 Our final speaker today is someone whom I'm sure many of you are familiar with, Dr. Safideen Amas. He's the best kind of intellectual and academic, which is to say an independent one. He has taken some time off from his teaching job, teaching duties at the American University in Baruch to work on his book, which is now considered the seminal work in the area, the Bitcoin Standard. He also teaches his new online courses at his own website, safideen.com, which are really fascinating, really interesting. We have a small group of us at the Mises Institute that watches them live on Monday mornings. He does hold advanced degrees from the London School of Economics and from Columbia University. He was, however, able to overcome those infirmities and still develop a sensible worldview. Dr. Safideen Amas. Thank you very much, Jeff, and to everybody at the Mises Institute. It was really down to your work and your beautiful website that I managed to overcome these infirmities. And it is thanks to this that I have recovered intellectually and I'm able to stand on my intellectual feet in front of you at the Mises Institute. So thank you so much. It's a true honor to be here. Today, I'm not going to actually present my book. I'm going to talk about the topic of Bitcoin and Austrian economics and the relationship between them. Why is it that Bitcoiners are so interested in Austrian economics in general? Obviously far more than the general population is. And why is it that I think and so I'm going to try and explain why in my mind I think Austrian economics helps us understand Bitcoin and how also Bitcoin also can help understand Austrian economics. Why it leads to many people wanting to study Austrian economics once they learn about Bitcoin. I think it's something that is well worth explaining. These are my five general categories of explanations of this phenomena. So let's get into them. The first one is that Bitcoin is free market and non governmental money. And you know, the famous quote by Mises quoted in Professor Salerno's book is that the sound money principle has two aspects. It's affirmative in approving the market's choice of a commodity used medium exchange and negative in obstructing the government's propensity to metal with the currency system. And in this regard, I think Bitcoin is extremely interesting from an Austrian perspective because it functions as a medium of exchange and it has acquired that role without any government having forced it. It nobody has forced its acceptance as money and yet this has acquired that role of a medium of exchange and it has acquired economic value on the market. The value of Bitcoin has never been imposed by any authority violently. It has been one on the market and it has been trading freely on a market for 10 years, which I think is amazing. And it's amazing because it's not government approved money. Nobody asked government's opinion for it to function and yet it operates, it works. So it's a slap in the face of the state theory of money. So that should make Austrians happy, not that it needs any more slaps because it's God, it's fair share of them. But to also borrow from Professor Salerno's distinction, Bitcoin is firmly in the tradition of Turgo as money. It's not John Law money. It's not money as an instrument of law as an instrument of government as an instrument of policy. It's money as a natural emergent institution, market institution that emerges through peaceful cooperation. It's a good that emerges on the market that all others. Now the question of is it money, is Bitcoin money? I like this definition from Man, Economy and State by Rothbard, where he says the concept of a medium of exchange is a precise one, but the concept of money is not. It's it's less precise. The point at which you could call a medium of exchange into the common or general medium of exchange and therefore define it as money is rather subjective and and down to judgment of the historian. So in this regard, you know, Bitcoin is not the most used money in the world by far. However, it is already more it's worth more in terms of the value that it holds than many of the national currencies around the world. So it's you know, it's it's it's more of a money or it's more it's got more volume as money than most national currencies out there in only 10 years. So the other interesting thing about it as a free market institution is that it is the only working alternative to government central banks and their monopoly over international money transfer. I think this is from a just purely functional perspective. It's truly amazing because there's no way that you can send money across international borders up until the year 2009. There was no way you could do this, except through going through the central banks monopoly and in particular through the correspondence banks, which are which is a highly lucrative monopoly in every country. You know, the central bank allocating to a few banks, the privilege of being able to send and receive money abroad is highly lucrative. And it's a monopoly that only Bitcoin breaks, only Bitcoin has succeeded at breaking. So this is quite amazing because now finally we have a free market way of having money across the world. And it's, you know, the interesting thing then once you see that this thing is possible, that