 All right, so Bitcoin has the only working alternative to central banks and that's with a focus on only working alternative meaning I'm gonna talk about Bitcoin versus gold today and We will see why I believe now argue why gold isn't really an Isn't really an alternative if we consider money So we're gonna you're going to consider Bitcoin and gold as the medium of exchange how how do they compare and Obviously money has also the function of store value and unit of account, but means of exchange is the most important function the two other functions are kind of sub functions and And so we won't talk about is it the better investment to invest to invest in gold or how much How much of your portfolio should be in Bitcoin or should be in gold? there are a lot of things that are great investments and a bad money obviously so you can buy Real estate might be a great investment. Maybe not right now, but Whatever and It's a great investment great store value. Let's say but it's bad money. So there are a lot of those things and So we will talk about as the means of exchange function only and First let's talk about the properties of money. So this Kind of framework is put forward by Jacomo and I will use it today Kind of There are several different frameworks, but they all work. So we have scaleness Which is divisibility and portability Meaning you need to be able if you want money Which is which works and which is good money. You need to be able to Start really cheaply across space of portability across space and portability across time so start and transport it and it needs to be divisible so you can buy your groceries or whatever and And that's that's the scaleness aspect then we come to the darkness aspect, which is The privacy aspect so fungibility and deniability fungibility obviously meaning every unit needs to be like every other unit It's at least we want that and then liability is You shouldn't have to care about the history and stuff and you should be able if it's perfect Let's say you should be able to deny even that you have this money and that how much you have and no one should be able to tell And then we have also hardness Which is divisibility and unforgibility here unforgibility also means Unforgible costliness so that's also the scarcity stock to flow aspect and Durability also the physical goods you don't want money which decays over time But we're gonna get into it Like all of the a little bit later first. Let's see a brief history of gold So how do we how do we get here in this kind of fear system? How do we how does it even happen? So? first of people People for a time used gold and silver coins as payments just normal gold and silver coins obviously you couldn't just use gold because Well gold the coins are worth too much. So you can't buy groceries with gold coins. So we had gold and silver coins But they still have some problems of storage and verification and stuff. So gold standard developer You just don't pay with gold and silver coins, but you pay with a certificate and This certificate means you go to your bank and get like one gram of gold for the certificate And that's really great because you don't have to carry on all of this gold You don't have to store it. You can just go to the bank and that's that's fine But the problem was that some other someone at some point the state decided that they don't want this gold standard anymore They would like to print money. They would like to finance their wars and whatever all of their conflicts So they took control of of the standard and ended the standard, but how did they do it? They took control of most of the supply which was centralized in some small amount of banks. So Like a few couple of banks have like most of the gold supply and Then they also outlawed the ownership of private gold and because of physical nature and some other things We go and get into later. It's really difficult to develop a black market and to hold gold if someone else doesn't want you to hold gold and In the scenario the the most of the supply was anyways gone and then the Hands of the state, let's say so there wasn't really an option of developing a black market and Now let's take a look at how Bitcoin could have prevented it and how which which properties makes it better money So we won't have won't have this kind of scenario again Which we really would like to avoid next time if we can develop a better monetary system and The first aspect is scaleness as we've talked about so gold is not very divisible. That's why we needed silver And it's not It's not very cheap to transport and store. So you need large if you'll have large sums You need either to invest a lot of money and Storing it and transporting it or you need to store it in a bank and They are obviously risk as we've discussed with the gold standard and storing all of your money in the bank and These problems are solved in Bitcoin. So it's easy to easily divisible because it's digital. So in theory you can devise it like however much you want and This means also that there is no need for silver. So no need for light coin some people might have Might still know with light coin when when they try to market themself as the silver to gold Bitcoin, which is Really bad marketing because Bitcoin doesn't need silver and Then also one of the most important differences obviously is the storage is And transport is simple and cheap compared to gold I'm not talking about cheap in the sense of it only cost a couple of bucks of sending it I'm talking about the final settlement How much does it cost if I want to send some of gold on the other side and like to over some borders and whatever How much does it really cost to ship the gold there compared to getting the Bitcoin there and Obviously the storage you can have your private key in your head on some piece of paper and You can have whatever amount you want on it. So that's really really great way of great way of solving the storage problem from gold and Then we come to the second aspect which is darkness, which is these Privacy aspects. So we have on gold. We actually have great fungibility Because you can smell it in every gold bar and you have like you can have It looks like every other gold bar. That's great. It's a little bit tricky in practice because Well doing it at home, you don't have a smelting pot at home. So it gets really tricky but it's it's possible in theory and Then you don't have any history of transactions if you do it locally peer-to-peer and You don't You don't have it Like that's also problem with gold