 Okay, so now we're, I think a moment's presentation is done. We're going to go to a debate format. So I'm going to take a few minutes to state the case for gold as money, and then I'll be able to state the case for Bitcoin as money, and we'll have two rounds of rebalo, and then lunch. So let's talk about gold a little bit and why it's the best form of money. And I certainly agree that anything can be money. Various times, various places of feathers have been money. Clamshells have been money. So I don't doubt that Bitcoin is money. I dispute the fact that Bitcoin is a kind of money, and Roman gave the three-part definition. He said maybe we're two and a half parts of three. I would satisfy that, but I'll give Bitcoin the benefit of the doubt, so it'll get to all three. But let's, we'll come back in the next round, but just talk about gold a little bit. The first thing about gold, it's important to understand, it is genuinely scarce. You know, you've probably heard of what are called rare earths, rare earths are special minerals that are used in various technological applications. They're found in very low density different places around the earth. Well, gold is far more rare than rare earths. Rare earths are actually plentiful. The reason the cold rare earths is because the amount of ore you have to dig up to get a little bit of it is huge. They're scarcely thinly distributed, but they're actually around the different quantities. Whereas gold is genuinely scarce, but the entire effort of the mining industry on a worldwide basis in that effort has been extensive the last 10 years because the price of gold has gone up so much. I should say the dollar price of gold has gone up so much in the last 10 years. All that output adds about one and a half percent to the stock every year. So it's estimated there are about 165,000 tons of gold in the world. So that goes up about one and a half percent a year. So really just a few thousand tons, about two to 3,000 tons every year. That's important because the economy is growing at a certain pace and gold were everywhere. It would be very unstable as a store value. The dollar price of gold would be a lot more volatile. It wouldn't be very valuable as a store of wealth. That's one of the three-part definition, but that scarcity is very important. And actually there's feedback between production and scarcity. People say, well, what about the California gold of Russia of 1849, where the gold came into the market all once and that's true, and there were some major discoveries in the late 19th century. But what happens is that when you have that much gold coming on the market quickly, and that has been rare throughout history, it has happened, but it's very rare. It causes inflation. If gold is money and you put a lot of money in the system quickly, you do get an inflationary spike, which makes the money, you know, temporarily less valuable, but then you get into periods of scarcity. So then what happens is your mining costs go up because of inflation, mining becomes less profitable, mining slows down. The converse is true and appears where deflation, where gold is more valuable, that attracts more people to mining. You know, they say that imitation is a sincerest form of flattery. I think it's interesting that in the Bitcoin world, they've actually used the term mining to describe what's going on. A lot of Bitcoin was patterned on gold in the sense that it was going to be scarce. These bitcoins can only be created very slow. Patiently, more and more computing power to produce them. It's exactly like the capital investment that goes into mining to produce gold. So the Bitcoin creators were consciously imitating gold and gold production, gold mining, to create what they've done. Second thing about gold, it's an element. It's atomic number 79. Gold is gold. It's not anything else. So you look at other commodities, good people say, well, gee, couldn't you have an oil standard or couldn't you have a grain standard or a corn or wheat standard, et cetera? The answer is you could. But those things all come in various grades. I mean, oil, and we talk about West Texas and Brandon's benchmark prices, but there are actually 70 or 80 major grades of oil around the world depending on viscosity and sulfur content and other variables. Same thing with corn, if you trade corn futures in the Chicago futures market. They have very detailed specifications about what kind of corn you're allowed to deliver and it can't have certain impurities and et cetera. That's not a problem with gold. It's an element, it is what it is. So there's no such thing as near-gold or crop-gold or pseudo-gold. I mean, you can make 14-carat gold. That just means you put an alloy in. It's not all gold. So uniformity is very important. Gold has very, really about the reasons why it's money good. Has very high density. If you've ever had a gold coin or a gold bar in your hand, the first thing that you notice is it's heavy. So when you put a gold coin in your hand, it weighs a lot what it does. I happened to pick up a 400 ounce bar recently. It was in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it's, I have a picture and he's smiling, but we don't see the pictures. I was straining to hold it up. It's a 25 pound free weight, just