 Will gold remain an important form of money or are crypto currencies like Bitcoin set to overtake it? That was the subject of a Soho forum debate held on Tuesday, July 26th at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama as part of Mises University Week, an annual event attended by more than 80 students from around the country. Keith Wiener, CEO of Monetary Metals, defended the resolution gold will remain an important form of money in the 21st century. Wiener took the position that gold is poised to hold on to the monetary status it's enjoyed for the past 5,000 years and that its recent performance only confirms why. Pierre Rochard, co-host of the Bitcoin for Advisors podcast, took the negative, arguing that the technological advantages of Bitcoin will make it the preferred medium of exchange in a post-dollar world. This debate was moderated by Soho forum director Gene Epstein. With that any further ado, I want to remind you of the resolution. Gold will remain an important form of money in the 21st century. Please vote initially, yes, no, or undecided on the resolution. Here to defend the resolution, Keith Wiener, Keith please come to the stage. Taking the negative on the resolution, Pierre Rochard, Pierre please come to the stage. Okay, I hope you've all voted yes, no, or undecided on the resolution. Connor, please close the voting. Keith, you have 15 minutes to defend the resolution. Take it away, Keith. If this debate were about which asset is better at skyrocketing, also crashing, then I would shake my opponent's hand, concede, and walk off the stage, because Bitcoin is obviously superior at skyrocketing and also crashing. However, that is not the debate. The debate is gold will remain money, remain an important form of money in the 21st century. Ladies and gentlemen, our esteemed moderator, Genevstein, my honored opponent, Pierre Rochard. And the way this debate is a bit unfair, because gold has been doing what it does for 5,000 years, and the proposition is that it's going to continue doing for the next 100 years what it's been doing for 5,000 years. In a certain sense, good luck to debunking that or arguing against that. But there's a lot more to be said, obviously, about money and, excuse me, and how all this works. So we live in a system where we have a failing dollar. I don't think that's very controversial in this audience. Some audiences I speak to, you say that people are like, what, what, and then the room breaks into pandemonium. But the dollar is designed, this is a feature not a bug. I'll keep referring to this concept of feature not a bug. The dollar is designed to go down. The Fed on its website says 2% per year, which they define as price stability. I wonder what Orwell would be saying about that. So the dollar is designed to go down at a steady rate. Why? As a free boon to borrowers. If you borrow money and then the dollar is going down, then what you owe the return of is falling in value. The longer the term of the loan, the greater the fall, the easier the burden on the debtors. And that is how the system, if I can use the word rigged, is rigged. Unfortunately, the dollar doesn't do as they would wish, doesn't do as their theory would predict. And it isn't steady or stable. It is not a simple mechanism for robbing Peter to pay Paul, Peter being the lender and the other. So every trade has two sides. And there's Peter over here is the saver who's lending his savings to something and expecting to get that back with interest. Well, he's the one who's screwed when the dollar goes down. And then Paul over here, the borrower is the one who wins when the dollar goes down. Unfortunately for Paul, it isn't a steady linear monotonic would be the term progression of going down. It has wicked volatility to it. And as we see right now, the dollar is going up, not down, which means the borrowers are finding that their burden of debt is increasing, not decreasing. Oops. And they don't really understand their own system. And so they're running around worrying about inflation and one day and then, you know, yield curve inversion, the next and the dollar index and on and on and on with all this stuff. So savers, when they face this uncertainty, turn to the thing that they've turned to for 5000 years, which is gold. Now gold does not pay a return. Now my company, monetary metals, that's actually what we do is we pay investors a return. That proposition is growing. We're hiring all kinds of good things are happening. Not really here to talk about my company, but generally gold is not expected to pay a return. And the trade off for that is it doesn't have a risk. It's the thing you have when you don't want to invest or speculate and take a risk. People turn to that. But if they want to get a return, then they have to go to the market. And unfortunately, part of the defect in the dollar is that the yield, the interest rate available to especially retail savers and investors has been taken away. They wage the war on interest. Unlike all the other wars on this one, they've actually won. It's all over about the shouting. The Fed is now still in the throes of pretending that it can raise interest rates. But in their so far early stages of attempting to do that, all sorts of problems are coming out and they're going to be forced to reverse as they were in 2015 as they were in 2007, you know, all over again. If they want a yield and they can't get a yield by financing productive enterprise, then they're forced to turn to a surrogate for yield, which is speculation. So you have to go into the Fed's casino and you have to put your chips down and you can bet on stocks. You can bet on real estate. You can bet on fiat currencies. You know, there's a bookie taking orders and everything from Turkish lira to euros and everything in between. You can bet on obviously bonds. You can even bet on Bitcoin. And folks, that is dare I say the shabby little secret with all due respect of Bitcoin. Its purpose is to be a chip in the Fed's casino for betting to make more dollars. That's what it does. That's what all these other things are increasingly perverted into doing. Equities have become that real estate has become that old artwork, old antique Ferraris, whiskey, wine, new name and everything has been financialized and turned into a bet in the casino. So let's look at Bitcoin now for a moment. Bitcoin is skyrocketing. Well, not the moment today was down a few percent. But generally skyrocketing. It has been in quite a bull market. And that's not a bug. It's a feature. It is planned to just as a dollar is planned to go down. Bitcoin is planned to go up. Sounds like a good deal right by this thing that's going up. Who's on the other side of the trade and the dollar they're going down benefits the borrower and the Bitcoin going up benefits. They're not really savers. We'll call them hodlers. Who's on the other side of the trade? Well, that's the problem. In Bitcoin, there is no creative or productive thing generated by Bitcoin. The only way that anybody makes any money is by selling their Bitcoin to fresh new money coming in. So I buy Bitcoin. I give my money away to this gentleman here. My money's gone. I don't get my money back. It is not a conversion of my dollars to Bitcoin. It is a trade. I give him my dollars. I get his Bitcoin. He's out. I'm hoping that it's going to go up. So far, Bitcoin has been in one hell of a market. Eventually, if you wait long enough, it does go up. Maybe we'll see this time may or may not be different. And then I sell to this gentleman over here. I don't get my dollars back. It's not a return of my capital. It's this gentleman giving me his capital, which converts to my income to be consumed. So it is a vehicle for conversion of one party's capital to another party's income to be consumed. Nobody wants to be a prodigal son, but speculation and isn't just Bitcoin. I mean, it stocks as properties. It's whiskies as everything have become vehicles to make a prodigal society. We don't want to spend our own life savings down or let family legacy down. We're spending somebody else's through the magic of what we feel is a market. But it's a rig game and everybody is forced to be there because the Fed has taken away yield. Everybody needs yield. You can't get yield one way. You turn to the surrogate, which is speculation. So Bitcoin is a zero sum game. And it's actually negative sum game because it costs a lot of money to run the Bitcoin network. I'm not an expert in this, but I've read a number of something like tens of millions of dollars per day. The only source of funds to the folks who run the network are the new money coming in from new buyers. And so it's a system in which the system is the people that are exiting and the people that are running the network are eating some of the money that's coming in and then eventually what happens when you run out. So this is my one slide for today. Now, in a certain sense, you could say that's a trite tautology. Ha-ha, one equals one. It doesn't mean anything. I've argued with many Bitcoin folks on Twitter in particular, and a lot of them will say