 Can you guys see me? Is that good? I didn't actually say that, but I hope I can live up to that. I'll try. Yeah, my name's Brett Scott. It's a book I wrote a few years ago. Actually, it's quite a while back now. That's my Twitter profile. If you need to email me, that's my email address. This book is actually now available as a pirated copy. It's a PDF, so you don't actually buy it. There's a physical copy anymore. But I'm actually working on new stuff now, so it's a bit out of date. Basically, my deal is I used to work in the financial sector. I used to work in over-the-counter derivative contracts or swap contracts, so I've had some experience with high finance, I guess. But then since then, I've done a lot of stuff around alternative finance systems, alternative money systems. I dabble into the crypto world. I'm not in the crypto world day to day, but I try to jump between a lot of different groups to see how different people imagine how you change a financial system. And the cryptocurrency community tends to have one particular vision, but there's many other groups that have other visions of how you change stuff. I tend to find this is quite useful because you can see the different sort of assumptions people have when they're trying to change something. And you can help to build your own position by seeing how other people are thinking. So, and today I'm supposed to be talking about, I think the original title was gold, crypto gold and money, but the basic thing is like, is Bitcoin money? Is Bitcoin cash money? Is how would you make these things more money-like? And one of the, I've actually been involved in alternative currency communities prior to cryptocurrency, so there's a whole history of alternative currency experiments that have gone, that go back hundreds of years that don't use the same models that crypto does. So I've been around this kind of question for quite some time, so I'm gonna try and show you some perspectives from, also I guess maybe some outside perspectives on money systems. I mean, I work with lots of different groups. I don't have a particular thing that I do. I'm freelance and I jump around everywhere from like small local currencies through to the technology world and Silicon Valley through to all sorts of stuff. Anyway, so I'm gonna just like, I don't have very much time, so I'm gonna try, I might fly through this and if we don't get through it, you can ask me questions outside or whatever. But I occasionally reread the original Satoshi White Paper and I actually reread it again a couple of weeks ago and the overwhelming feeling I get every time I read this paper is it's extremely elegant. It's an extremely, it's almost beautiful how amazing the design is. It's like a very elegant design, okay. And what's actually been designed here is a way to issue tokens and move them around without a central party. I mean, that's really what's been designed with this particular system. Now that's a slightly different thing to saying that those tokens are money. What's being created is a system to move tokens around but to make a token money is a different question and I don't think the Satoshi White Paper ever actually answers that question. It shows you how to do one part of that question. And I guess one of the interesting big questions for the Bitcoin Cash community is, I mean, this doesn't actually answer the question. This just gives some hints. And one of the things you're trying to do going forward is like, how do you take that token system and make it into an actual money system, okay. Some people have always just assumed that Bitcoin is money. And I think that's problematic. You can't just assume that it's money. Just to give you an analogy to help bring this to light, this here is a train ticket, okay. Now a train ticket is a token. It's something that's been issued. You can move it around. It's a token. But it only is a train ticket in the presence of a train system, okay. If you find this on, for example, the moon or something on some far away planet, this is just a piece of paper. It's not actually a train ticket. It only becomes a train ticket in the context of a train system. Now you can see this particular token here has all sorts of particular special features. Like you can only write at certain times. You've got a particular seat. This is like a very highly calibrated token. It's got a lot of specific stuff, right. But you can have tokens that have different levels of calibration. It could be much more open. It could be an open ticket. It could be, who knows. It could be in somebody's name. There's many other things you can change. But the basic point is that this will not work without a train system, okay. Now you can implement this digitally as well. You can have a digital train ticket and you can have a transfer system, a way to move it around between people. With a physical ticket, I can take it to you. I can give it to you. That's a transfer. Or else we can do it digitally with a digital form. And actually when people make a distinction between Bitcoin tokens and the Bitcoin system, often what they're referring to is the difference between the token and the way that you move them around. The transfer system, okay. It never really talks about the train