a small 400 ounce bar. So it has a density, which means you get a lot of value for the weight. It's scarce, dense, pure. It's malleable. Gold is very easy to work with. So if you want to coin it or shape it or turn it into valuable objects, that's fairly easy to do. People talk about the industrial uses of gold. I say there aren't any, there are some. They use it to coat space helmets and they use it in sort of electronic applications. And people, official statistics count jewelry as a different use of gold than money, but I dispute that. To me, jewelry is just money that you wear. You go to India and you look at the gold necklaces. It's very pretty, it's attractive, but that's really the wealth and net worth of the individual that happens to be worn kind of decoratively around their neck. Same thing with a watch or a bracelet and so forth. So it has these characteristics, you know, uniformity, density, malleability. It's nice to look at and it's pretty. That's not a big part of the case, but you know, it's a nice sort of benefit. But above all, what gold really has is longevity. It has been money good throughout the entire history of civilization. Now it wasn't always coined and used as money, but it has always had a value. It's always been considered a source of wealth. The sources are historical, the biblical, archeological. I don't think we need to spend a lot of time on that. I think that's fairly evident. People said that there's not enough gold to support finance and world trade. That's a sort of a reasonable objection. There's always enough gold. It's a question of price. There may not be enough gold at $1,200 an ounce, but there's plenty of gold at $10,000 an ounce. That was part of the presentation I did earlier. So there's always enough gold. You just have to get the price right if you're trying to support money supply. And the last point I would make, and we're gonna have some time for rebuttals, but you can have discretionary monetary policy combined with a gold standard. People say, well, if we have a gold standard and there's a financial panic or a crisis or a depression and you need to create money, what are you gonna do? There's not only so much gold, you're sort of feeding the deflation. We talked a little bit about that. Well, you can have a gold standard, gold back money, and a discretionary monetary policy side by side. But what you have to do is hold your feet to the fire in terms of monetary policy by conducting open market operations of gold. You have to be willing to stand up to the market. So let's say you want to set the price of gold at $5,000 an ounce. What a central bank has to do in that world is not just dictate that, but actually say, okay, gold is $5,000 an ounce. I am a seller and a buyer. I'm a buyer at $49.95 and a seller at $50.50. And if you think gold is cheap, come and get it. We'll ship it to you right out of Fort Knox. If you think gold is expensive, drop off your gold and give you some money. So you have to stand up to the marketplace. So now you've got this financial panic. You want to print a lot of money to ease the situation. You can do that, but you'll find out very quickly by people's behavior whether they believe you or not. If that's good policy and people support it, they will not come down and buy all your gold. They'll say, you're doing the right thing. If you're abusing privilege, if you're trying to create a place, if you're trying to destroy wealth, if you're trying to steal savings, then people won't trust you and they'll say, yes, I'll take the gold, thank you very much. So that's how open market operations combined with discretionary monetary policy can work side by side using price signals, which is a very Austrian concept, to guide your monetary policy to tell you if you're on the right track or not. So just to summarize, it's got its uniform grade, its atomic element, it's malleable, it's dense, it's got a long historical track record, it's flexible, and at the end of the day, it's tangible. If you have physical gold in your possession, you have money that does not rely on any degree of trust. If you have it in a bank, you're trusting the bank, if you have it in GLD form, you have it on a comax future, you're trusting the exchange, you're trusting some other party, but if you have physical gold in your possession, you didn't lose the leverage to buy it so the bank can't come and take it away. That's money with no element of trust of any third party, it's the ultimate form of money and the foundation of all other kinds of money. So I'm gonna turn it over to you. I believe in gold, I own a little bit of gold, but I'm gonna live up to my responsibility and try to tell you why Bitcoin is better, but I think they're both great. First I'm gonna argue about physical gold and then comment on electronic representations of gold. And when I argue about physical gold, remind that of a joke that was told by Guido Holtzman who many of you know at an economics conference that I attended, and the joke involves that economists, the physicist and a chemist washed up on some desert island with a can of beans and the physicist said, let's smash it open and the chemist says, no, let's heat it until it pops open and the economist says, no, no, I have a better idea, let's assume