one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. And I challenged them. And I said, I don't think even you believe that if I had, let's say, a successful restaurant chain, that was worth 10 million Bitcoins a decade or so ago, that it's undergone a hyper-collapse down to a few tens of Bitcoins now. I don't think anybody really believes that. You realize that it's a unit of measure that's shifting and not the value of the thing being measured. I want to look at this and what this means in terms of gold because it's not just simply a tautology. I'm not just simply saying one ounce equals one ounce. Austrian economics teaches us that as the quantity of a commodity increases, its utility or value at the margin decreases. I live in Phoenix. It's a very hot desert. This time of year, you could expect temperatures of 115 degrees in the shade. If you're walking around in the afternoon in the sun, you will go from perfectly happy to thirsting to death within an hour or so. If you come across somebody offering to sell you water, what is the price you're willing to pay for that water? For the first leader, you'd open not just your wallet, your bank account. The second, the third, but the fourth leader, you would refuse it. Everything has a utility that is diminishing at the margin. Gold is not consumed and it's been continuously mined so far as we know for at least 5,000 years. And in those 5,000 years, we have not reached the point where marginal benefit is less than marginal cost. We continue to accumulate more of it without any apparent limit. And what this is saying is that at the margin, gold's utility is not diminishing. The nth plus one ounce has the same value as the nth ounce, which is saying that gold is the closest thing we have to an economic constant. Now, compared to Bitcoin, is this true for Bitcoin? We don't know. In fact, we don't have a way to know because the central planner who designed Bitcoin was terrified that this was not true for Bitcoin and set a hard cap at 21 million units. So we can't run a 5,000-year experiment to see what happens if Bitcoin's quantity keeps increasing. To put this in perspective, every year, the miners produce about 3,000 tons of gold, which is worth about $170 billion. That's over half of Bitcoin's current market cap being produced every year in gold. And yet this is still true. Gold's utility at the margin is undiminished. Now, why is it important to have something that's an economic constant? If you look at the firm, if you look at the enterprise, what is the single most important thing that every business owner, operator, manager needs to know? Are we creating wealth or destroying wealth? And how do we measure that? If the very unit in which we measure it is either designed to go down monotonically and have some wicked volatility along the way, or something that has gigantic volatility and gyrations, we would never know whether it was the change in the unit that that restaurant went from 10 million Bitcoins to 40 Bitcoins in value, or whether it was actually the business that went down. You need something that will give you an objective picture. And gold is that objective picture. One other problem with Bitcoin, I say the word again, centrally planned, is that somebody, we don't necessarily know who Satoshi is, we think we know at this point, decided that 21 million was the magic right number of Bitcoins. He decided 22 million is not the magic right number, and 20 million is right out. It kind of feels like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, if you remember the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, right? Well, what if that's not right? He also decided that as Bitcoin approaches this 21 million, it is to approach asymptotically. What if that wasn't right? What if it should be linear? What if it should be the other way? These are things that have been decided by a single person, or maybe a small group of people of Satoshi's group, and they constitute Bitcoin's central plan. And the net result is that Bitcoin cannot respond to changes in demand, except by changes in its price. That was about a million and a half left. All right, thank you. Which means that with Bitcoin, volatility is not a bug as a feature. It cannot be stable. It does not intrinsically not stable. And so, just to make my conclusion here, Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme. It does not generate or produce anything. Getting back to the debate proposition, I don't think there's any real debate as to whether gold continues to be for the next 100 years and what it's been for the last 5,000 years. The only real questions are, one, when does the dollar collapse? And two, when does Bitcoin run out of fresh new blood and fresh new money to continue to feed the pyramid? Those are the actual questions that everybody should be thinking about. Thank you, Keith. And now, please take the podium. Paul Pierre. You have 15 minutes to take the negative on the resolution. Have a chair. Okay. Thank you. First of all, thank you, Gene Epstein and Soho forum. I've attended two in the audience, and this is the first one I've had the honor of debating at. I also want to thank the Mises Institute for hosting this and for partnering with the Reason Foundation. It's very ecumenical. And thank Jeff Dice, of course, for the invitation. And thank Keith for coming to join us here and having this really important conversation. The Mises Institute has a very special place in my heart. I first went to Mises.org in 2005, downloaded MP3s and put them on my iPod, as one did back then, as well as when I was in college, I searched a dating website with the keyword Rothbard and found my now wife and we have two children. So that would just not be possible without the Mises Institute. And I want to, you know, especially thank the donors and the scholars and the students here. You know, this does affect people's lives and it is important work that you are all doing. Okay, so a little bit about me. I've been researching Bitcoin since 2013. I'm now the Vice President of Research at Bright Blockchain. It's one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miners. But like Keith, I'm not here to shill business. Oh, and here's, you know, my contact information if you want to contact me. So I think that the first really, maybe this is a separate debate, but it's a debate within a debate is what is money? What's our definition of money? And if you attended Professor Klein's excellent lecture on money yesterday, my impression was that she gave the consequentialist definition, which is really kind of what is the end result of the market process is that you have an asset that emerges as the most saleable marketable liquid good. And really, I think that's a fine definition of what money is in kind of equilibrium. But as we know, market processes are not in equilibrium. And if we think about from a first principles perspective of why do we hold money? I refer back to an excellent article written by Hoppe about the yield on money held, which is an article written by William Hutt, whose name I see here. And it's really about hedging against uncertain future cash flows. So we have a lot of uncertainty in the world, and uncertainty has a very specific definition that we would contrast with risk. Uncertainty is unquantifiable. You don't know the possible range of outcomes, whereas risk is quantifiable. You can have actuarial models and be able to price risk, whereas uncertainty is something that is uninsurable. And the reason we hold money is because there are future cash flows that are uninsurable. If all future cash flows were known in the evenly rotating economy, then we would be able to not have to hold money because we could prearrange all of our transactions so that we always have this inter-temporal double coincidence of watts, which is obviously completely unrealistic given the world that we live in. So we have to hold money, and it has to be, if we're hedging against uncertainty, I would argue that the money that we have to hold has to be the least uncertain asset possible, right, available to us in order to most fulfill the need, the utility of hedging against uncertainty. Okay, so let's kind of dig into uncertainty in a monetary system. I see two places where uncertainty arises when using a money. One is when you're actually holding it, right? I mean that, you know, very literally of when you have money on your balance sheet as an asset, and then the second source of uncertainty is when you're actually transacting with it, when you're sending it or receiving it. And these two axes, when we evaluate which assets minimize uncertainty on these two axes, this is a subjective evaluation, right? We're engaging in entrepreneurial activity, and we might be wrong about which assets have more or less uncertainty. And so I really see today's debate as an entrepreneurial debate rather than really one about theory or praxeology. Okay, so let's get into, well, I'll elaborate here as well, although I already touched on some of these topics. Professor Klein had this excellent list of different qualities of money that would allow