it's possible to send money from the US to China without having to resort to any of the political and legal institutions that exist in the US or China, then it becomes possible for people to really see that free market money is possible. And that's when the march down the Bitcoin rabbit down the Austrian economics rabbit hole starts to happen. Because the next question as well, how is free market money different from government money? And, you know, the only coherent answer to these explanations can come from Austrian business cycle theory, which will tell you is effectively economic crisis. And inflation and unemployment are not, you know, just the product of how capital markets function. They're the products of the intervention in capital markets through central planning and manipulation by central banks. And that if you had a free market monetary system, then you wouldn't get these kinds of failures happening. So this is the first one. The second one is the fact that Bitcoin continues to operate in spite of having the committed the cardinal sin of having a fixed money supply. The Bitcoin money supply can't be increased. Nobody has found a way of making more than 21 million bitcoins. And yet it works. So really, the only version of the universe in which this works is really Austrian economics, because all the other scores of economics have all their various reasons for why the money supply needs to grow at all times. So Bitcoin refutes that inflationist tenant of modern economics, which is almost taken for granted amongst most economists. And the interesting thing about it is that, you know, it's not just a living challenge, it's mathematical almost. We've seen Bitcoin. If you look at the growth in the Bitcoin supply over the last five years, it grew the number of bitcoins in circulation has grown by about 32 percent. The value of the daily transactions carried out in Bitcoin in those five years has grown by about 2,500 percent in the same term. So that, you know, the fact that Bitcoin growth has not kept up with the value or the real market value or the real size of the Bitcoin economy has been no impediment. Bitcoin has just appreciated and it has not needed the supply rate to increase. So people who believe in the inflationist view of money, who think that the money that the supply needs to continue to increase, need to really ask why, what need to now answer the question of what supply growth is necessary, what is insufficient. Why should, you know, should it be 2 percent, as some people have suggested, but there's very little evidence as to why and how, you know, what happens when Bitcoin goes under 2 percent? Does that mean that Bitcoin stops working 5 percent, 10 percent? Is the size of the growth in the money supply, does it have to be proportional to economic activity or to the number of people and why can't it be zero? These are all very difficult questions for people to answer if they are not armed with Austrian economics. And that's why they come to Austrian economics when they find out about Bitcoin. Basically, you know, I think it's quite amazing that so far we've not seen a single inflationist economist present a coherent theory or a coherent prediction about why the limitation, the limited supply of Bitcoin is a problem with Bitcoin. It would really be interesting to see, you know, somebody present that if the growth, the supply growth rate of Bitcoin is declining, it's around 4 percent. So eventually it's going to drop below 1 percent and head towards zero. So it would really be great if any of those people who tell us that money supply growth is necessary could actually formulate a point at which they'll tell us, you know, at this point, Bitcoin stops working because the supply growth is too slow. We've not seen anybody come up with an explanation. If you know anyone, please let them volunteer. I'd really be interested. The third topic I find interesting is time preference. Austrian economists seem to be the only ones who focus on the importance of time preference. And I think, you know, the impact of the move toward easy money and how that has affected individual and societal time preference is something that you would only really read about in the work of Austrian economists like Professor Holtzmann or Professor Hopper and, you know, the impact of time preference on decision making and the importance, of course, in Austrian economics of time preferences is unrivaled and is not really analyzed. And we see this, the interesting thing about Bitcoiners and over time is because Bitcoin has appreciated so much, people who have started getting into it have realized, have started to really learn what opportunity cost means. Just somebody, just today, you know, as if to prepare me for this talk, somebody tweeted something that I just saw saying a hangover is Satoshi's way of reminding you that you could have been buying Bitcoin instead with the money that you spent on alcohol. And it's, you know, it's something that for people, our generation is something that we've never had. Like the concept of saving doesn't really exist. When you're young, it doesn't make sense to save because money loses value over time and you don't know how to invest in the stock market. So the culture of saving, particularly among young people in our