we have a can opener. So I think the argument for physical gold has a similar assumption embedded in it. It kind of assumes that we have a free market for money and that if you wanna just go and trade these gold tokens or if you wanna take them across borders or do whatever, use them however you want without anyone's permission that that will be allowed, but it's not allowed. Bitcoin is very much a reaction to the state and the state's impositions on money. And Bitcoin's advantages over physical gold to me seem fairly obvious. So you can transport it anywhere in the world almost instantly for free. It's easier to verify it. There have never been fraudulent Bitcoins. It's more divisible. You know, if you're stuck with a, you know, I have a one ounce gold coins, you know, I'd have to buy, I'd have to have some intermediate money like maybe I would trade it for a whole bunch of cigarettes and they'll deal with the cigarettes when I wanna buy coffee for gold, but Bitcoin lends itself perfectly. Every Bitcoin is divisible down to eight decimal places. And we heard that physical gold requires no trust. Sort of. I mean, you're trusting society against physical aggressions against your property or it's easier to hide Bitcoin than it is to hide gold and it's easier to transport Bitcoin than it is to transport gold. So in some ways Bitcoin requires less trust than physical gold. But I think the more interesting comparison is to talk about electronic representations of gold which have existed in the past back when entrepreneurs were allowed to do that. And I think the biggest rival to Bitcoin will come, I hope it comes in my lifetime, but it'll come when the fiat system is dead and buried and entrepreneurs aren't afraid of engineering gold to behave like Bitcoin. Then you can have, then you can do with gold everything that you do with Bitcoin from the user's point of view, you could send it across boundaries for free and trust that some company is just keeping the accounts accurate in a vault somewhere far away. This is how e-gold functioned before all their gold was seized. It was one of the largest seizures of physical gold ever. But even then, even then there is still a case to be made for Bitcoin because I don't know if their e-gold's vaults were in Costa Rica or somewhere in the United States. I don't know where they kept it but that's still a physical risk of someone coming in and taking the gold. No such risks exists with Bitcoin. You're still trusting a third party if you use electronic gold whereas Bitcoin is person to person, no third party whatsoever. E-gold had an annual peak of about, or had in their decade of existence the most annual transactions were about a billion and that was right before they were shut down. Bitcoin is already doing 200 million a day. So if you add that up, it comes out to like seven trillion something. So would somebody trust a business, electronic gold business enough that they would build additional software and internet infrastructure to support the exchange of their currency? Bitcoin is a protocol and it has no owner and that's very attractive to software developers and I think that's why there's so much more action on Bitcoin than there ever was with e-gold. Relying on that third party also creates the potential for a Google Reader problem. A Google Reader was a very popular reader that people would get their news from but it belonged to Google and when they decided they wouldn't support it anymore and they shut it down. Why would programmers, why would programmers build infrastructure on top of the next e-gold when it's controlled by someone? I'm not saying they won't. I'm just saying that even in such a situation, there's still a case to be made for Bitcoin which would not belong to anybody and which would be peer to peer with no trusted third parties. Last point I wanna make, you believe, most of us believe or at one point believe that money should be a commodity but I think even more fundamentally we believe that markets choose their money. Markets choose their money and I think when we see the flight from the dollar, that network effect that we saw in the earlier presentation, I think the door is wide open for Bitcoin in a way that it is not open for gold. I don't know of any restaurants that accept gold. I don't know of any place where you could buy electronics for gold. There's a libertarian conference that happens every year in New Hampshire called Pork Fest and they really try to live absent the state and with that in mind, they used to trade it in silver. They're a little bizarre that they set up. This is a very small anecdotal example and I may be guilty of a confirmation bias but they had a little market at this conference every year where they traded in silver. This past year, no silver whatsoever, it was all in Bitcoin. So I'll leave it at that for now. We'll do a few minutes of rebuttal and then back over to Roman for the last word. So this conference is called Intellectual Minds which implies a certain broad-mindedness or open-mindedness and I think Roman is definitely a lot more open-minded than I am because he said he owns gold in Bitcoins and I own gold. So he's a little more forward-leaning in that regard. A couple of things about Bitcoin specifically. One thing