it to emerge as the most saleable good. And I think that on each one of these qualities, we should look at it through the lens of how do we minimize uncertainty, right, in all of these regards. So my central contention is that receiving, holding, and sending with Bitcoin has less uncertainty than with gold. And from that I would expect that the market process would over the coming years, and I think that the proposition is 21st century, so we've got, the years are ticking by, but we've got 70-something years remaining of market process before we can finally decide whether Keith or I was correct. But that if Bitcoin really does fundamentally have an order of magnitude less uncertainty than gold does, that we would expect Bitcoin to demonetize gold. And I would argue that silver has been demonetized already. And, you know, if I really wanted to throw a bomb, I would argue that the dollar has already demonetized gold, and it's only recently that gold has reasserted its monetary premium, you know, in post-911 world, but that really, you know, at 2000 when Tony Blair was selling the UK's gold, that maybe that was a peak demonetization of gold. But I'll let Keith pick on that thread if he finds it to be silly. So let's look at it. Let's look at the uncertainty when we're receiving an asset. You know, this was highlighted by the professor that came after Professor Klein, but I should have, I should have meant Newman, I believe. He pointed out the issue with counterfeiting. And when we're dealing with monetary asset, it's critical that we're able to verify the authenticity of that asset, that we're able to combat counterfeiting. And here I really think that gold has an issue of cost. It is very expensive to verify the purity of gold. And that, you know, doing an assay and doing a sonogram of your gold bars and gold coins, inconvenience aside is very expensive. And it's something that you would have to do every time you receive gold, right? And now, furthermore, it has another limitation, which is that even when you do verify your own gold, you're not verifying everyone else's gold. So as it was pointed out, the counterfeiting negatively affects all gold holders, right? Not just the ones that are being cheated by receiving counterfeit gold. So contrast this with Bitcoin, where you're able to cryptographically verify the Bitcoin that you receive using what's called a Bitcoin node. And with this software, you don't need to trust anyone. You're able to first hand verify not only the authenticity of the Bitcoin that you are receiving, but the total supply of Bitcoin as well. And so this really makes it an order of magnitude less uncertain than gold. And it's easy. It's automated software. And it uses cryptography. And it's, as far as we know, full proof. All right, let's go to storage. Has anyone here bought a gold vault? They are very expensive if you want one that is of quality. It has limitations. For one, the gold vault is in a one singular location, right? Fort Knox is in one location, which might seem like, okay, well, why is that a problem? With Bitcoin, you don't have that limitation. With Bitcoin, you can actually put what are called private keys, which allow you to unlock Bitcoin. You can put those private keys in any number of different locations. And this is a really tangible advantage in terms of security. Professor Klein mentioned that one of the reasons why people don't carry gold around is that it's very hard to secure gold. And I was recently on vacation in France. I was reading about the local history. And there was a chapter about the problem of theft in this part of France and that farmers could not leave their farms because thieves would come along, break in and steal their gold. So the locality of gold, the physical locality of gold is a problem. It's one that is solved by the nation state, which I know that here we would frown upon, but that's the reality of the situation that we're in. Furthermore, one of these vaults only is rated to last 30 minutes against power tools. So if you are not home and the police does not arrive within 30 minutes, they will break into the vault and they'll be able to steal the gold. Which means also that if you are dead for whatever reason, perhaps this is a home invasion and the home invader is a criminal and murders you, then they can still access your gold. That's not necessarily the case with Bitcoin because with Bitcoin, if you had memorized the past phrase and they've murdered you, now they can no longer access the Bitcoin. Which also leads us to the final point here on the gold side with regards to pleading the fifth. This is relevant in the United States. I'm sure that there's different degrees of relevancy outside the United States. But in the US, you can plead the fifth in order to not give a password to the government. So if you have your Bitcoin locked away by a past phrase, the government can't force you, compel you to give up that past phrase and seize your Bitcoin from you. Whereas with gold, all they need is a search warrant and they can certainly seize gold from a vault. That's unfortunately in the Constitution. Okay, now on the gold side, there's really easy ways to store Bitcoin. You could just use your phone. There's lots of great Bitcoin wallet apps on your phone that allow you to hold your private keys there. But that would not be minimizing the uncertainty because phones are actually one of the riskier ways of holding Bitcoin. The most secure known way to hold Bitcoin is to use what's called a multi-sig, which allows you in a programmatic way to say, in order to spend these Bitcoin, you need two signatures from any three different devices. These devices are generally called hardware wallets or signing devices. Here I've got, for example, the cold cards. This multi-sig, I used two of three as an example. It could be one of five or 10 of 15. There's any number of different combinations that one could have in order to, again, minimize the uncertainty. You can do neat things with multi-sig. You can leave private keys in different legal jurisdictions so that in terms of asset protection for the government to seize your Bitcoin, they would have to go through international legal process to seize all of the private keys and be able to move the Bitcoin. This cold card, this latest generation, as far as we know, can resist power tools and lasers for an indefinite period of time. So the attacker would sooner accidentally destroy the private key than be able to extract it from the device, just making it an order of magnitude better than the vault. And it's, again, inaccessible if you're dead and you can plead the fifth. Okay, sending gold versus sending Bitcoin. When you are sending gold, you are generally recommended to use registered mail through the US Postal Service. And, you know, that's maybe a little bit status, but if you use FedEx or UPS, they're apparently much harder to work with. Much more expensive to ship gold. It takes much longer, and you're trusting the US government. With Bitcoin, you can send billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin for very little, right? Anywhere from pennies to dollars worth of Bitcoin in transaction fees. Because the fee is based on your data usage. It's not based on the value that you're transacting. Generally, it takes anywhere between 10 to 30 minutes to move your Bitcoin around. It operates 24-7, and you don't have to trust anyone. You just have to trust your own software. You could write your own software if you want to. Plenty of software engineers have written their own Bitcoin node implementations and Bitcoin wallet implementations. It's all free and open source. Okay, so just to kind of diagram it out, my contention is that Bitcoin has an order of magnitude more certainty than gold in practice. And so one would expect that gold will replace Bitcoin. Sorry, Bitcoin will replace gold. Brain fart. Okay. Now, let's now go to... Well, don't I go to the rebuttal? Okay, so now it's Keith's turn. I want to try one little... Is this microphone on? Okay, I want to try one little thing. I have gold coin here. So they're not actually that hard. I want to sit here. Okay, sorry. I want to use this table to actually demonstrate something. It may or may not work. So we're trying an experiment live. Yep, there you go. So they're not that hard to carry around. I do this fairly frequently. In terms of figuring out fakes, I just figured I would address that. Gold has a very unique sound. And every time I go and visit a vault of which I visited many, sometimes they'll say, hey, we have this fake, we have this real. And one, they decided to test me and said, here's an American gold eagle that's real. And here's one that's fake. And they handed me two coins. We're not going to tell you which one's which. So I dropped both of them one at a time on a piece of, on a, on a, like a granite countertop, which I don't have here. I have a wooden one, but we'll try and see if this works. So are we able to hear that? Gold makes a very distinct ringing sound. That no other metal comes remotely close. You can tell that instantly you can