system, the underlying thing that will make those tokens actually work, okay. Some people try to like make a conceptual jump from the fact that you can move them around to them being actual money tokens. I personally find this a little bit, I don't think it's a holistic enough picture. Okay, is that kind of clear enough to you guys so far? Okay. So I'm gonna try and jump into two predominant narratives you find in the Bitcoin community. You guys will know this right now because of the, I guess, the tension between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin and different sort of visions of what it's supposed to be, okay. So you still find this idea that Bitcoin was money, all right. It was originally presented as currency. Still very explicitly says this on most Bitcoin material. And there's also a lot of monetary language that's used when people speak about it, all right. They say inflation and deflation, all right. These are monetary concepts. They only apply to money, okay. You do not use this term unless you're talking about money, okay. And you see these various like meme systems that come up. People are just been flying around, people are getting to this kind of stuff. There's also a sense that Bitcoin is better money than other money. And one of the main reasons it's been given for that is because it's deflationary, okay. Now one immediate point I'm gonna make about inflation and deflation is that different people experience these things as good or bad depending on what position in an economy they're in, okay. Savers often like deflation. People who are in debt often like inflation. So really what you're talking about when you're having an inflation and deflation is different groups in an economy benefiting relative to each other, all right. So there's this kind of these battles of like which of these is the best. So you can have debates about which one you prefer. But you're still always assuming that you're talking about a money form here, okay. Just to like throw in some little things to kind of like mess with some of the preconceptions around these things. So this particular like meme here, I mean I find it kind of interesting. I also find it problematic. So for example, one of the key things to get with any money system is that one person spending is another person's income, all right. That's a tautology. That is by definition true. It has to be true, all right. So when you're saying prices are rising, you're simultaneously saying incomes are rising, okay. And if your income is not rising while prices are rising, it means somebody else's income is rising and they taking that, all right. This helps to explain large part of the battles between wages and stuff where people are saying prices have risen, but our wages haven't risen, all right. So where's it going? It must be going to shareholders because they're the guys who take the surplus that comes off from that, right. So this is the battle. It has to be going somewhere by definition. It cannot be like disappearing. So this is in a way it's presenting a certain type of thing here, right. So you gotta say, well, maybe the dollar has depreciated but incomes have also risen, all right. Immediate obvious point. Other points, productivity has increased massively over the last 100 years. We have a lot more stuff now than we ever did before. Okay, so you gotta be thinking about these whole holistic cycles of how economies work. Focusing on little sort of elements doesn't necessarily illuminate the whole picture. And another question you wanna ask is something like this is if you're having this situation where is all this extra stuff coming from? All right, this trolley is filling up but where's this stuff coming from exactly? It's coming from other people somewhere else, right. Quite possibly it's coming from or maybe you're not, you're shaking your head but it has to be coming from something. Okay, this doesn't just spring out of the earth. So just so I can, those are immediate two things to sort of talk about the monetary idea but while we've had this monetary idea we've simultaneously had a different idea about Bitcoin going on at the same time. The second idea that you're now finding if it's very prevalent within the Bitcoin core community is this idea that it's not actually money it's an investment, okay. And the basic idea about an investment is it's something that you put money into originally and then hope that you get more money out later. All right, that's what the concept of investment is. Investment is something you, it isn't money in itself it's something you use to make more money, okay. There's basically two types of investment. You either invest in a productive asset which is something that produces something that then gets sold on a market that you can then get some kind of return from in future or else you invest in some kind of nonproductive asset for example, housing or land or potentially crypto which is basically something you can buy and then resell later for a higher price, okay. It gives you two basic forms of investment. One of the immediate ideas that suggests that people think Bitcoin's an investment is that claims to have a market capitalization. Market capitalization is explicitly something as