that's overlooked is that, is Bitcoin a form of money? Sure, is it a kind of money? I don't dispute that but it's not state money and here we have to go back to the state money theory which has really evolved in Germany in the early 1920s later called chartillism today runs under the banner of modern monetary theory but says the money derives its value from the fact that the state can require it in the form of taxes under pain of death and the extreme case. And so the problem with Bitcoin is if you buy your Bitcoins for $100 equivalent and you cash them in or exchange them for $200 of goods and services under certainly US tax code in the UK and I think most countries, you have a $100 gain in that example. You bought the Bitcoin for $100, you swapped it for something that was worth $200, you have a $100 gain, leave aside whether that's an ordinary income or a capital gain, you have to put that on your tax return and you have to pay dollar taxes on the gain. I dare say that there are practically no Bitcoin users in the world except in Roman who are actually tax compliant who are actually doing this on their tax returns which means that all the Bitcoin users are tax evaders which is a felony in most jurisdictions. For people who don't think that the government's watching I would refer them to a gentleman named Snowden I think now residing in Russia who has told us enough about the NSA capabilities and their encryption capabilities and decryption capabilities. We also have an IRS scandal in the US which shows that the IRS has been perverted to do selective politically based enforcement. So I think what's going on is that between the NSA and the IRS and Oregon's the US government and the Inland Revenue and your general headquarters I think is what they call the R equivalent of the NSA are watching all this and someday sooner than later hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people around the world are going to get deficiency notices from the tax authorities saying we've observed the following transactions we've also observed that you didn't put this on your tax return, come in and give us an explanation of course you're all felons at that point and if you happen to be on the wrong side of the political divide you might be subject to incarceration so that's coming just kind of put that down as a warning and one reason to think hard about Bitcoin. I'm actually very serious when I say that. The other thing is that I talked about anything being a form of money. By the way, we're all familiar with what's called the straw man argument where you create a straw man so you can go knock it down and say see I knocked down that straw man. I thought it was interesting that Roman spent two thirds of his time talking about the deficiencies of e-gold. I never mentioned e-gold. Don't advocate e-gold. Roman basically put up a straw man that he attacked. I'm not talking about e-gold. I'm not talking about comics futures. I'm not talking about GLD. I'm not talking about ETFs. I'm talking about gold. So gold is no one's liability. I think no one's done a better job than the Austrians at pointing that out. It's the only form of money that's not a liability. You say what's a dollar or a pound sterling? You know, I learned in the first week of law school if you have a contract you're supposed to read the contract. Take a dollar bill out of your wallet. Take a pound sterling and look at what it says. Look at the writing. That's the contract. It says it's a note. It's a Bank of England note or in the case of US dollars a Federal Reserve note. Where I went to law school a note is a liability. Indeed, if you look at the balance sheet of a central bank the money that they've created is listed on the liability side of the balance sheet. So it has no interest and has no maturity but you can think of money as a perpetual non-interest bearing liability of a central bank and these days the central banks are actually insolvent. So there the amount of trust in using that as a form of money is extremely high. On the recent clamshells and feathers and other media of exchange were accepted as money was because others in the system trusted that they had value. I would take a clamshell as money because I trusted that when I wanted to spend that somebody else would take the clamshell as well. That works fine in communities. It works fine in tribes. It works fine on a limited scale where the trust is high but the minute you broaden the community so that you're no longer into our contact with people you're relying on a degree of trust that may be misplaced. So Bitcoin is really a global community at this stage. I expect that will grow but you're trusting Saki Moto whether he was an individual or a team whether he was working for Google, we're not quite sure but the creators of Bitcoin, we don't know that there aren't so-called trap doors or hidden aspects of the code and an open source so you'll probably figure that out sooner or later but finally the ultimate trust is that when will you want your money the most? Let's call it your store wealth and let's refer specifically to gold. When will you want it the most? You'll want it the most when society is at its worst. In other words if things are good somehow the Fed starts printing money and the dollar