also bite it with your teeth. Gold is very soft. There are lots of ways. I'll just put this down. I think we can get the name over here. There are lots of ways that historically people could tell fakes. There's a little plastic device that you put the gold in there. And it has to be at least as heavy as gold to flip it this way. And it has to be very small to fit through the slot. So you're proving that gold, that the coin has the density that's supposed to have almost nothing on this planet has the density that gold does. One of them is tungsten, but tungsten is very hard and not moldable. Platinum is usually more expensive than gold. than gold, so nobody would counterfeit gold with platinum. Uncertainty. So I think there's two kinds of uncertainty that I want to just touch on that my honorable opponent talked about uncertainty but did not address these, one of which is to simply the value of this Bitcoin. And I was there watching on Twitter when Bitcoin was $69,000 and changed back in November. And the Bitcoin proponents were obviously extremely bullish and recommending to everybody. And I remember getting to an argument with one guy in November around that price saying, would you recommend this even to an octogenarian grandma? Yes, absolutely. Blah, blah, blah, blah, it's safe. Has certainty, has all these things. Well, it fell 75% to $16,000. So there's a certain maybe dimension or axis of uncertainty that I think is a really, really key one if we're talking about uncertainty in the world. And that is the drawdown to a killer, especially if you're past your working age, you're retired, don't have any further income. Or you're holding this as a hedge against uncertainty of future cash flows. I like that. I think that was a very elegant way of saying that. You need to know the value of the thing. And again, think the n plus 1 ounce is equal to the nth ounce all the way back to Mises aggression theorem. Now think about this from the perspective of coordination in the economy which comes to exchange both of present goods and also of finance. In the case of present goods, I suppose I'm a merchant on the internet and I'm selling, I don't know, flat screen TVs. And I want to get $1,000 for a TV. And there's some merchants now that Bitcoiners will say except Bitcoin. So suppose I actually took Bitcoin onto my balance sheet on Saturday and by Monday when I go to pay my distributor, these things are pretty low margin. I'd probably have to pay my distributor $950. And by that point, Bitcoin's fallen 18%, which it did happen one Monday when I went to Tweet. And now I have $820, but I owe my distributor $950. So what retailers generally do is they don't take the Bitcoin onto their balance sheet. They hire a third party currency exchange who finds a fourth party with USD who wants to buy Bitcoin and then they arrange this, they broker this complicated multi-party swap where the fourth party gives up his dollars, the guy who wants the TV gives up his Bitcoin, the merchant gets the dollars, the customer gets the TV and the third party currency exchange gets their fee for that. It isn't exactly using Bitcoin as a medium exchange because of the instability. That's why this has to be done this way. But now think about it in a finance context. Suppose I borrow a million dollars worth of Bitcoin to finance whether I'm a trucking business or farming business or manufacturing business. I brought a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, my monthly payments about $17,000. And then Bitcoin ends a 10-year loan and Bitcoin does what all of the Bitcoin promoters promise it will do. This is a bug, not a feature. My mortgage goes up to $50 million. My monthly payment goes up to $850,000. There's a technical term that the coroner will use when they take out my body. And that technical term is bankrupt. There's a problem with the uncertainty of Bitcoin and has to deal with its instability, which as I said earlier is a feature, not a bug. Thank you, Keith. Five minutes to rebuttal. Take it away, Pierre. Thank you. So I don't view Bitcoin's exchange rate volatility as an uncertainty. I think that it is a risk. It is quantifiable and you can ensure it gets it. There is an active, very liquid market of futures where you can buy and sell futures at the CME and they have both physically settled futures and fiat settled futures. So I think to the extent that you can hedge against the exchange rate risk, it should not really work in favor or against Bitcoin, because in favor of it would be me talking about how Bitcoin has outperformed gold. I think that it would be in poor taste to make that argument for this debate because we're not debating over speculation, as Keith pointed out, but rather uncertainty. And I would just simply not put the Bitcoin's price under the umbrella of uncertainty. It is a risk. It's not the only risk that Bitcoin has. I mentioned earlier the transaction fees. Bitcoin's transaction fees can be very volatile as well. And there is a way to hedge against that using a layer two network called Lightning. But that would kind of go beyond the scope of today's discussion. Let me see here to respond to, I think the argument that Keith first made about gold's long history. I don't see that as a praxeological argument. To me, that's a German historicist argument of, here, let's look at the historical record. And I think that we're forward looking as people as acting humans. And so we need to be looking at the properties of these systems going forward rather than looking back. I thought the coin trick was pretty cool. And I liked that. I could not do the same with Bitcoin. So I'll concede on that argument. But what I can do with Bitcoin is that I can not only verify my Bitcoin without listening for a particular sound or tuning my ear. I have a terrible ear for music. But I can do it cryptographically with software. And not only can I verify my own Bitcoin, but I can also verify Bitcoin's global supply. And this really gets to the, I'll say, the one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin meat, which is that it's really, if we expand that a little bit, it's one Bitcoin equals one out of 21 million Bitcoin. And that's something that I can verify using my own node, using software. And it's also the case that Keith brought up the view that it's an arbitrary number. And I agree, it is an arbitrary number. If we go back to yesterday's lecture from Professor Klein, any quantity of money is fine. So there's not, I don't think that there's an argument to be made that Satoshi's approach to how Bitcoin's monetary policy is objectionable and that there needs to be an element of flexibility in order to dampen Bitcoin's price volatility. Because monetary policy that is discretionary introduces uncertainty into a monetary system. And so that's how you have, for example, with the dollar, that they can just add $8 trillion to the Fed's balance sheet overnight, and you just have a non-linear increase in the money supply. And then in the case of gold, I think gold's monetary policy has very little uncertainty. It's just 2% a year approximately above ground supply increasing. But the use of gold custodians, which was also discussed yesterday, has led to tremendous volatility in my, sorry, uncertainty with regards to what the total supply of gold, paper gold, let's call it. And I won't indulge in the conspiracy theories because I'm not super familiar with all of those, maybe Keith left some more color on them. But I do think that there is a slippery slope and it's not a theoretical argument. I think that this is how it's worked out in practice of using a gold custodian is more practical than holding gold yourself. And that leads to centralization of gold inside of gold custodians. And that leads to government capture and to the fiat system. And so I think that that kind of slippery slope, the uncertainty there of, well, one day you have a dollar that's backed by gold and the next is no longer backed by gold is very real. And that's it. Thanks guys. We now move to the Q and A portion of the evening. And I guess there's a mic over there, just this one. And so line up if you have questions, but the Q and A portion also includes questions that each of you may wanna ask the other. And in addition, questions the moderator might wanna ask, exercising moderators prerogative. I'm burning to ask a couple of questions, so I'm gonna exercise that prerogative. In particular, to you, Pierre, my understanding of gold is that it was now at a rule over 1,700 an ounce. And that if we're only trading at a price to reflect its ornamental and industrial uses, it would be have a much lower price than that. And so that therefore the 1,700 an ounce reflects the idea that it's still a monetary metal and still trades as such. Do you think that's ridiculous? Or does it really trade just like an ornamental and industrial metal? So I think that it's just an empirical question. Without a doubt, there are many ounces of gold in vaults being held on people's balance sheets. And so it is very much being used as a monetary asset today. And I would say that the monetary