 fiat. The concern that I have with its future is that the U.S. government banned gold ownership for four decades because of it being a threat to the U.S. dollar. How concerned are you that if Bitcoin ever presented a real threat to the U.S. dollar that it would suffer the same fate? So I think in general, holding back technology is very hard to do. The United States and China are really the entities that have a lot of firepower to cause Bitcoin challenges. One thing to keep in mind is that the gold ban in the FDR days was in an environment of super political concentration. So his party had like 70% of Congress, for example. And so you could stack the courts. You could override. You could just do supermajority stuff. And that's not the world we have today. So I think the basic, yes, if we were to have a supermajority of government that does not like Bitcoin, that really could set back Bitcoin for quite a while. It could damage the liquidity of the network. It could force institutional investors to discourage it. It could render it onto the gray market or black market. And of course, there will still be foreign usage of it. Plenty of hubs around the world that would happily say, okay, build your companies here and it's free to use here. But it would damage liquidity. But I think that those types of draconian things are harder to do if there's not that kind of supermajority concentration of power. It's also why I do think that some political work is useful. I mean, I'm not really politically engaged, but there are other people that go out and talk to senators and congressmen and make sure they understand it. I mean, during this recent multi-week period where there was no Speaker of the House, the acting Speaker of the House, he's hosting the Bitcoin White Paper on Congress's website. And so the acting Speaker of the House, and now it's still there. He's not the acting Speaker anymore, but Congress is hosting the White Paper. And that's the world we live in, where there are senators that like it. There are congresspeople that like it. There are governors that like it. There are presidential candidates that like it. We also have a somewhat independent judiciary and rule of law. And you can point to things like the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment. And there's context in that where, for example, in the 1990s, Phil Zimmerman got in legal trouble for introducing open source encryption to the world. And the U.S. went after him, but they eventually lost because they couldn't get past the First Amendment once he published the code in a book. And I think that Bitcoin has similar methods to try to protect itself from the most draconian pushback. So what might a transition to a more Bitcoin-based monetary system look like? What are the main technical obstacles that need to be overcome to really get that widespread adoption? Because it seems like right now what you were saying is that stablecoins are the big thing that people in countries with a weak currency are adopting. A stablecoin just for anyone listening who doesn't know. It's basically a cryptographic token that is redeemable for national currency like a U.S. dollar. So in a sense, people are still hungry for U.S. dollars. What would have to change for that hunger to turn to Bitcoin? I think a lot of it is just liquidity. And so when Bitcoin traded $1,000 a day, a millionaire couldn't just go in and put $1 million into without moving the price. The overall liquidity and sellability were low. When Bitcoin traded millions a day, someone couldn't just come and put a billion into it without moving the price. And even today, when it trades billions of dollars per day, there are very large pools of capital that if they're not careful, they can move the price. It's not a big, liquid enough market for them to really kind of go in significantly. It's still not, it doesn't have enough money properties for them yet. It has money properties at lower levels, but the bigger you get, the less liquid it is. And so it's still a tiny fraction of the overall dollar monetary system, which is much bigger, much more liquid, much more trench network effect. So I think that part of it is just going through a handful of more cycles. I mean, it has the benefit of absolute scarcity. So it's growing at a lower rate. In addition, developers keep building on top of it. So there's more layers that can be using it. There are better wallets, better user experience. Part of what, I originally discovered Bitcoin in like 2010 or so. And it's one of those things where in order to get it, you had to like mine it. And then I would revisit a couple years later, like I didn't buy it or didn't acquire it. And I would kind of look at the exchanges and they'd be really sketchy looking. And you had to like wire money to like Japan. And then like, it is like this whole thing. And then of course, it became much easier to do it. And then the wallet technology became much easier to use. And so part of it is just the UX gets better over time, liquidity gets better over time. And then of course, every year that goes by, people try to find more ways to break it or centralize it, things like that. So it's kind of like it's being tested for its hardness, you know, can someone find a way to, you know, break the overall technical capabilities of the Bitcoin network. And every year that goes by where that doesn't happen, the Lindy effect on it is strengthening. Unlike most technologies that can be adopted very quickly and smoothly. So, you know, most technologies, you adopt like the smartphone, you never go back to not having a smartphone, you don't adopt electricity and go back to not having it. A new monetary technology is different because unlike those, it can be levered. And so if it starts to go up in a smooth pattern, people will realize that and leverage it. And then they will make it a bubble and it'll crash. And then people will actually de-adopt it. They'll be like, well, I messed up, I should have bought Bitcoin, it's a scam, and they get out. And then Bitcoin has to spend a few years rebuilding from people that actually, you know, deeply followed the network and understand what's going on there and say, okay, there was a local bubble and it's going to work itself out. And then they kind of re-come into the network on the next cycle. So by its very nature, it's going to adopt basically any cyclical and longer taking way. And I think really there's a challenge of dollar one or two ways, either just the sheer liquidity and size of the network eventually reduces the volatility of it. You know, if it's held by just, you know, building people around the world in some small way, that's less volatile network than one where, you know, some like guy with crazy hair in the Bahamas can like, you know, manipulate the price. It just gets harder. And two, the United States dollar does have some kind of long-term fiscal challenges with it now that we've not really seen in a very, very long time. And so eventually the dollar can enter a more structurally inflationary problematic period, kind of like what Japan would look like if Japan had a trade deficit and had these other kind of challenges. And so I do think that either the dollar can hurt itself or Bitcoin can just keep gathering liquidity and technical proof and just overall better UX, assuming again that nothing, no one finds a way to hack it, centralize it, censor it, or otherwise disrupt it. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from my conversation with Lynn Alden about her new book, Broken Money. You can watch another clip right here or the full conversation over here.