stabilizes. By the way I'm often labeled as a gold bug I'm actually not a gold bug I spend a lot of time reading and writing researching and talking about gold. I'm a bit of an old school imperialist I favor a strong dollar the so-called King dollar policy. The problem is it's not what we have. I may favor it but my preference is irrelevant. The policy of the United States is to weaken the dollar that's why I lean to gold but at the end of the day if society actually collapses your gold will be money good and by the way as you roll for silver as well not to change it up but that's an answer to the domination problem I recommend people have a what we call a monster box 501 ounce American silver igles so you think of silver as fractional gold so you don't have to sit there with a file and kind of chip off little pieces of your gold coins I agree that a gold coin in that world is probably years worth of groceries not a week's worth of groceries so there might be a roll for silver there but at the end of the day you don't have to trust anyone to find your value in gold and Roman talked about Bitcoin being kind of outside the power of the state that really is wishful thinking the state is watching, they're waiting for you they control the portals you probably if you're a Bitcoin user you're probably a tax evader and last time I checked the last time I checked the state runs the power grid and good luck with your Bitcoins when the power goes out it was some hacktivist Mark Amberg if I remember his name I think I have his name wrong but he said government may be a violence on monopoly but violence can't do math I think Bitcoin is outside the control of the state the role of the state is not it has a huge impact both on the price and the usage of Bitcoin all the big companies in America Amazon, Google, Apple they're waiting to see what the state will do the recent drop in the Bitcoin price from about 1200 to about 700 came after the Chinese version of Google the Chinese equivalent of Google said that they would stop accepting Bitcoin they did that after the the state sort of limited the legal usage of Bitcoin so it has a huge impact but I think it's just a question of whether it's going to be a a white market or a black gray market and certainly if the dollar starts to go you know you want to be in the black gray market I mean just to pay the you know inflation like if there is serious inflation your taxes will go through the roof because if you buy something for a day and sell it tomorrow it will have doubled in price so it's not irrelevant but I think it is outside the control of the state what they do now is they watch the exchanges I buy my Bitcoins the most recent ones on an American exchange where I'm registered with my name and bank account and I have warned my accountant that I will be about all that but those are just the choke points into and out of the Bitcoin system and because the choke points are guarded most people want to stay in in Bitcoin because they don't want to pass through those choke points again they want Bitcoins so they can exchange without without having to ask the permission of any bank without the approval of any state and I think that's why it's going to spread there was one more thing power oh right well I think without power the you know the legacy what I like to call the legacy banking system maybe that's wishful thinking but I think without power the legacy banking system will be out out of luck just as much as Bitcoin and when the power comes back on the the blockchain is still there so I wouldn't worry about that and uh... and I think that that's that's mostly it I mean I guess the the amount of time I spent on on e-gold was just because I thought the advantages over physical gold were were fairly obvious more transportable you know more verifiable more divisible maybe we should want to take questions now maybe that'll trigger some more good discussions so so maybe please ask which one of us should should answer the question and uh... and then ask the question will share the mic thank you hopefully you'll be able to enlighten me just on a question that I have first of all as many of you will know uh... Carl Manger wrote a book on the origin of money and he in his theory which Mises then built upon was that money has to have its origin in the marketplace as two important words as a consumer good so both of these two words are important consumer as in it is precious for reason in and of itself all the different types of money in history of a consumer gold worn as jewelry but also as a good Manger also defines good as having four characteristics the most important of which is so i have a question with regards the scarcity this digital currency not that we all understand that it is mind and it is released at a certain period of time but the fact that the what makes bitcoin and scarce is its uniqueness and that is it was the first digital currency to be released as far as I'm aware but what is stopping multiple other new digital currencies being created um... well you don't have infinitely many but there are uh... hundreds i think there's around two or three hundred alternatives to bitcoin they're collectively known as alt coins uh... and they've been a great playground for experimentation uh... one