measured in money to refer to the monetary value of something else, okay. Market capitalization itself is a very problematic concept. It's a dubious concept at best. It kind of means like how many dollars would I need to buy up the whole supply? Of course if you tried to actually do that you would cut through all the buy orders and the price would spike through the roof like crazy, all right. If you try to do the opposite like how many years old would I get if I had the whole supply and try to sell it? You would cut through all the, so you'd cut through all the buy orders and you'd cut through the sell orders on the way up but if you're doing the other way around you'd be cutting through all these buy orders and it would just like plummet, all right. Actually all the buyers would back away they'd all like to jump out because they would see the crash. It would just like, it would just implode, right. Market capitalization is sort of like a, it's like a metaphor I guess, all right. And it's sort of like semi useful. Do you guys kind of agree with that? Is that sort of like, what about monetary base? Sure, we could, the monetary base is just how many units there are. Right, that's a different, okay. So we have these like two competing conceptions here as a money or as an investment that you use money to buy. Now one of the sort of like mental tricks that people often try to do is to sort of say those are the same thing. There's been a tendency in the crypto community to say an appreciating asset is the same thing as a deflationary currency. Now I'm not gonna say that's wrong. I'm personally like not massively convinced by that idea but that's the sort of like way that you can resolve this contradiction, okay. And you sort of find this, I just chose, you guys probably know Michael, I mean he puts out this kind of like funny tweet about saying, you know, he's clearly happy about these returns that he's made, right. I've made this 900% returns this year. What he's talking about here is like, I've made 900% US dollar returns, okay. And why he's happy is that this far exceeds the rate of inflation, okay. I've made far in excess of the rate of inflation which means I can buy more in a trolley. Versus, well, he would have to say he's experiencing deflation if he wanted to cohere with this idea here, right. These don't actually, you can't really use these things in the same sentence that they actually, they don't actually exist within the same paradigm of thought but often there's an attempt in the crypto community to sort of like reconcile them into one kind of concept. And I'm, again, it is hypothetically possible to think like this but it's not, it's quite unorthodox I'd say, okay. Cool. All right, so that's my initial sort of opening statement. I kind of wanted to help clarify this debate to just go a bit into how different people think about money and this maybe will help to sort of think about how you could go forward in this whole debate. If you wanna understand the sort of tensions and monetary theory, you gotta go down to this basic historical battle between two different paradigms of thought around money, commodity versus credit theories of money. Now I'm gonna argue commodity theories of money are by far the most dominant way people think about money. Even when they think about fiat money, they still use commodity style thinking to think about it. Credit theories of money are far less known but they're actually, I would argue, extremely useful and they're historically probably more accurate or at least these two systems interact with each other in interesting ways historically. I'm gonna give you the basic parameters of a commodity theory of money. So in commodity theories of money, the money is produced prior to the trade, okay? It gets like, you have to find it somewhere. It's somewhere out there and you have to bring it in before you can trade, okay? The second thing is you can then transfer it between people but it's never destroyed. It's like a perpetual object. It just sort of floats between people. It gets passed between people, all right? This is like the standard way most people think about money, okay? It's imagined as a thing or an object that has stored value. You're kind of like passing this value around, okay? And the concept is basically it's the idea is that when you're engaging in exchange, you're engaging in a value for value exchange which is kind of like butter basically. It's just the idea that you're just taking one thing of value and exchanging it for something else of value, all right? And actually one of the ways you can work out if somebody has a commodity theory of money in their head is you just ask them what would happen if the monetary system suddenly imploded and disappeared? What would people naturally do? Okay, let's say you asked this question in 1980. You said barter. If you say barter, it means you've got a commodity theory of money, all right? Because think about that, barter has the same structure. You have to produce something, you get this thing and then you have to take it to somebody else and give it to them, all right? And then they will give you something. Exactly the same mental structure as a commodity theory of money. If you do anthropology, I'm from