 what the central bank digital currency is all about is surveilling Americans and controlling behavior of Americans. Today I'm here to call on the legislature to pass legislation to expressly forbid the use of CBDC as money within Florida's Uniform Commercial Code. Let's not assume everyone knows what a CBDC is, so just briefly explain what that is, why you think it's a problem and why you're approving of what DeSantis is doing here. Well, so what's a CBDC? A CBDC stands for Central Bank Digital Currency and to first order it is something that's a lot like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but it is run by Central Bank and so every dollar can be tracked in the ecosystem, it's more programmable, and that's different than how the current banking system is set up where you're not getting too technical, it's more opaque, it's all spread out across different databases as opposed to like one consolidated database where you can track literally every single dollar moving everywhere, right? So from a technology standpoint, a CBDC is an efficiency and transparency and programmability improvement over the status quo. If you were living in a high-trust society, you might be able to do that, right? The problem is we're not in a high-trust society, unfortunately, or in a society where these genuine productivity gains, unfortunately, will come with a hook, it's like a suite where it's got a hook in the bait and the hook is total surveillance, total control, ability to freeze accounts, drain accounts, the euphemism of consumer-to-government payments. If you take the observation that, for example, DeSantis has come out against CBDC, he's also got a Florida state guard, like he's making America states again, right? Federalism is on the rise and for the last 10 years or so, states have been breaking away from the feds both left and right on not just sanctuary cities, of course, but on gun laws, drug laws, abortion laws, crypto, everything, right? In crypto in particular, you know, you have, for example, Texas says the right to buy, sell, send, receive Bitcoin shall not be infringed. Wyoming and Tennessee have the Dow laws. Mississippi and Montana have Bitcoin Mining Protection Acts. Florida Mayor accepts the salary of Bitcoin. Colorado accepts tax of Bitcoin. New Hampshire is friendly to cryptocurrency, okay? So what I anticipate is that this is going to become a major political issue, but not in the typical left-right way, more of a federal versus states issue with more and more states potentially doing something like reopening the gold window. Here's a preview of an article I'm writing, okay? Reopening the gold window accepts the digital gold window. So we have Bitcoin.Forda.gov, Bitcoin.Texas.gov, Bitcoin.Wyoming.gov, okay? And so on. And what you can do is it's a simple Bitcoin exchange where you can buy and sell Bitcoin either as a brokerage or just by placing limit orders. And then these order books, they can use, you know, commercial exchanges or they can peer with each other, okay? And the state takes a cut at this and they are able to start building up their digital gold reserves like they'll sell. And they have restored the interconvertibility into digital gold that essentially reverses what Nixon did in 1971, okay? And why did they do this? Well, the state has actually put out some stuff on how he might actually have state chartered banks banking crypto as a response to the Fed trying to shut off banking access crypto. At which point, if you game it out, essentially you're going to get out with Fed to shut off Fedwire or ACH or other access to state chartered banks, which would mean like cutting off Florida simply to cut off crypto, which is probably too big a thing. And if the Fed did it, it would actually show the financial talentarianism that he's saying is potentially there with CVC. If they didn't do it, well, then they have to actually allow the currency of the people by the people for the people to not perish from the surf. And we actually have a Bitcoin exchange that is now at a government level, right? And so the thing is, you're seeing the movie Pacific Rim. Sure. Yes. Yeah. So Pacific Rim, these giant monsters come out of the ocean and humans cannot fight those giant monsters. So you have to build giant rods, okay? So when you've got a government that is attacking companies, you can't beat a government with a company. You can only beat it with another government. Okay. So Florida or Texas has enough hit points to be a giant robot that can stand up to harassment from the federal government. And I think that's what's going to come. Yeah. I favor separation of church and state, and I favor separation of Bitcoin and state and all other cryptocurrencies and state. So I'm not keen on state governments running exchanges. Those should be in private hands. They should play hands off toward private exchanges and let them do their thing. And so, of course, should the federal government. So I mean, that's what I think we have to rely on to preserve our monetary freedom of choice. We have to be eternally vigilant against encroachment of our rights and our liberties by the federal government and by the state government. Yeah. I do actually understand that view. But that's also why I wouldn't call myself an orthodox libertarian at all. You know, like, you know, Lee Kuan Yew was pretty much all over the political map and did what he thought was best for the country at any one time. Like, you know, whether he was subsidizing houses or doing things that seemed to be for the left or the libertarian right or what have you, he did some combination of policies, idiosyncratic heterodox combination policies. And I don't think that you can beat government harassment with just lawsuits. I think, like, basically, you need another state to kind of be on the other side of that. And I think that's what's going to happen. So look at it as unilateral disarmament. If you are, if women is not actually taking what Bitcoin really means seriously, it means essentially the currency of a free people, that you're not monitored, you can't be, you can't have your savings, you know, stolen and frozen, right? But that has an interaction. Go ahead. And that's why I'm not a fan of what's happened in El Salvador, where the government has tried to mandate that businesses accept Bitcoin, whether they want to or not. Fortunately, it hasn't taken. The businesses have refused it and it's been unenforceable. I completely understand where you're coming from. In fact, there is a difference of opinion in the community on this. But ultimately, there's actually a higher sort of standard, which is, is El Salvador going to attract migrants on net, right? That say, if there is a seeming violation of one or the other libertarian principle, but they preserve the freedom to exit, and other people are able to exit there, and if they're choosing that jurisdiction over others, whatever local tradeoffs they make that may be, you know, like incorrect by one theory or another are nevertheless something that unbalanced attracts people, right? And I think there's actually multiple solutions to that. That's to say, for example, the Netherlands has a very liberal drug policy. Singapore has a very strict drug policy. But arguably they're both better than the US has this bizarre, you know, bipolar, catch and release type policy where it's simultaneously very harsh punishments and non-punishments, you know? So, we're Singapore and the Netherlands are very clear about their goals. Hey, thanks for watching an excerpt from that conversation with Balaji Srinivasan and Lawrence H. White about Balaji's million-dollar Bitcoin bet, the state of the banking system and the US dollar. You could watch the full conversation here or another clip here.