generation, isn't very common these days. I'm sure that this is not news for anybody here, but Bitcoin changes this quite drastically. And it leads to a lot of people beginning to think much more about the future. And I think honestly, the reason the, the, the, the, the, the number of people that mentioned this that have mentioned to me personally and then say it online cannot really be a coincidence. It's, it really forces a shift in the way that you think about things because when you have access to a hard money, it makes it easier to plan for the future. It makes it easier to hold on to value for the future. And that makes it more rational to plan for the future, more successful, more likely to be successful to be planning for the future. So people will start thinking more and more of the future if they have more reliable methods for saving to get to it. And I think that's effectively what Bitcoin is doing. And fourth, you know, ending the Fed, this, I think, is another reason that Bitcoiners and Austrian economists see eye to eye in many ways. Bitcoin is essentially actionable, practical, practical, individual and an apolitical way of ending the Fed, one individual at a time. And so, you know, it's no matter how much you think Bitcoin is bad, it's still non-governmental money. And the more you use it and the more less you use government money, the less you're financing government and you're allowing government to finance itself from this. So this kind of motivation, you find it quite common amongst people who read Austrian economics, you know, ending the war, defunding the Fed for ending the Fed. Of course, anyone who's familiar with the work of Ron Paul knows how important this was as an issue for him and many other people associated with Austrian economics. And it also is quite strong of a motivation among many Bitcoiners. Many people see it as this new motivation of just taking money out of the hands of the government. And Bitcoin offers us a new technological way of doing it, which I think is quite interesting. So finally, Bitcoin has exemplary haters. You know, if I haven't sold you on Bitcoin yet, just remember all the people who hate them. You know, the fiat governments, obviously, they hate them because it would be a shame if somebody were to take away their printing presses, right? And fiat economists like Krugman and Rubini, obviously, they also hate Bitcoin because, you know, they are employed by governments that tell them to tell the world about the importance of government money and the importance of monetary policy and the importance of hiring more and more economists in your central bank and listening to the IMF and listening to all the chief economists from the IMF, all that army of economists that they send all over the world. To tell you how to centrally plan your economy, you know, all of that army is financed essentially with government money and credit. Nobody actually would pay for the services of, you know, IMF economists like Rubini to go and destroy their country voluntarily. They pay for those things because the IMF walks in with a loan of freshly printed fiat money that they get from their credit line from the US Federal Reserve. And so it would also be a shame if Bitcoin were to put these people out of a business, wouldn't you say? And of course, you know, monopoly banks that have a monopoly over correspondence banking. This is one very important monopoly throughout in today's economic activity. And it's it's it's something that Bitcoin disrupts. It allows us to have this instead of having to rely on this old financial political behemoth monopoly. You just rely on open source software that nobody can control, nobody can manage. And it's a truly, truly amazing thing. And, you know, a lot of people can be skeptical about while software, you know, you can always hack software. But pretty much most of the critical things that we do in our life from the grid to flying airplanes today, they all run on. Well, not all, but the majority of them probably run on open source software. It's the most reliable thing because it's, you know, open source software means anyone can check it online. And so if anyone finds a mistake in it, they can report it. And so this means people are constantly verifying it and constantly checking it and constantly revising it. And effectively, this is what Bitcoin is becoming. It's just becoming a fixed protocol for exchanging value without politics. And that really makes it quite interesting. Thank you very much for everything. One final announcement. My website, as Professor Deist has mentioned, safeadine.com, and in the Academy section, I've already offered two classes and I'm going to begin offering the next class now. I'm going to start a principles of economics class based on Murray Rothbard's man economy and state. And basically the business model of my website is to teach Austrian economics to Bitcoiners. And so a lot of them are becoming interested in it because of Bitcoin, because of all the reasons that I mentioned. And so if, you know, if you don't believe me, well, you know, I believe myself enough to set up the website at least. So check it out. And of course, let me know what you think of the syllabus. Obviously, if you have any feedback about it, I would appreciate it. Thank you very much.