an anthropology background, you learn that the story around barter is extremely dubious historically. But it's very, since Adam Smith and John Luck, it's been a very common way of thinking about money, okay? So the question you then ask yourself with any kind of commodity theory of money is like, so it's conceived of an exchange of something of value for something else of value, okay? So the question you then ask is like, well, why does this thing have value? Or why does this monetary object have value? And there's different sort of conceptualizations of that. One of these things is like utility is a concept of value. The idea that there's something like within the money itself that somehow gives it value, okay? It's like it's somehow like internal to it. Well, we see it, we automatically recognize and ensure to be recognized the value internal to this thing. Another conception, which as you find more in classical economics is the labor theory of values with like Adam Smith and Karl Marx, where people use labor theories of value. In essence, labor theories of value are basically just saying that things will not exist unless they're produced. They're just saying that labor will unlock things of value. Saying nothing that you find on a market hasn't been produced, right? For example, the sun, you do not find on a market because you do not produce the sun. It just comes to you. Everything that's on a market has been produced. The labor has unlocked it. It's actually made it be able to actually be on a market and that's what's caused the then utility value to emerge. Okay, so that's how you should think about like any kind of labor theory of value. They're basically saying labor is a prerequisite before you can have utility value, okay? And these are sort of different ways of conceptualizing some kind of internal value. And actually weirdly in crypto circles, you're finding certain returns to labor theories when people talk about the mining power as being somehow related to the value of Bitcoin. That's essentially a labor theory of value that's been posited right there, okay? You're saying something about the process of the production is giving it value, okay? Let's go into credit theories of money because I don't have huge amounts of time. The basic thing about credit theories of money is, and these are very interesting, they basically say money is issued initially at least at the point of exchange. It doesn't exist before, all right? So you issue it as a promise. And basically this basically mean you do something for me and rather than me giving you something, I issue you a promise saying you can come back to me at some point and get something from me, all right? Once I've given you that promise, you can take it to somebody else and then they can come back to me and get something from me, all right? But you might get something from him for that promise to me, okay? So you can issue IOUs and then the IOUs can move around and then they eventually will come back to the person who issues them, okay? They are recorded into existence either as a physical object or as data. Doesn't really matter. So I will record this promise that I've done to you and they can be transferred but they are always eventually destroyed when they are redeemed, okay? So they get issued and then they come back and they get destroyed. Issued, destroyed, issued, destroyed. So they kind of like breathe as it were. So the system expands and contracts, expands and contracts as people are doing stuff and then getting stuff back from each other. And the basic idea is that what you're doing is actually one person is giving underlying value and somebody else is giving them some kind of claim or credit that enables them to get value from others in future, okay? Is this kind of like conceptually, okay? The best way to understand this is vouchers. Vouchers are a very simple form of credit system, right? This does not store coffee. This is basically a promise issued by Starbucks saying you can come and get coffee. If I destroy this voucher, coffee is not destroyed, all right? If a meteorite hits Starbucks, this is meaningless, all right? This only exists insofar as the promise is redeemable, okay? So this is a basic concept of a credit system. They just get much more advanced. This is a friend of mine runs this here. This is a huge mutual credit system. It's a kind of like these systems have been going on for hundreds of years, all right? Basically, people get together and they issue each other credit and they create money in the process and they move these IOUs between themselves and then eventually they kind of come back to each other. You can go and research mutual credit systems. This has been a very successful system. Have you come across this in Italy? Yes, it's in the island of Sardinia. They use it quite a lot. But of course, our entire banking system is a credit system as well. So you get different types of credit systems. But in our current banking system, you actually have two layers of credit. You have two IOU issuance processes. You got the state money system which gets recorded at the central bank or as cash. We experience the state money system through cash. We cannot experience digital state money, all right? We do not have