a problem of convincing people that it's being run honestly but if you can overcome those problems sure okay looks as though Q&As over the guys are not leaving you can call them and ask them questions afterwards we should go on with the debate we have the summation portion of the debate the affirmative goes first take it away John with your summation um yeah I don't have much to reiterate I think I kind of sound like a broken record at this point but you know I do think that what bitcoin has done that's so special is introduce non-discretionary monetary policy that cannot be stopped Larry has referenced the gold back crypto he's referenced artwork that has numbers on it as being somehow equivalent the problem is and this is something that everyone seems to forget is that all of those reintroduce trust into the equation what we've got here is rules without rulers and that is what's so special about this that's what gives us the confidence that nobody's going to be able to come in and undo the saving that we've done to siphon off our wealth because oops we trusted the wrong person we trusted the wrong system again and that's why it's so important that bitcoin's monetary policy is the most credible it is the most able to repel censorship and that's what makes it so so important and so valuable so again I think the thing that people need to do when we're discussing will bitcoin replace government fiat as a preferred medium of exchange is zoom out we have to understand that this is a process that it's going to look different at each stage of that process it won't always be clear whether it's actually valuing using etc bitcoin for the same reason I think the trend will continue I spend a lot of time in this space talking with people and thinking about this and studying bitcoin and I think that the opportunity cost of spending bitcoin is one of the primary reasons why we don't see it used as a common medium exchange today when it is fully distributed when we go from 100 million to 8 billion then the opportunity cost will come to that process you're going to see a lot more people spending and transacting in bitcoin and they will choose to save in bitcoin well they'll choose to save in bitcoin because they don't want their savings to be stolen from them and bitcoin is the best way to insure that and they will transact in bitcoin probably because their trading partners will demand it from them people will start asking and demanding to being paid in bitcoin they'll offer discounts for being paid in bitcoin and this is how the things will start to change and they will begin to be used as a medium exchange so that's what I see for the future I don't think what's happening right now discredits that case I think everything that's happening is exactly as you would expect when a new form of money starting from zero emerges on the world and offers the properties and the proposition that bitcoin offers this is how you'd expect it to see it unfold and I'm pretty damn excited to watch the next 10 years because I think over the next 10 years we're going to see the bulk of the adoption in bitcoin and a decade from now perhaps we'll be having a different conversation at pork fest so thank you guys for listening and appreciate the time 5 minutes should be quite well I'm summation for you Larry take it away yeah I think most of the points that we have to make have been made so I just want to say that most of John's argument I think was established why bitcoin has been a successful investment vehicle and why it's a successful censorship resistant method of transferring value which is typically done in large amounts between parties who want to escape the banking system and the censorship that takes place there and those are valuable properties of bitcoin but they're not a commonly accepted medium of exchange and that's what the debate was supposed to be about so we can celebrate bitcoin's virtues but those virtues are not the virtues of a commonly accepted medium of exchange ok now we find come to these sort of climax of the evening Jane please open the final vote if you voted before please cast your vote a second time yes no or undecided on the resolution ok bitcoin will eventually replace governments fiat and money as the preferred medium of exchange and the yes vote got 26% and it's fell to 20.2% 20.3% the no vote picked up votes to pick up 11 points and so Larry White wins the tutsi roll congratulations