of the funniest ones is called fry coin which i call kenzie in coins because it's creator had the idea that you need to spend your money or else it's bad for the economy so they depreciate in value if you hold on to them too long uh... others others are tied up with uh... one can be a new uh... a new protocol for the ownership of domain names there's one called name coin uh... right now if uh... you know say the the government wants to seize the domain property and freedom society dot org if uh... if those if the if it was property and freedom society dot and it's it's the ownership of the domains was regulated by name coin they would be non-seasable uh... another one is uh... is called prime coin and in their mining algorithms they do something that's potentially useful for mathematics they generate very big prime numbers for the math mathematicians to play with okay i'm getting off on a tangent just because i love this topic uh... scarcity okay uh... right and minger okay so scarcity i think there are many metaphors for for bitcoin i think one of the best ones is a big ledger and you're renting space in this ledger so it's not scarcity in the commodity sense but it's it's maybe scarcity in in the service sense and i think if you wanted to make things like the uh... like missus's regression uh... regression theorem work with bitcoin you have to do a little bit of of gymnastics and argue that it's a service and not a commodity and it's a service that predates bitcoin you know before bitcoin came on the scene i'd paid uh... thirty dollars for wire transfers from one country to another i i paid uh... uh... what is it uh... two point something percent for paypal transactions or credit cards take their percentage so so a demand for this service does predate the existence of bitcoin and then bitcoin arrives think of it not as a coin but as a ledger and you rent space in this ledger in order to use it for the sending of money and i think that's the best way to square bitcoin with with missus and manger but i'm also not sure if that how valuable an exercise that is because they were very much engaged in in you know untangling all the mediums of exchange of their day which is why i i think the colloquial definition of money is best thank you just to add uh... to what roma says i actually think bitcoin passes the scarcity test maybe too well because it has a limit is it twenty four million is the twenty one million or so bitcoin the way the algorithm is set up that you won't be able to produce anymore after that now the problem with that is it's highly uh... deflationary if you measure the price of goods in bitcoin in other words if you cap out the amount of bitcoin but the economy continues to grow the value of the bitcoin will go up uh... enormously so eventually you know in the extreme one bitcoin would be able to buy an entire country with it because the economy would have grown to the point where you know that the bitcoins are fixed so they may have to solve that problem but it gets back to the community that roman described a lot of people object to the gold standard and i would distinguish a gold standard from gold because gold is just money and if you have it you have money you have a store well but a gold standard is this is a system where you take a paper shit you know in effect a warehouse receipt but probably not that good that's fixed to golds is golden vault and we circulate paper and the paper has some fixed relationship to the gold and you trust that but the history is that countries abuse the trust they periodically devalue the currency uh... they'll confiscate the gold they'll do various things to break that trust that's happened over over again that's an objection to a gold standard it's a valid objection but yeah the same objection with regard to bitcoin there's nothing stopping the bitcoin community from getting together you know online or in cyberspace and can essentially say you know twenty one million is too low we really ought to have forty million bitcoin because that's more practical so that could happen it's not happening yet because we're not at that limit but these are the kind of things when i say you have to trust the community and trust the evolution trust the power grid trust governments is a lot of trust of people you don't know that go into bitcoin and one of my reservations is i'm not a bitcoin hater i'm i've read the papers read the papers roman has i'm familiar with it i think the technology school the encryption school i like open source uh... so i say go for it i don't know anything i don't recommend it to clients uh... probably because it doesn't have a kind of track record that i look for when i want to allocate wealth let me just add to that briefly uh... the uh... deflation problem if you consider it a problem is actually made worse by losses of bitcoins you can search for losses of bitcoins and read some painful stories about people who had hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and either threw away a computer or or uh... lost their their wallets or something like that it's actually worse but with each one divisible down to one hundred million pieces uh... i don't think that's a problem and uh... with the community support the changing of the protocol to expand