access to digital state money. We only have access to cash in the form of state money. But banks themselves are allowed to hold digital state money, what they call reserves, okay? Sometimes it's called the monetary base or the Mzero money supply. Banks in turn, so this diagram is pretty complicated. Banks in turn can then issue their own promises on top of that. That's what we call deposits, all right? Deposits are issued by banks as promises against their reserves, okay? And they can expand these promises when they're issuing loans. And when you're repaying loans, those promises get destroyed. So the money supply expands and contracts. And then the state can try to expand the money supply there as well and try to influence what the banks are doing. But essentially, the banks are often determining that the final money supply whilst the state's trying to influence their activities. And that's how our basic monetary system works. It's a very crude version of it. Now, one thing I wanna quickly jump into, I don't have very much time, shit, five minutes? Okay, cool. This gets interesting. So a lot of what we call commodity money actually has credit-like elements to it. And this is where I think Bitcoin Cash probably starts to agree more with, I guess me on this, than people in the Bitcoin Core community do. So, because actually Roger's being saying some of these kind of things, right? One of the most interesting things about commodity money is that there are often things that aren't really in and of themselves useful. Their properties are only useful to be given away, all right? They don't have anything in and of themselves that makes them useful. I can't actually use it for my personal use. They only have characteristics which make them useful to give to somebody else. That's why people fixates upon, so this is this guy Daniel, I was having this discussion with him. He gives me all these reasons why gold's useful, but basically all he's saying is it has properties that make it useful to give away. He's never ever describing anything internal to gold that's useful in itself. And you find a very similar narrative in cryptocurrency communities. So this is back in November 2017, I just said this to him. It's like, well, yeah, so this is this concept. But your concept of the store of value is derived from the fact that it's useful as a medium of exchange. You'll notice that Roger's been saying a similar thing around this year. This is pretty well known among people. Something can't be a store of value if it doesn't have some kind of actual use in and of itself and it's not being used for exchange, okay? Well, I mean, it can, but it's like, you have to do a lot of work to make that the case. And so you start to find these weird narratives coming out, you know, Bitcoin's made to be an asset rather than a currency and that you get this circular reasoning going on. It's like, well, why would it be a store of value if it isn't a means of exchange, all right? It's kind of like, the whole thing's predicated on the fact you can give it away, like if it's not being given away, like what is it doing exactly? Like, so you get this circular reasoning. And one of the interesting things to note about gold is actually the most heavily prevalent use gold in history was always issued by monarchs, all right? It was never just like random pieces of gold people were handing to between themselves. They were often sort of officially issued and sanctioned kind of tokens, all right? So people were kind of learning how to use these things or were required to use them. And these are the most, I think the most widely used gold tokens in history. And they were always issued by state authorities, all right? So it's not just like the commodity itself but also the whole power structure around it that makes it actually work. Okay, I'm gonna, shit, three minutes. I could do the last section. Okay, all right, this is, I'm gonna come to this last. Okay, you wanna understand the money systems? The basic thing about a money system is we cannot survive by ourselves. There's no way in hell we'd even survive for a week if we cannot get access to what everybody else does, all right? We are not self-sufficient. Basically, you need a way to convert what you do into a claim upon what everybody else does, all right? So the basic concept is you need a way to mediate between two points on a diagram via some kind of routing mechanism, okay? And this is how money systems are formed. You have this, the whole system of prices starts to coordinate between all the objects around the outside, okay? And they have to agree with each other. You can't have, for example, a tin can being more expensive than a bottle of Coke, all right? That wouldn't work, it would be rejected by the network. It can't happen because this has a tin can plus Coke, all right? So the tin can itself can't be worth more. This thing has to root itself in such a way that you form this dense mesh of these relationships, right? Now what's happening a lot with Bitcoin is something like this here, all right? You actually have two objects on a fiat currency market and you're trying to directly exchange them, all right? So what actually ends up happening is you do counter trade. It basically