premium is gone only when everyone just wears gold as jewelry, right? And it's not actually using it as a monetary asset. Okay. It's still monetized. Now, silver is a different story. I think there's much less silver in vaults compared to the annual mining of it. I see. Any comments about that? Yeah, I was gonna say, there's vast, vast, vast amounts. I've been in vaults that have acres. And most of the world, by the way, jewelry is monetary reservation demand. In the West, we've become wealthy enough that we wear jewelry that's less and less about the gold and more and more about the ornament. And most of the rest of the world, especially in the gold-centric sorts of places. And by the way, being a world traveler, I think I'm in a position to say this as an American, Americans understand gold the least compared to anybody in the world. We've never really had, we've never had a hyperinflation. We've never had a major currency crisis. The worst we ever had was the late 1970s where inflation was whatever, 13 or 18% or something. The rest of the world would say 18% per year. That's cute. So yes, they're both monetary metals. Huge amounts of the stuff accumulated. If it was not a monetary metal, then what you'd see is a glut, like what you'd see in the wheat market, if the wheat crop came in 1% greater than what the USDA estimated, price would collapse, production would stop, consumption would be incentivized, and that would continue until the glut was worked off. In the case of gold, it's a 5,000-year glut. We've got a long damn time before that whatever worked off. I actually have two questions that I'm going to ask you, Keith. Number one, why hasn't the gold price risen over the past year or two given the turmoil and the inflation in the US market in particular? Why has it been pretty stagnant? Short answer is there's a more and more desperate and urgent need for dollars, right? So that's the flip side of the gold. The other is that most of the forces driving what people call inflation, people have this mantra from Milton Friedman, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. I've written article after article after article arguing that we have some huge non-monetary forces that have caused prices to skyrocket, namely green energy restrictions, lockdown and then the whiplash, trade war, and it isn't just tariffs, but it's companies terrified that if they're sourcing from the wrong jurisdictions that the government might frown upon that in the future, logistics snafus on and on and on with problems that are non-monetary in origin, and of course gold doesn't respond to that. I see. Any comment on that, Pierre? Any comment on that answer, no? No. Okay, my final question for Keith and that would be my last question that I would put into the audience. Is this, because the Bitcoiners like to say, I know a few of them fairly well, that the government can easily seize the gold supply if it really wants to, pretty much the way it did in the 1930s when the gold ownership was made illegal, but much more difficult next to impossible for the government to seize the Bitcoin supply. Does that make any sense to you? Does that matter? Great question, but I would flip it around. So the government made it illegal from 1933 to, it was re-legalized in 1975. As in it was a felony go to prison if you got caught with gold. So of course the government got the gold that was held at the banks and the safety deposit boxes, and a few gullible people gave their gold to the government. People were a lot more trusting with the government in those days than they are now, and most of the people hid their gold. There was a term called midnight gardening that became popular in 1933. Oh, look at that, the neighbors have a new flower. Huh, and a meter and a half underneath that flower was the gold. So they didn't really get the gold but as to the Bitcoin, since all of that is in a Bitcoin network, if we really ever had a rapacious totalitarian state, there's a great movie called The Lives of Others written by an East German who survived East Germany, wrote this obviously after the wall came down, about what life was like under that totalitarian state. If we ever had anything remotely close to that, they would destroy the Bitcoin network and they would destroy anybody who participated in it. It got to the level where they had a fingerprint on every typewriter, so you couldn't type seditious messages. Of course, they knew everybody's handwriting. The only way to plot anything was to say, Gene, let's go walk in the park, but people would be informant. 17% of the population were paid informants to the government. People would be watching, why is Keith going with Gene in the park? And if we spent more than a minute or two, if we did it more than a couple of times, we would both be taken in and we would discover the prisoner's dilemma as real-life prisoners where I'd be taken to one room and say, you know, your buddy Gene's ratting on you. If you don't rat on him, you know, we're gonna torture you to death. And the same thing to him, it was just a horrible, horrible system. And for anybody to think, they would keep secrets against a government like that. It's not a criticism of Bitcoin per se. It's, you know what? If the government is getting that bad, we've got bigger, deeper problems. Like, is it even possible to live in a system like that? I don't think it is. Lives of others is a great movie. It's actually got a happy ending. But Pierre, do you want to comment on that answer? Yeah, I do. I think that the issue of totalitarian government would apply equally to gold in terms of, you know, seeing your neighbors' new flowers and turning them in to get some favors from the government. And really, in my mind, the differentiator for Bitcoin under this scenario is that you can memorize 12 words and you can leave the country and you still have your Bitcoin. Whereas leaving the country with your gold logistically would be much harder. It certainly doesn't scale, right? So if you had $100 million worth of gold, that would be very hard to transport across the border and not get caught. Whereas you could have $100 million worth of Bitcoin on 12 words that you've memorized and it's not necessarily the case that the government would be able to figure that out. Okay, guys, you can at any point exercise the option of asking each other a question, but let's see what the audience wants to know from you guys. So please, don't identify yourself, ask a question as though it's a question and address the question. If need be to the person, you'd like to answer it first. Go ahead, sir. All right, Mr. Rushard, this one's for you. Your last thing you had said before we started the question portion, you'd mentioned that one of the flaws of gold was that it requires an intermediary and history has shown that that can be taken from them. And while I agree that the state taking gold is obviously a negative, do you not see it as an enormous positive that gold relies on the division of labor and that it takes advantage of that? I don't see the division of labor as something that should be avoided because I don't see it as an inherent negative. I'm wondering how you respond to that, that why it's necessarily negative that gold utilizes the division of labor like that? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that if a job can be automated, we shouldn't keep it manual just to make sure somebody still has a job. And so the division of labor is great, but the reality is that as technology progresses, there are entire categories of professions that would become obsolete and that have been automated by technological advancement. Comment on that question or answer, Keith, Annie, no? I think the logistical challenge of gold are kind of being a little bit overstated. Reminds me when I was testifying, I don't remember if this was Texas or Arizona. And one of the Democrats who was hostile to the idea of recognizing gold as money was kind of grilling me on, well, what about counterfeits and what about if someone steals it out of the vault and, oh, by the way, we use FedEx and get it insured. We don't use the postal service when we ship client gold around. Obviously, yes, there's something to be thought about there, but on the other hand, do some Googling on Bitcoin security and ways that hackers can take your Bitcoin. That is a very, very deep rabbit hole and I think much deeper than the risks and dangers to your gold. Next question. Yeah, this question is for both of you. Do you think there could be a cryptocurrency backed in gold and would this help stabilize its value? Keith, take that first. Absolutely, if you had a crypto token that was redeemable in one gram or one ounce or whatever of gold, then as long as the redemption was real and you weren't committing some sort of fraud, then the value of that token would be whatever one gram or one ounce, absolutely. And yeah, I do think that's viable. I do think that is the future, right? I mean, when people talk with a gold standard, I think there's a tendency of a lot of critics to imagine that what we're talking about is going back to the