to forty million or eighty million uh... they would they would not if it would cheapen the bitcoins they currently own but if it was if the if it was a problem and people were abandoning bitcoins altogether then they would choose that to save the value of their coins but that's a long way away yes david well if you uh... if you buy gold at a level and you exchange it for business services at a different level you have to put that on your tax return that's not what people do what they do you know what what they do is they i don't mean they don't report on a tax return what they do is you buy gold for dollars uh... and then when you if you need dollars you sell the gold for dollars and use the dollars to pay your bills and yeah that's that's the taxable gain you put that on your tax return so i don't think it's any any magic there is no different than buying IBM at a hundred and selling at a two hundred you have a hundred dollar gain so there's probably some tax evasion and uh... yeah across the board but i think uh... gold is uh... you know you're in and out of the dollar system it's let me put it this way there are very few people evading taxes in gold who don't know what they're doing i think the problem with bitcoin is a lot of people just haven't thought about the problem that my experience the followers of bitcoin are libertarians and technophiles not necessarily economist or traders and so i i think in a lot of cases it's just naivety they can't put us all in jail um... can you help me with the difference between consumer and producer good oh yeah uh... well i i that's a good question uh... the the service i would classify at the same as the the service of money transmission uh... so however you would put that i actually i i i i don't know i i would love to defer to our austrian scholars in the room on that question but i don't know uh... you did ref remind me of an earlier point if you allow me to escape from that question uh... you mentioned mangers definition of money being a good that exists on the market and i was very happy to hear that because uh... i didn't know that he used those words because when mises describes it he uses the word physical commodity so that spoils it right there but uh... i'm i'm glad that manger just said a good that exists on the market because then if you want to do them and mental gymnastics you can say that it's uh... it's packaging a service as a money i still think this is maybe not a very important game because we're we're dealing with archaic definitions more questions this is uh... the tough crowd that take issue with austrian tenants but uh... i've suggested there are things in the world other than producer and consumer goods uh... and one of them is the rule of law uh... and the rule of law is civilizations alternative to violence in other words absolute law through through most of history wealth was created at a very very slow pace uh... a little bit here and there are some from trade some from your mining and and agriculture but wealth grew very slowly the way you got a lot of wealth was was through violence you uh... you know uh... thirty years war uh... crusades uh... uh... nightly uh... combat uh... you know the norman invasion you name it but the way you got wealth vikings raids we got wealth is by stealing from other people and killing them in the process uh... it's only really with the industrial revolution that we got better at creating wealth as opposed to stealing wealth but part of that evolution on and off as the rule of law i would put money uh... my definition of money would be uh... contractualism theory rather than austrian theory or a monitorist theory or chartlism which is the state power of money uh... i would advance a contractual theory which is really a subset of law and saying that money is part of the rule of law one of the ways that societies facilitate commerce and wealth creation without violence and in that regard bitcoins for money yeah everything about bitcoin is it's code and any any good programmer can go and read all of it at this point i will say that there are no secrets in the bitcoin code there are no backdoors uh... like it could be that some guy with a a gigantic brain is gonna figure out how to crack elliptic curve cryptography but this is like that's some serious you know scholarly work to break that kind of cryptography but even then the blockchain still exists we know who owns who owned what bitcoins so at worst it's a disruption and they'll switch to a different type of cryptography but those are you know the types of crypto use in bitcoin that they've been under academic scrutiny for for decades how can somebody stop it from being counterfeited from being recreated oh okay but by counterfeiting it seems like you're referring to making a bitcoin too that does the same thing in parallel those already exist there are hundreds of uh... of those but within the bitcoin system nobody has ever sent the same bitcoin twice and had it accepted so that when we when i was talking about counterfeiting and and better of verifiability than gold that's what i meant within the ledger that is bitcoin nobody has ever made fraudulent transactions or sent bitcoins they didn't own or anything like that other questions great thank you for your attention