 The currency known as Bitcoin, which made headlines earlier this week when the FBI seized Silk Road, the popular online black marketplace for drugs and other contraband payable in Bitcoin that had done over a billion dollars worth of business in just the last two years. Bitcoin has made headlines on PBS News Hour, sparked by an online Bitcoin payment drug trafficking site. Mainstream companies are popping up all over the place. Big-time investors are getting involved in this emerging sector and there are cryptocurrency conferences happening monthly and sometimes weekly all over the world. Even Canada has introduced their own government-backed digital currency called Mint Chip. What is the future here in the United States regarding Bitcoin and digital currency? Here to help us out is registered patent attorney Stefan Cancilla, founder of Libertarian Papers and former adjunct professor at the South Texas College of Law. Good to have you on, Stefan. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Silk Road is this online black market that was shut down by the FBI last week. Should people be worried about using Bitcoin in the United States? Well, I don't think use of Bitcoin itself is a big concern. Silk Road might be a different issue. You have to consider your own risks in using Silk Road, but Bitcoin itself, no, you can use Bitcoin without being implicated in the Silk Road issues right now. What's happened with Silk Road? Is that a benefit for Bitcoin or is that bad for Bitcoin? I think it's good and bad. I mean, if you think about it, everything that people accuse Bitcoin of being bad for is true of the US dollar. So people say that Bitcoin is used for drug transactions. Well, the US dollar is used for that, too. So all the bad things that people accuse Bitcoin of are being used by the US dollar. It's just an alternative currency that people can use. And as long as you're careful, as long as you don't use it for illegal transactions, you should be okay. The US government has the war on drugs and the war on poverty and the war on terror. And we're at this cryptocurrency conference in Atlanta over the weekend. There's a lot of libertarians there, a lot of people concerned about their freedoms and their ability to live their lives without government interference. Do we see a possibility of the United States government declaring a war on Bitcoin? Yes. I think there's a concern there. And the concern is that if the US government sees a significant threat to its hegemony over the currency, the US dollar or the World Monetary System, they will try to crack down on it. But we've seen this in the internet as well. For example, I don't believe the US government, if it had known in the early 1990s what the internet would evolve into, I don't think they would have allowed it. But it's a little bit too late for them to stop it, I hope. I'm hoping the same is true of Bitcoin and simple occurrences. What part is Bitcoin going to play in the future of legal tender in the United States with the rest of the world already embracing Bitcoin like in Europe and again, Canada having their own digital currency? So the legal tender is just another tool in the tool box of the state that they can resort to when they need to, to try to crack down on people that threaten their systems. OK, so the dollar and dollar system is the insurance system of the World Monetary Order. And it really doesn't need to crack down too hard on the right end. It's a counterfeiting thing like this. But as Roosevelt and others showed in the 30s, they will seize gold. They will outlaw gold causes and contract. They will do what they have to do to protect their monetary system. So if Bitcoin emerges as something that threatens the dollar supremacy, you're going to set the state to try to react and try to ban transactions in Bitcoin using legal tender law and other provisions that are available to them. What if the Federal Reserve decided that this was too overwhelming for them on the world market and eventually tried to hedge by creating their own cryptocurrency? Will they do that? I think it's possible that the world's currencies will try to modernize and use digital methods. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to use technology to basically track and implement their own currency system. They don't have the advantages Bitcoin does, which is a fixed limited supply and free of government intervention. So they're always going to be inferior in that sense. I mean, really, there's really little difference between Bitcoin's dollar except that there's no limit on the US government insulating the dollar as much as they want. But Bitcoin has a 21 million currency unit limit. So they can never compete with Bitcoin really, because they don't want to be limited by the shackles. Well, what about regulating digital currency or? Well, I think that regulations can start tripping in using legal tender laws or other laws so they can start saying that if you pay in Bitcoin, it's going to be regulated or you have to pay sales taxes or something like that. So there is an age of that. Of course, the advantage for Bitcoin is that it's highly encrypted and I view Bitcoin is like Esperanto. Esperanto is this artificial language, which was not intended to be a substitute for regular languages, but like a universal second language. So if Bitcoin doesn't have to be the dominant monetary currency to survive, it just has to be a currency. So if it's in the background, if it's used for something, even if it's only used by certain people who are savvy enough to use it, that may be good enough for it to survive. Steph and Cansoa, thank you very much for spending some time with us today. Thanks, Kurt. I appreciate it.