standard if you digitalize it you have this history of transactions but that's that's another point and You know don't have deniability sadly of large sums basically because gold is physical takes up some space So everyone knows if you have a lot of gold or it's at least really difficult to hide and in Bitcoin fungibility is a problem. So that's probably the biggest problem Bitcoin right now fungibility and privacy and it's being worked on with coin join pay join this is kind of not not like coin join, but it's still a technique to like get your identity of your coins buying it basically anonymously and There is a history of all transactions, which is obviously bad for our privacy and fungibility part But the good thing is it can be worked on there will always be a history of all transactions But there are different ways of Improving privacy and if we get this privacy improved to a sufficient point Let's say which is obviously difficult and there will always be this fight of like surveillance and privacy But if you have it we have easy deniability of large sums because there is no physical representation of Bitcoin right so you can just if the privacy is given and you bought it anonymously Let's say and you coin joined and it worked and you you you have a lot of Lot of privacy you can't just deny that you have large sums of Bitcoin There's no one able to tell because in theory you can even have it in your head you your private key and that's it no one knows and Now we come to the third aspect which is hardness Good money should be hard meaning it should be should be difficult to create more and Not decay over time and gold obviously has that with greater ability It has relative scarcity and high stock to flow ratio and the stock to flow ratio the highest stock to flow ratio a Highest stock to flow ratio from any good you have known or any commodity So that's why it's always used as money You don't want any any you don't want to hold anything which loses a lot of value over time So stock to flow just means you have large you have a large quantity of this money or of this good already in existence compared to what's being produced or which new supply coming in every year, let's say and That would suggest that you have a large Unfortunate costliness, but the problem with gold here. That's one of the biggest problems is the individual verification is impossible so I As an individual Cannot verify if I trade with someone gold peer-to-peer It's impossible for me to verify this gold I need to go to a third party and let it smelled in and trust him that it's hundred percent real Sure, there are some techniques of trying to get a decent understanding of how real your goal is, but they are not hundred percent accurate and Faking gold gets easier and easier Ironically enough with technology. So it's it's really a big problem this fake gold and obviously the supply is unknown Which is due to the fake gold, but also due to there's no There's no central central authority that kind of tracks all of the gold So that's that's really something to keep in mind. That's very fine. There's difficulty of verification really makes it not so unfortunate as you would like and Bitcoin on the other hand has also great durability. It's digital and decentralized. Everyone has a copy if you run a full note and It has absolute scarcity compared to relative scarcity of gold and Soon like after the next half and it has the highest stock to flow ratio ever So then it's the scariest money But the more important part and it's way more important than absolute versus relative scarcity My opinion is that you can verify the supply and the Bitcoin you receive Individually and this is really easy and really cheap That's the most important difference between gold and Bitcoin And this leads to a lot of a lot of great things and we've heard Obi talk about a little bit about the sovereignty aspect and this is where it's coming from when everyone's talking about monetary sovereignty and All of this kind of stuff. It's all a consequence of running a note. You don't I don't have to I run my own note I don't have to trust anyone else telling me if the Bitcoin is real quote-unquote real Bitcoin Or if it's fake Bitcoin or whatever around my own note, I Don't need anything else and it's really cheap. So a lot of people can do it. This is really important and This is kind of the biggest three differences. So You have one storing large sums of gold is really difficult to we have this very fine Supply very fine the gold you get is really difficult and it's getting worse if you don't do a hundred percent verification So a lot of technology development Kind of favors sadly, let's say sadly the attacker over the defender So all of the development and nuclear weapons and whatever always the attackers favorite There's no defense against it and the attackers favorite So kind of this development always favors the attacker one of the exceptions is Bitcoin funny enough because of all the encryption encryption is a Development a technological development which favors the defense over the attack because verifying it is easy But faking it takes a lot of energy So part two is the really difficult a really big difficulty of verifying the authenticity of gold and part three is the The divisibility of gold so you need either a gold standard where you can have notes where you can have small paper notes where One paper note can work be worth whatever and that solves the divisibility problem or you can have silver But only using gold coins doesn't really work Bitcoin solves these problems these three major problems and Storage problems solved by the digital nature It's easy to verify the supply and authenticity by running a full note which costs a couple of hundred bucks in comparison to let's say the Gold full note, which is a smelting pot which costs a lot of money and takes a lot of specialized knowledge and The third part is is extremely divisible also because of its digital nature basically all those three points are Only solved because it's digital so Everyone who if people talk about Blockchain and it it's kind of backed by gold or backed by whatever They're really missing the point because if you make it non-digital if you Have something which backs it you lose all of these Advantages and that's that's awful like then then we are back then we can just use gold So gold-backed cryptocurrencies are a non-starter by the way And so now we're gonna go and talk about some some arguments Let's say they're often brought forward from gold box and