means you have two monetary transactions that are superimposed over each other such that you cancel out the money legs of those transactions. So there's two monetary transactions. Bitcoin one way, cash this way. Cash this way, good this way. You eliminate the money section and you just exchange Bitcoin for the good. This is what businesses do this as well. This is a form of advanced barter. That's essentially what's going on right now in the Bitcoin system. And I'm gonna jump to my very last section. This system messes with our concept of store value because if you're talking about this as a monetary asset, what you're talking about with a store of value is either something that has some kind of intrinsic value in and of itself or else something that continues to maintain its purchasing power. There's actually two different meanings entirely. If you're applying it to a non-monetary object, you're basically just saying it maintains popularity in a market just like property might, for example, or farmland. If you're applying it to a monetary token, you're saying once people are locked into this network and you get one of those tokens, it will keep its power relative to later joiners in the network. People who are coming in, all right? It's maintaining its ability to command stuff from them, all right? Note that a store of value doesn't mean it increases its purchasing power, all right? It means it maintains it. So I'm just gonna move on to my very last slide here. This is kind of what Bitcoin is, and I'm using this broadly here because this applies to a lot of cryptos. Record it into existence, requires labor. You create this digital object that initially seems like it has no particular characteristics. You just sort of pass it around. And it doesn't have any explicit sort of redeemability. You can't like compel people to accept it in any kind of way. You notice from the early days of Bitcoin, trying to get people to accept it. They're like, well, why don't I take it? I mean, it's like an object or cool, I should take it. And basically in order to make it work, you have to start forming the circuits, the actual like train system as it were, to make it people that really feel like they have to accept it. Or like really, it's not just like an optional thing. They're like, well, actually today, I don't feel like taking it. You have to create whole supply chains that where people are basically becoming interdependent upon each other and becoming like a mesh, all right? And so actually a lot of the projects I've seen been people trying to build up various elements of this vision, but this really needs to be focused on if the actual vision of peer-to-peer cash is to be achieved. Because if that's not focused on, you'll have a token transfer system, but it will not actually end up being a money system. All right, so to fulfill the vision of Satoshi, that really is what needs to happen. So I'm gonna end there. All right. Holy moly. Got it. Is there any time for those? That was, yeah, we're gonna get some questions. Who, whoa, that was good. Another good one. All right, we have questions in the audience. Over to the left. Hey, Brett, thanks for this. So yeah, I'm curious, the Nakamoto Institute has published something I think is pretty interesting subtle refactoring of this money. They say it's not really a thing so much as a behavior. And so that kind of enables you to, it's like anything could be used as money, but like maybe some things are better, like more convenient or more effective as money. I'm just curious, like how would you fit that into this commodity thing? Or commodity versus credit? I haven't read the Nakamoto Institute thing. I mean, I don't know if I've answered your question fully, but really the type of thing you want is money. It's something that's not particularly useful in and of itself. The problem that's something that has use in itself, I mean, let's hypothetically say it lasts a long time. So we're not talking about like it's gonna perish in the next few days or something like that. Let's say it's something that has usefulness in and of itself, but also lasts a long time. So it's a candidate. The problem with like the usefulness in itself is it kind of like fucks with all the relationships when you're trying to form that network. If you think about like diminishing marginal utility, it becomes a big problem because it's like, okay, let's price everything in eggs. Okay, that's a bad example, but like whatever. Fur codes. It's like, so how many fur codes for that thing? Okay, 10,000. It's like, do you want 10,000 fur codes? Well, I would like two fur codes, but at 10,000, this isn't gonna be a waste, right? You have all this like marginal utility problem. You really want something in and of itself. You don't mind how much you get. You could take as much as you want because it gives you an option of every other thing. Okay, so you want something that's like not useful in itself, but has properties that make it like somehow linger around. And the question is, how do you then convince people initially to take this thing that's not useful in itself, right? So like this is the Bitcoin problem. People like in the big early days, we're like, oh, it's got these great properties as a medium