 Okay, so the question is involving cryptocurrency. Okay. I was listening to the CEO of Cardano on Leif Friedman's podcast and recently, and they mentioned something that I had not heard, which is that the country, El Salvador, has officially recognized cryptocurrency as legal tender. And then they were kind of riffing on the idea of, well, is this sort of a foot in the door for getting around these fiat currencies and using crypto because other countries up through the foreign exchange have to recognize the El Salvadorian currency and is this sort of moving in the direction of getting away from these centralized controls of currency. And my thought was that sounds encouraging. I mean, I like the idea of not having governments be able to print money and control the currency, but I also thought, ain't going to happen because, I mean, up to and including, like, there's no way our government's going to let go of that. And I think even if they had to go as far as some kind of a covert operation to overthrow the El Salvadorian government and install a new one that would reverse the decision to recognize crypto, whatever it took that they would do it, but what do you think about this general idea? I mean, do you agree with me that they would just do whatever they had to do to stop it? But if they couldn't and if it were something that became a phenomenon where we could circumvent these fiat currencies, would that be, would that make cryptocurrency more appealing to you as a medium of exchange? So first I appreciate your cynicism about our government. I wish it were, but I think it's realistic. I think that's right. If they have to overthrow the government in El Salvador to protect the dollar, they would do it in a heartbeat. They wouldn't have second thoughts at all. I have no question about that. I mean, it's complicated because what El Salvador has done is illegitimate, right? Because what has El Salvador done? It basically is told business owners that crypto is currency they have to accept. So even if they don't want to accept it, legal tender means they have to accept it. And you take a currency, account, it's not account, you take an asset that sometimes drops in value 10% in one day. Sometimes in an hour, during the day. And I'm a business owner and you want to buy something for me. I don't know how much Bitcoin to charge you. How quickly can you get it to me? How quickly can I sell it? Because I don't know what the price will be in half an hour. It might be higher, it might be lower. So it's what El Salvador has done is very, I think very bad for business owners in El Salvador because it forces them to accept this incredibly volatile asset as a currency when I don't think they would want to. It's one thing to say it's illegal to accept it if you want to. In the United States, anybody can accept cryptocurrency. I mean, Tesla was accepting Bitcoin, right? So changing it to legal tender suddenly forces business owners to accept it, which is a violation of rights and really, really bad. Now, what would it do? It's really hard to tell. I mean, I can see a lot of people who want to transact in Bitcoin would go to El Salvador to buy stuff. So maybe there'd be some increased consumption activity in El Salvador. The business owners, my guess, would sell the Bitcoin immediately on the other side of it. So there's not to take the volatility risk or the value risk. If Americans wanted to buy something from El Salvador, is it easy for them just to use dollars and exchange them into Salvadorian, whatever the local currency is other than or is it easier for them to change it into Bitcoin? My guess is it's much cheaper to buy the local currency to buy the thing that you want to buy. I'm not sure why anybody would, again, take on the exchange rate risk. The exchange rate risk is much greater with Bitcoin because of the volatility, whereas the dollar El Salvadorian currency, the change in value of currency is probably very small, certainly on an inter-day basis. So I don't see how it changes anything. Now, if a big economy did it, and for whatever reason merchants and everybody within that big economy embraced it, then now maybe you'd get some more stability in the value of Bitcoin because now more people would be holding it. There wouldn't be as much trading of it. It wouldn't be as speculative. Let's say China made Bitcoin their currency. Yeah, you would get a stabilizing effect from that, but El Salvador is too small, too small a case. I don't see, you know, if all of Latin America did it, maybe the increased demand for Bitcoin would over time stabilize it. But Bitcoin has to become a lot more efficient, cheap, and people are working on this, but it's not there yet. Now, it's too expensive to transact in Bitcoin. It's too expensive to send money by Bitcoin. As I've said before, much easier to use something like Venmo. And now you've got fintech companies that are doing exchange rates. So they're matching buyers and sellers of dollars. Now I don't know if it applies to euros and things like that. I'm not sure if it'll apply to El Salvador because again, how many people want to hold El Salvador currency, which I should know what it is, but it's one of the few countries I've never been to. So I don't know what the local currency is. So if if we're saying the US government, you know, would go so far as to overthrow El Salvador to thwart crypto, then it certainly seems a lesser step would be to take, you know, 10 billion 50 billion and run a shadow trading desk to keep the price volatile. Yeah, yeah. I know we're half joking about all of this, but so I'm half joking too, but a common criticism is that it's so it's so volatile. And then another one is that the, you know, the mining operations use fossil fuels are bad for the environment then the CIA could totally set up some, you know, some fossil fueled fired data centers and server houses to, you know, sabotage the environment and and then, you know, buy and sell at at a loss to manipulate it the volatility. So I'm half joking, but God, I hope nobody for the Fed. I hope nobody for the Fed is listening and you're giving them all these ideas. Stabilized Bitcoin. I. Oh my God. I'm saying oh my God. There's a socialist I think on the on the chat who's I am. I don't, while I wouldn't put that beyond the government. I don't think it's necessary because I think Bitcoin trainers are doing it themselves and look what's happening in China. I don't know if you've seen what's happening in China, but China is basically kicking out of China. Bitcoin miners. I think because they're consuming so much of the electricity that China is how it is just having to produce electricity for Bitcoin miners. And for whatever reason they decided that's not a good deal for them, or maybe