medieval times. We're gonna wear sackcloth robes. We're gonna tie our waist with a rope belt. We're gonna have the suede leather purse jingling with gold and silver coins in it. And the reality is today, Apple Pay, you just take your watch and you go deep at the checkout counter. All the same things exist for gold. As for Bitcoin, yes, you can spend your gold. You don't have to ship it around. There are companies that, if you wanna spend your gold, they sell it and pay dollars into the Visa, Mastercard, Rails or whatever. I imagine that's what would be the case. Calvin? I think that that solution would go down the same slippery slope that past solutions have in this regard of, oh, well, you start out by depositing your gold at the warehouse and you get the warehouse receipt. And then suddenly the warehouse turns into a fractional reserve bank. And then they're colluding with the government and creating a central bank. And now we're back to fiat. And so I think that the reason Bitcoin minimizes uncertainty is because it's decentralized. The moment that you say, oh, these Bitcoin or this cryptocurrency is backed by this physical asset in the real world, you're reintroducing centralization. You're reintroducing trust and thus uncertainty with regards to that trust relationship. Next question. Alrighty, this is for the gentleman, for the negative. Yes, Mr. Rashard. And you'll have to forgive me. I don't remember the exact wording of the resolution, but I remember, I think it was something along the lines of will gold be the primary currency in the 21st century or a major currency in the 21st century with you presenting Bitcoin as the alternative. My question is if it's supposed to be the alternative, I think it's reasonable to assume that most people would have to know how it works, how to use it, something along those lines. And anecdotally, but I have a feeling this might be common. I know people that are at the age of 40 and older that have no clue how a computer works, let alone Bitcoin and all the infrastructure that goes along with it. So how might that dilemma be resolved if this is supposed to be something that a large section of the population would be using instead of gold, which I know people that were old enough to where they were using gold as a small child under the gold standard, varying too, that if you don't have to have an education to know how it works, how would this dilemma be resolved? Great. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's the strongest argument against Bitcoin is the learning curve of how to use it. So two-fold one is that brain plasticity can continue until a very advanced age. And so I think that people can learn new things and that's fine. Two is very morbid. Those people are going to die, right? And I've got until the year 2,100 or 2,099, I don't know how we'll do the math. So I think that that's just how sometimes technology progresses is just older generations passing away. Couldn't you run it? Couldn't you run it? You could give them Bitcoin coins. You could give them Bitcoin paper. You could give them Bitcoin checking. You could make it simple to them anyway, right? Absolutely. And this goes to Keith's point about making gold more practical to use by having a debit card linked to your gold account, for example. That exists for Bitcoin as well. So I didn't harp on that because I don't see it as a differentiator, right? This is a convenience that exists for fiat gold Bitcoin. So I don't think that it's relevant to the debate. Coming from you, Keith, isn't the question and the answer? Yeah, I would just caution people to go down the road of saying, what if nobody trusts anybody? The rise of civilization is that we can trust each other. And if that trust is going to collapse to the level where the warehouse people are going to steal all your gold, then that means the doctor isn't going to perform the surgery on you. It's going to steal your organs. We're going to descend to the level of some of the desperately, desperately poor places in Sub-Saharan Africa, where if they think that you have a watch, they'll just kill you. And they'll have a chance that maybe it's real. And hopefully, we continue to have the kind of society where people can trust each other. We have some sort of rule of law. And not just for money, but for every other. Medicine, health, food safety. I buy a computer from Samsung. Do I really have to worry whether they've loaded it up with spyware? They have. Hopefully not, right? Wouldn't that point apply to the 1930s as well? Yeah, the 1930s was a major breach of the rule of law. And ultimately, the antidote to that isn't a new technology, but it's a reason foundation. It's the Mises Institute. It's education and outreach to the population to convince them that, look, you were sold this bill of goods. You thought you're going to get something for nothing. That was the real reason why they created the Fed, is the promise of something for nothing. And you've got to tell people, number one, you shouldn't want something for nothing. And number two, it's an illusion. The mouse never sees the spring-loaded piece of steel. He sees the cheese, free cheese. As we were discussing earlier, Alan Greenspan was very well-educated. Oh, god, OK. Right, he was a gold proponent. And that did not stop him from the temptation of printing money, which seems to be an inevitability, right? We'd have to change human nature. We'd have to re-engineer man. Or just have a population that demands their government not have the power. I think J.R.R. Tolkien is what he was writing about with a one-ring. And in the movie by Peter Jackson, you have the scene with Denethor saying, we need that one-ring. But of course, put it deep in the vaults and never, never use it, except the utmost end of need, which means I'm going to put it on my finger and use it every day, right? So you've got to keep people like that out of power. Don't give them the power, rather than giving them the power and saying, gee, why is human nature failing? People are abusing their power. And Bitcoin's proposition is give everyone the power. Let everyone be their own central bank. That's what running a Bitcoin node amounts to, is being your own central bank. That way, you can be self-sovereign, but it also means that nobody else has power over you. No, that's not running your own central bank. OK, next question. Hi, my question starts with Mr. Richard. I was wondering, by what logic would you think that Bitcoin will see further price stability in the future? And on the other side of that, this is for the affirmative. By what logic would you say that, although in a deflationary environment, there's still a risk for producers trying to make calculations in an inflationary or deflationary market, why would you say that Bitcoin would have inherently less stability because of that deflationary market? So you have a question for both. So starting with Richard. OK, Pierre. Yeah, I actually agree with Keith that I don't think that Bitcoin will ever be stable. I think that there is a trade-off between having certainty with regards to the money supply and having price volatility and that it is much better for a money to go to the extreme that Bitcoin goes of having no flexibility with regards to the money supply. And I actually, I don't see any other solution that doesn't reintroduce human discretion and bring us back to the current status quo of central banking. Congressman Keith, a question. Well, you have two problems. One is the value of all businesses. I take businesses in particular because it really matters. Businesses borrow money and they produce something. And if the thing they borrow is going up in value, then they're not going to want to borrow. And so you end up with a medieval period where you have these little subsistence villages with a cooper, cobbler, and blacksmith, and nothing larger than a one person workshop can exist because nothing can be financed. The other problem is that when you have something that's intended to be a monotonic trend, so the dollar is supposed to go down monotonically, Bitcoin is supposed to go up monotonically, what you find is that since everyone knows that's the game and everyone sees the trend, the speculators pile on usually with leverage. And then the violent unwind of the speculators with their leverage causes violent drawdowns or counter moves opposite to the trend. So you have huge uncertainties. Even if Bitcoin's headed to a million in a couple of years, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, I don't know, I'm not a Bitcoin price predictor guy, but even if it's headed to a million in a couple of years, that drawdown from 69,000 to 16,000 destroyed people. People were taken out on body bags, right? Now you take a look at Michael strategy and Michael Saylor, for example, he's not had a margin call yet and he's talked about this on his public earnings calls, this is all very public. However, he's got a business that now has a very big interest expense that I think is eating most of his free cash flows, which means his software company, which is what he's really supposed