of exchange. But then you go to somebody and you say, will you take this digital object? And they're like, yeah, sort of, but why, right? You can't point to any intrinsic thing about it to make them take it, but you don't want something that has intrinsic value either because then they might use it for themselves. So you have this weird conundrum of how you kickstart that system. Historically, states are very good at doing it because they can use taxation systems to create demand for their own tokens, all right? So any kind of credit system creates loops where the initial issuance is backed by a reciprocal obligation, which means you can always bring it back, all right? They're much easier to kickstart those systems. So it's a much trickier job to try and kickstart one of these systems. I think Bitcoin's been very successful at this. And Bitcoin Cash is now taking the kind of, what's the word, the baton. I'm trying to take it on. But I don't see the big coin, right? Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Here's a question here. Hi, I want to ask something about the value of Bitcoin. And historically, people are using diluted metal as a currency, maybe diluted coin or diluted gold of coin or diluted gold of paper money. It's all diluted. And people use this currency because it's diluted and it's less valuable than the real gold. So people use it first, not gold, but people use paper money because paper money is less valuable. So people first use paper money. But Bitcoin of itself is not diluted and it is valuable. So people may not want to use it because it's gonna be valuable more or and people want to keep it because it's going to be not diluted. So why Bitcoin will be used as a currency? What do you think? I mean, what you just said is a very common thing people say. I think it's conceptually flawed on multiple levels. It would take me a long time to go through all of those. You're sort of assuming that it just is obviously valuable, all right? And as I said earlier, the quote-a-quote store value function of Bitcoin only exists in so far as you either create a cult or some kind of deep cultural attachment like gold has where it has religious purposes, it has all sorts of state purposes and to do with economic elites who like clothe themselves in gold and you create this deep cultural structure where despite the fact that it does not reuse for anything, it still maintains its status. So you either do that or else you have to make it super useful as a medium of exchange, all right? Like if it doesn't do either of those things, you've got a problem, like what's your quote-a-quote store value based on? So you're just assuming that that's the case. Like the fact that people are prepared to spend fiat currency on it doesn't mean that's the same as a store value, right? Like it's like, yeah, you gotta be careful. You gotta really like think these things deeply through. I don't really have time to go. Would it be better to say like the same problem with silver? Silver really has not a lot of even industrial uses, but people still buy silver. Yeah. And people still believe in the value of silver, but is it a currency? What's the huge network effect that it develops, right? You can have it like despite the fact that everyone might be like, oh, actually, does this really valuable? If the network effect is strong enough, it could actually maintain this, right? So there's various ways you can try to create it, but yeah, I don't know if that answered your question. In terms of like bi-metallism and the whole history of like coin clipping and stuff, it's a super complicated history and it's often not what people think it is either. There's, I mean, I can ask you this question, like how much gold for a car? Yeah, tell me now. Yeah, yeah, tell me. Yeah, of course you don't know. Nobody has any idea how much gold to give for a car. There's no way to intuitively assess that. You can't. If you only, you have to learn. Like this is why, like these are essentially commodities you can't intuitively think about like what it's supposed to be worth. Whereas I'll ask you the same question for like how many of these phones for a computer? You'll have a much more immediate way of working that out because you know intuitively the actual use value of these things. So this is the whole dark arts of making money systems work. Wow, all right. Mind blow, we got one on the back. Thanks, great talk. You're very knowledgeable about all this stuff and I know a lot of people who don't know all the things you do, but they do use cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin Cash for things. I'm just curious, somebody like you who knows all these things and knows all the intimate details of the workings of currency and money and stuff. What do you use Bitcoin Cash for and how much like do you use it for one particular thing and how much do you use it for some other particular thing or do you use it at all? Yeah, did I put my slide in, I didn't put the, I had a slide of a tweet I did which actually is no longer there so I took it out which was when Bitcoin first came out at least I guess I got involved like 2010 probably or something like that. I used to buy quite a lot of stuff with it. I used to get paid