that's probably what Daniel was referring to when he said I was kind of Not nice to gold box online and I I think that's probably right because I Mean I have no problem with people buying gold selling or whatever. It's a great investment. I think I Not bad in Bitcoin, but that's that's not a discussion, but telling people it's for some reason better money than Bitcoin is just insane and we will just now see some arguments and This is an example from Marcus Krall and some people might know him if you live in Germany, you probably know him he's probably he's decently well known in Germany and Famous because he's closer to like some Austrian economics and Telling everyone that the banking system we have right now is awful and stuff, which is obviously right But he's a big gold book and in one interview he got asked about Bitcoin and we want to keep in mind that Helons razor like we should never attribute to malice which at that which is adequately explained by stupidity So I would leave the the viewers. Let's say to decide if this can be explained by Incompetence on his part or if he's just not trying to understand Bitcoin because he sells gold at his digosa exchange and Yeah, so let's get into it. The first quote is to be fair Analyze it very intensively. So when he got asked about Bitcoin, he said he did a lot of research in it Because he gets asked a lot about it. So that's that's a great start, but two quotes that follow are really Really insane. So the first one is Bitcoin would be money if there was something in it and I'm not really sure how this is even supposed to be an argument The best interpretation or the most favorable interpretation I could think of of this is an intrinsic value argument So that's the same where people say we did condescend that value. You need to back it with gold or whatever but I'm not sure if he means that I hope not because if if people write me's is for example You should know and other Austin economics, you should know there's no such thing as intrinsic value Things don't have an intrinsic value. You're just objectively or whatever People we as people value things subjectively and that's where the value comes from there if there is no people has no value there's no nothing in gold in the Chemical makeup of gold which gives a value. That's a complete weird thought so that's a non-starter and The second quote is Bitcoin might be scarce, but I can put 10 of the same next third I can put 100 next third. Where's the scarcity? And that's also I'm not sure How to how to even respond to this quote-unquote argument because it's so Unbelievable as it shows a lack of understanding on all on all fronts, basically So if we take it to mean that there are other all coins And they they they can be created at will let's say That's obviously true, but it doesn't end well and validate the scarcity of Bitcoin just like Mine and copper and silver doesn't invalidate the scarcity of gold, right and if we if we take it to mean Yeah, you can copy the code of Bitcoin and run it for yourself on your own computer and whatever Then that's obviously also true. That's by the way, what you do when you run the note, but It doesn't make Bitcoin any less scarce because you cannot introduce Necurrency in the system and if you if he had really done the research he claims to do and this is only an example For like other gold box and their worst people probably out there who who pretend to know something about Bitcoin and Say they've done research when either they haven't already. They're just lying. So I'm I'm really I don't I'm not sure how how this is even how this is even possible that that you can But you can tell tell your opinion or if you voice your opinion on this topic without Having any clue what's going on and then I want to go To my last slide or my last argument Which are often here and it's not really an argument It's more of an argument that we don't know right now, which is the best money And we can't find out until we have a free market So we need to establish a free market first and then we can finally see oh, yeah competition and the best money will win and And This this argumentation starts with two correct observations first one is We don't have a free market the money right now. We have a lot of regulations. We have legal tender laws We have taxes we have whatever So that's obviously true and the second point is that a free market the money is desirable That's also completely true a free market and almost anything is desirable. So yes Anyone should use whatever they want but The problem we're thinking that we this market we have right now Cannot decide which is the best money that's just false because Money which is unable to work under the oppression of a state is undesirable meaning it's bad money So we don't want another failure like gold where it is. Yes in a free market scenario when the government plays plays nice and Plays along it works kind of decently and stuff and everything is fine But then once the government decides yeah, we are gonna stop this gold standard stuff Then it just breaks down completely. That's not what we want. So If money doesn't work right now under all the oppressions under all the regulations, whatever It's just bad money. We don't need it. We need the money that works right now and not in some ideal free market and The second point is kind of more basic it just calling for it arguing for it is also naive. So Obviously you can do it, but hoping that the state or the central banks Will listen to you and just say oh, yeah, great arguments for free market and money We just got it wrong all the time Keynesian economics is wrong. Let's do a free market That's that's not a possibility my opinion and it's really naive to think it and the the last this this ties in with my last point basically which is Thinking we need to shrink the state to get rid of all regulations and All of this good stuff and then we can have good money is the wrong sequence of events We have first need to have good money which is outside the control of government Which is outside all the regulations we can which can basically Work on the oppression of the state and then we will have afterwards after the state kind of kind of learns that it cannot control it and it cannot charge the taxes like it wants to and stuff then the Government will get smaller so That's basically my last quote here where I say it is not the free market that makes Bitcoin possible But rather Bitcoin that makes the free market possible so yeah, thank you and Thank you for listening