to be doing, is probably not in a position to be investing in developing the features that users want. Does he have any major competitors out there, such as SAP and Microsoft and Oracle, which I imagine he does, that are going after Michael strategy's customers and saying the viability of your vendors in question because of this bet that they've made and is he also facing the risk of hostile takeover, all of which these are all things that are in Pierre's definition, not risks but uncertainties. It's really hard to model an equation. What's the risk that Michael strategy would be facing a hostile takeover bid or that Michael strategy's customers are abandoning because other competitors are convincing them that this is not a long-term viable stable place to be and business customers want a stable vendor. So that uncertainty of the drawdowns causes real damage and then in the end, the price recovers, but that recovery doesn't do you any good if you're one of the people who left on a body back. You're coming from you, Pierre. Yeah, I think that Keith makes a great point that one should not trade Bitcoin on leverage. So I would underscore that. I think that Bitcoin's price volatility actually brings out virtues in people in the market. So it teaches people humility and also to be prudent and not reckless in borrowing and leveraging up. I won't comment on Michael's sailor and micro strategy and in particular, they're publicly traded and everyone can go see, but I think their liquidation price is $3,500, but even if it did get to that, I mean, I think that Michael sailor getting liquidated and that putting all those coins on the market would be great for everyone else who is interested in accumulating Bitcoin at a discount or at a much lower price than it has traded at historically, but I think that it does mean in order to hedge against an exchange rate volatility like this, you got two choices. One, you can buy insurance by buying futures, but you can also self-insure by just holding more Bitcoin, right? So we've seen throughout the cycles that the people who don't take on any leverage, who are well-capitalized and who have a long-term view while understanding that there are gonna be 85% drawdowns along the way, they survive. They do not end up in the body bags and they thrive because Bitcoin's exchange rate overall on the long-term has trended up. Next question. This is just a clarification question on the resolution. So at what point would we consider gold no longer as a monetary use? Well, we've gotten to the end of the 20th century. There's a time limit, 21st century, I mean, we've got another 78 years, correct? I mean, in other words, we're basically just looking at the next 78 years in the 21st century. Correct? I think you're saying what's the definition can you falsify to use that term, the proposition? So I would say if, right, so I drew that flatline to make the point that marginal cost is less than marginal benefit and after 5,000 years of accumulation, not only is there not a glut, we continue to accumulate more. The falsification of this proposition would be that that flips and stays flipped durably. So that is, cost of mining goes up to the point where it's no longer profitable or rather the price of gold collapses and to the point where it draws all the gold out of hordes and into electronics and into consumer toys being made out of gold, then you'll know you've arrived. Well, yeah, thanks for the clarification, Keith. I see it's a good question and I think Keith gave it a good answer. Would you comment? Do you agree with Keith's answer? I think that's a perfect, yeah, let me just ask for the answer. Okay, too much agreement now. We can pass it on, but no, it's good that the two guys agree on the resolution. That's important. So our next question, yeah. Hi, I have a question for Mr. Wiener. If you store your wealth in gold but the price of gold does not beat the inflation rate, are you then really storing your wealth or is it being rather slowly depleted away by inflation? Is gold being depleted by the price inflation? So as I said earlier, I think it's because we have non-monetary forces that are driving prices up, by the way, much, much worse in the UK and Europe than here, both the non-monetary forces, the green energy restrictions and the prices that have skyrocketed much worse there than here. I have a paper that's gonna be coming out soon talking about this notion of a storage of values that people think of as storage container. I think it's actually a fallacious idea. I don't think there is such a thing as a store value. I think that the term that I would use for gold is that it has non-diminishing marginal utility. It's an economic constant. That doesn't mean that the government can't make goods and services generally scarcer by destroying the ability of producers to produce. If that happens, we get poorer. And those who own gold get poorer too. Maybe they get less poorer than people who don't, or whatever, but it's generally bad when government is attacking producers and shutting them down. Coming from you, Samantha, you wanna pass? No, okay. Yep. Okay, next question. When I graduated from Auburn, there was almost no such thing as a one megahertz computer, and now we know what an iPhone can do. So over the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years when computers make iPhones look like toys, what prevents someone with one of these devices from mining or hacking as much Bitcoin as they desire in about 30 minutes? You wanna address that question? Do you understand the question? Yes. Unless Keith wants to jump in. I mean, Keith has background in software as well. I'm sure he could provide an answer as well. But I think that with regards to the mining, the key mechanism that prevents advances in chip technology from accelerating the mining process is that every two weeks worth of blocks, which are basically batches of ledger entries in the Bitcoin system, every two weeks there is what's called a difficulty adjustment. And so if the technology for Bitcoin mining is advancing very rapidly, then after let's say 10 days, we will have two weeks worth of blocks because they were getting mined more quickly and the decentralized network of nodes would update the difficulty. And there's a formula for this difficulty. So that's to retarget back to having two weeks worth of blocks for the next interval. And so that I think is, now the second part of your question, I think is a greater concern of being able to essentially brute force private keys and be able to access people's Bitcoin that way. And the current view on quantum computing, which is basically the only way that this would be feasible, is that it's not within the foreseeable future that quantum computers will have the ability to brute force the digital signature scheme that's used for Bitcoin called DCDSA. There are avenues by which that could be updated in the future so that it is using post-quantum cryptography and not vulnerable to quantum computing. But that was my first objection to Bitcoin when I started learning about it in 2012 was, well, there's always a way to break cryptography. And the reality is that at this point, elliptic curve or the discrete logarithm problem in math is still unsolved. And so I think that the cryptography for Bitcoin will continue to be solid for the coming decades. We, unfortunately, we are running out of time. Please ask your question, sir. Go ahead. This is addressed to Mr. Richard. So earlier, you'd said that you didn't think that there would ever be a time whenever Bitcoin would not be volatile, which to me sounds like an admission that you don't think that it would be universally adopted. And from my understanding, it would either continue to be highly speculative and more of an asset than a money unless it's universally adopted. So what would be the utility of it if it's not universally adopted? Because it would seem for pricing that you'd continue to need some other currency to look at for pricing. Yeah, that's a good question. Is Bitcoin going to continue to be so volatile that it could fall by 70% or even 20%? If so, how is it ever going to become a useful money? Yeah, so that's a fine question. I think that, well, I don't have a lack of volatility as like the criteria to distinguish between a currency and any other asset. I mean, if we look at foreign exchange rates, we see volatility in foreign exchange rates somewhat regularly. And if inflation today is 9%, I mean, that's arguably rather volatile in terms of the purchasing power. Yeah, it does introduce issues of updating the menu prices and things like that. But as we have an economy that's increasingly digital and everything's on demand, that I don't see why prices can't adjust more rapidly. I also would push back on the notion that Bitcoin being volatile means that it is not widely distributed or widely adopted or widely accepted. For example, real estate, everyone's in the real estate market. Real estate's still volatile, right? Home prices go up and down and that's, yeah, I don't know if it'll be 85% drawdowns like we've seen in the past, but