in Bitcoin as well. I actually was very into the idea that it would actually be a transaction system and I never wanted to think about it in terms of other currencies. All right, so I made a very explicit effort to try and buy things, accept it and so on. And then of course you know what happened, the whole sort of mentality's been taken over so that the tweet I put out was, I showed a bunch of receipts that I had and I said the only reason why it's got all this like fiat currency value now is a whole bunch of us in the beginning actually bothered to use it to create all that hype and to create all that media attention and stuff. And yeah, and that's totally true. So I was trying to use it as money but it became increasingly hard obviously and this is the question, this is obviously the difficulty. More recently I haven't actually been using very much, partly because I'm kind of broke and I don't have that much money. I still got a bit, I occasionally try, but yeah, I mean I would love to see a lot more of these deep networks being built such that I could almost, I could feel like there was actually a coherent economic network I was working with rather than essentially just bypassing through fiat systems, right? And that's a very, very difficult task. So I kind of skirted your question, but like, would it be your argument that Silk Road was a network that essentially Bitcoin founder? Yeah, yeah, so you really need like an anchor point to make your currencies work. You need to develop a fusion with a real economy, all right? So it needs to fuse into an actual network of goods and services. And to do that's very hard if you're working in an existing state system because those networks are already built. So you're trying to throw a sort of thing that doesn't have explicit characteristics into a fiat money system. So what happens is the fiat money system just co-opts it, all right, it turns it into another commodity. So you have to have some, like some way of partitioning off some network that becomes, it gets native to that network and then can start to build its own kind of base. So like, yeah, you have to create those in some kind of way, a real economy. So we should go back to drugs. Yeah, don't underestimate those types of things. Next question. Did you have, did you have one? How would you recommend that cryptocurrencies attempt to achieve value stability? And do you think it's important at all to pay attention to this at this stage? Not necessarily. I mean, look, so if I go back to here, so this is the situation right now. It's rooting itself through fiat currency, okay? So it's fluctuating relative to other commodities on the market. So people will often weirdly refer to this as like deflation. They often don't say inflation when the price is going down. So you get these kind of like, but really it's basically it's a commodity on a fiat market and it's going up and down. That in itself actually can be like a first stage to establishing its usage and getting it to well-known. So I'm actually, I have no real problem with that. And maybe you don't actually want it to be fully money. It could be a quasi-money, a type of sort of half semi-money. Actually already in financial markets you find a lot of this. You find like what they call like near monies or sort of like things that have moniness to them or quasi-moneys, all right? Which are things that aren't in and of themselves actually a pure like pricing system or not really a unit of account but they still actually operate as some kind of thing. So I don't know, it depends on what your ambition is. You're shaking your head, you're, yeah. Yeah, how to make people get money. No, I'm just being pragmatic. I'm saying, you know, as a first stage, it takes a while to establish something as a proper money but as an interim process, of course, you can try to just work with how it's actually operating on markets right now. Is that kind of like? Yes, yes. So relatively low importance at this stage potentially. Yeah. What we guess what I'm saying is it still has use even if it isn't fully a money. I mean, you can still use it in these other kind of ways. Just like I can pass Apple shares to somebody to pay for something as well but it doesn't make them a monetary system. All right, we have to go to the panel soon. So last question. Would you think that the expansion of mining pools and the operation of mining pools could potentially create these financial currents that are needed to establish Bitcoin as a currency? I don't feel like I have enough knowledge to answer. What do you mean, the mining pools? Well, mining pool operators and miners themselves need to continually buy new equipment and sort of recycle old equipment. And this can set up financial currents. Yeah, yeah. If they agreed to make their input costs in crypto as well, yeah. Right now their input costs are not in crypto. You have to create, that's not a full loop. That's like a partial circuit. It's not a full circuit. But sure, you want to target a few key players who prepared to take that hit, prepared to do that. Like if you can get the big anchors to actually agree to create the underlying structure of an economy, sure. That's cool. And with that, we wrap up. Let's get Brett a good hand.