they think Bitcoin is destabilizing things in China, but they're kicking out all the other miners which has caused a drop in the value of Bitcoin but look, I don't think a lot Elon Musk is a CIA plant, but he might be I mean I wouldn't put it beyond Elon Musk or the CIA for that matter. There's a now we should I should tweet that because that could that could really go viral. You know, Elon Musk is really a CIA plant planted to destabilize Bitcoin so to sustain the US government it's all a Democratic Democratic Party plot to that would that would just get off. There you go. It's still under my control, so you can't get reelected. Yes, it's under my control. There you go. And it's, it's, it's a viral conspiracy. There's 20,000 subscribers right there. That's right. That'd be at 100,000 tomorrow. But it's, somebody's gonna, somebody's gonna transcribe this and put it up. But they don't have so they don't have to right now because of Bitcoin is doing into itself and it's natural look it's a new asset class. It's nobody quite understands it, the number of people who do a very passionate about it and a buying it like crazy. And even if it's legit, which I don't think Bitcoin is going to be money in the end because I just, I don't think it, I don't think it can compete but even if it's legit that until it gets a certain level of probability it's going to be volatile and it's not going to serve as a medium exchange. So, all of this is just a natural evolution. I think much easier than that is going to be what the feds have already started doing right they've already announced that they're doing, that if you do a transaction in Bitcoin that is larger than $10,000, you have to report it, just like if you do a cash transaction, like if you, if you, if you do a cash if you bring $10,000 to the bank in a suitcase, right, the bank has to let the Fed know that you did it right. If you come into the United States, and you have to fill out a little form, your citizens have to fill out the form or you do it on the little computer. One of the questions is, do you have more than $10,000 in cash on you, and they can stop you and search you and confiscate the money if it's more than $10,000 and you haven't let them know. So the government wants to know about any movement of $10,000 cash. Now they want to know, and they've already indicated they want to know movement of $10,000 of Bitcoin. Now that takes away anonymity, which is the biggest value of Bitcoin and it, it, it, now how, how did they match? How did they, how would they check on this? I don't know, but how did they check on cash? They'd have to literally search you. The next steps are regulatory steps and they're just going to regulate the thing so that they keep raising the cost of engaging in it till they wipe it out. That's the, that's going to be the long-term strategy if they view it as a threat. I think right now, they're not yet viewing it as a threat. China is obviously, that's why they're kicking out the miners. And the US might at some point, right? But they're not, they don't view it as a threat yet, otherwise you'd see a lot more regulation coming down the pipe from the Fed. And they can just criminalize, criminalize more and more of it, regulate and criminalize and, and then just raise, you know, the risk factor, right? Most, you know, I don't know on any Bitcoin or any crypto or anything because I, but I have too much to lose. I can't screw around with that for, you know, a marginal, a marginal benefit, maybe, so. It's pretty shocking how fascist they are with like monitoring all of the movement of money and everything. It's essentially illegal to have any kind of privacy in terms of financial dealings that have nothing to do with the government. And by the way, one of the reasons that some countries in Europe are trying to ban, they're basically trying to get rid of cash. So they want to make it impossible for you to use cash. They want to basically make everything electronic because they can monitor everything electronic. They can't monitor. If you walk into a store and pay cash, nobody knows you bought what you bought. But every time you pay a credit card, with a credit card, there is a permanent record that you paid, you bought something. If there is no longer any cash, if cash disappears, they have access to every transaction you make and privacy is completely out the window. Now, there are efficiency reasons to get rid of cash. Cash is inefficient if just lug it around and so on. I don't like using cash. But if you want to, if you care about privacy, and the more you care about privacy, the more you want to use cash and certain, like in Scandinavia, certain countries have made a very, have introduced proposals to make it very difficult to use cash. The other issue about privacy is when you pay cash, and this is a big part of their excuse for doing this, that's how you get around tax regulations, right? If you buy stuff with cash, they can't monitor you. So they can't tell if you're living beyond your means in a sense, which is one way they catch tax evaders. No, but if everything is electronic, now they can go after you. Where did you get this money? How could you afford a Porsche? You know, you don't make enough money for a Porsche, so you must be in the black market. You must be doing something or you haven't declared some taxes or something. So, you know, this is the state trying to monitor our behavior so that they can control us and they can take our stuff. And they're getting very good at it. And the whole argument about Bitcoin is that it would allow us to avoid state control. And that's exactly why the state won't allow it, right? That's exactly why the state is going to come after them and stop them. So, if, you know, I think the only value that Bitcoin has, right, the only real value Bitcoin has is anonymity. And, you know, right now it's a $30,000 a Bitcoin, right, I think that's the latest $31,000, $32,000, something like that. And that means that that's how much people value anonymity. What they're paying for is anonymity. What they're paying for is the ability to do things that are either illegal or they just don't want tracked. I think mostly illegal because it's very expensive, again, to trade in Bitcoin. So it's people who want to do illegal stuff are the ones who are setting the marginal price of Bitcoin. And I don't see in a free market why anybody, why Bitcoin would have value beyond that. And of course, in a free market, there's very little that's illegal in that sense in terms of buying and selling. So what would be the point? What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist growth. Alright, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. 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