I also just think that the price of money can fluctuate and that's okay for the economy. That's part of the free market. This obsession with having a stable unit of account in my mind is very Keynesian, not Austrian. Okay, we've run out of time. We go to the summation portion. You can respond in your own summary. The affirmative goes first for the summary and now I yield the podium to Keith. Five minutes. Yes, sir. In a certain sense, I don't, in order to defend the proposition, don't need to tackle the question of whether or not Bitcoin will stabilize. Although I think my honorable opponent for conceding that he doesn't think it will. And I don't necessarily, in order to defend the proposition, have to defend that yes, it is necessary for a money to be a unit and a measure that it is important for an enterprise to know whether it's destroying wealth or creating wealth. And the only way to do that, as Menger argues, is in measurements and money values. In a certain sense, I don't need to prove that the dollar is failing. That the debt is skyrocketing exponentially. That the interest rate is collapsing to zero and beyond. One other comment that Pierre made was you just hedge. Now, the futures market is something I've made a study of and written, I don't know how many articles, scores of articles about futures. And in my business, since we finance gold companies and gold, we talk about this all the time. They say, why shouldn't I just get a conventional dollar loan and then just hedge? And then we actually have some marketing material with a page, with a headline, just hedge. And those two words do not belong together. Hedging is actually kind of complicated. It has a bunch of moving parts. It has some risks, some of which are pretty obvious and some of which are not so obvious. And then it has to be maintained. It has costs and companies that fail to hedge go bankrupt as well. In a certain sense, I don't need to prove there's a quote, or at least Winston Churchill is reported to have said this. God bless the Americans, he said, or is reported to have said. I'm not sure if he really said this or not. God bless the Americans, because after they've tried everything else, they'll do the right thing. You know, we've used gold as money historically. It works surprisingly well. When the UK, when England ran the world's trade in the late 1890s, the system was so efficient that there was 160 tons of gold in London at the time of the peak of this gold standard. Today, the state of Nevada produces 166 tons. So it was very efficient, it worked very well. I don't necessarily need to prove that we're gonna do the right thing as Winston Churchill gave his very perverse backhanded blessing of all this. I just need to prove the proposition or defend the proposition that gold is gonna remain an important form of money. Not the only, not the leading, not take over as the gold standard, which my company is working to do, that's our raison d'etre. And in order for this proposition to fail, I'm gonna make the argument, thank you, that two things would have to occur. Both gold would have to cease to be what it's been. And this is not a German, with all due respect, a German historical analysis. This is very much looking at how it's behaving even today, even though it is allegedly demonetized or at least every government in the world would like you to think it isn't money anymore. How it's still behaving even today. Gold would have to change its behavior and do an abrupt U-turn. And in addition to that, either the failing dollar, which I think most of the people in this room agree is failing, or the highly volatile Bitcoin, which my opponent has conceded is highly volatile and will always be highly volatile, that either the dollar or Bitcoin would have to change its nature as well. And if gold or the dollar or Bitcoin doesn't change, then gold is gonna continue to remain an important form of money in the 21st century. And so if you're thinking about this proposition, are these things gonna change what they are? I would just conclude by saying the tiger does not change his stripes. Five minutes of rebuttal of summary Pierre. And as you know, you can't introduce any new arguments. You've just gotta summarize what you've said so far. Jean, I didn't get all my arguments in, but yeah, that's all right, that's all right. So I wanna touch on kind of the two main takeaways that I got from Keith's conclusion there. Well, first on the hedging part, I think that he's right, there are costs to hedging. It's not a great solution, but thankfully you can self-insure, right? You can just hold more Bitcoin if you are concerned about its purchasing power going down in the future. And that's a fine solution. Second, with regards to Bitcoin's volatility, I think that gold has been volatile as well. I think that we could easily overstate gold stability if we look at its purchasing power. Now, we've heard anecdotes of, you know, an ounce of gold will always buy you a fine suit or something like that. And that might be true over decades, but if we look at interyear, there's definitely been volatility in gold's purchasing power. And I think that that's fine. I think that the volatility argument is really rooted in a rejection of having a fixed money supply. And that the only way that you can dampen volatility is by having an active management of the supply. And I think that that inevitably leads to political corruption. So to win the argument in this case, my central contention is that Bitcoin has orders of magnitude less uncertainty than gold does, despite gold's much longer historical track record, and that the debt is reflected by the tremendous adoption Bitcoin has had over the past 14 years. 14 years, right? I mean, it's impressive that gold's been around for 3,000 years and continues to work. I'd argue it's much more impressive that Bitcoin started 14 years ago, and it is what it is today of having a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars and a network with millions of users. And so what has been driving that adoption, clearly the people adopting Bitcoin have not been overwhelmed by its volatility or have all been body bagged by it. Clearly the adopters of Bitcoin have been driven by other considerations than just the exchange rate. Now, one is the speculation which Keith brought up in his argument that people might be acquiring Bitcoin because they think its value is going to increase in the future. I think that's perfectly fine entrepreneurial activity. I don't have anything against speculation. I think that speculation is good. It's a part of the market process. And that there are plenty of gold speculators as well, who are anticipating capital gains from holding gold. Now, they have been disappointed, I think, relative to the long-term holders of Bitcoin who have seen their purchasing power dramatically increase if we zoom out to five-year timeframes. Now, I think that the other way that I could be wrong is if Bitcoin's uncertainty increased. And if we look at the software engineering of Bitcoin over the past 14 years, it has actually improved. And the uncertainty about holding and transacting with Bitcoin has actually decreased over the past 14 years. And I have every reason to believe that that will be the continuing trend. Now, another way I could be wrong, which I hope I'll be forgiven for bringing this up because it hasn't come up before, is the other cryptocurrencies, right? Although we talked about a gold-backed cryptocurrency. And they all have additional uncertainty added to them, whether it's because of centralization because they're backed by an asset or because they are configured differently. For example, they may have a higher block size limit that makes running a node more expensive and thus increases uncertainty for users or they are adding lots of different features, right? To quote-unquote increase the utility of these other cryptocurrencies to the detriment of the uncertainty minimization that makes it so key for an asset to be a money. And so that's why I think that Bitcoin will displace gold. I would argue will continue to displace gold. I think that part of why gold has underperformed over the past 14 years is because Bitcoin has drawn demand from it. And so I think that we're already in the process of demonetization and that it will continue over the coming decades. Thank you both for a very civil and lively exchange. Now, please take out your smartphones and vote again. Yes, no, or undecided on the resolution, gold will remain an important form of money in the 21st century. I forgot to bring the sole form Tutsiro, but I will be mailing it to whoever wins the vote. Again, gold will remain in an important form of money in the 21st century. Yes, no, or undecided on the resolution. Drumroll, please. And there you go. All right, the pre-vote, the resolution was gold will remain an important form of money in the 21st century. The yes vote began at 47% and it ended at 62%. It picked up a little more than 15 points. The no vote was pretty flat. It lost a pointer too. And so the Tutsiro goes to Keith Wiener. Congratulations.