 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies. Our topic for today's episode is Bitcoin. Joining us to discuss it is Timothy B. Lee, senior editor at Vox, covering technology and previously with The Washington Post. Tim, can you start by just telling us what is Bitcoin? Sure. So Bitcoin is, fundamentally, it's a new payment technology. So there's traditional payment technologies like PayPal or Visa or MasterCard that lets you send money from one person to another and make payments. And Bitcoin is a network that performs the same function but has a couple of important differences. One of the differences is it's the first payment technology that's completely decentralized. So if you think about PayPal, PayPal is owned by eBay, but it's a company that runs the PayPal network that's responsible for ensuring that if you get a payment in PayPal that you'll be able to actually get your money out. There's no Bitcoin incorporated that runs the Bitcoin network. It's operated as a peer-to-peer network. There's thousands of computers around the world that collectively manage the network according to some standardized rules. That means there's also nobody in control of it, and it means that there's no gatekeepers. So anybody can create new Bitcoin-based applications. Anybody can send money through it. There's no regulations about what kind of transactions you can have and so forth. The second thing that's unique about the Bitcoin network is that whereas PayPal and MasterCard use the dollar as their unit of account, Bitcoin has its own currency, which is slightly confusingly also called the Bitcoin. And that's a currency that isn't pegged to any conventional currency. It doesn't have any fixed value in terms of dollars or euros. Rather, it floats just as the euro and the dollar float against each other and have different values over time. So Bitcoin, the currency, the value of floats against the dollar. This sounds sort of bizarre. I mean, if we think about money, this doesn't sound like anything we've ever heard of something similar before. You can't get one in paper or a coin, an actual coin. So computers just churn this out and people use them to buy things. That seems a little bit weird. Yeah, it's very weird. I mean, it's very counterintuitive. When I first heard about Bitcoin in 2011, I was pretty skeptical of it. And partly, I think, is just historical conventional currencies. They started out, often they were backed by gold or something like that. And then they transitioned to what's called fiat currencies that isn't back to anything, but were still pieces of paper, as you were saying. We got checking accounts. We have this pretty complicated infrastructure that's very intertwined with the banking system and with the regulation and so forth. I think actually, though, if you look at the way things work right now, in many ways, the conventional banking system is mostly electronic. And we still exchange pieces of paper, but the really big payments are all electronic, we use more and more things with credit cards. So in some ways, Bitcoin is, it's the first kind of purely electronic payment technology. But the idea of making payments electronically is not super new or unusual. Maybe we can walk through, because this is a little bit confusing of what this thing actually looks like. And where they come from. In user perspective and just in general. So where do these, there's these things called bitcoins that, you know, so if I pay you with them, I'm paying you with something. And those don't exist except in computers. They're just code somewhere. So where do they come from? How do I get them? And what happens when we exchange them? Sure. So the way that the fundamental kind of unit of the Bitcoin network is there's this thing called the blockchain, which is just a list of transactions that have happened. And one of the unusual things about the Bitcoin network is that every, every computer that participates as a kind of a full member of the Bitcoin network has a list of every transaction that's ever happened in the Bitcoin network since the beginning of the network in 2009. And the way it works is kind of by consensus. So if you have a Bitcoin and you want to send it to me, you submit a transaction that just says, you know, this address pays this address and there's some cryptography that goes into that to make sure it's secure. And then that's just distributed to everybody else who's on the Bitcoin network through a particular set of protocols that ensure that there's some, some security and some consistency. And once you mean the record of the transaction is distributed to everyone else on the, everyone who has the program, everybody who has the parameters, I could, I could be on the network. If I installed this program on my computer. Yes. Yeah. So you can run your computer. It's actually, it's become, because there's the volume of transactions is growing to the point where it's difficult for somebody on a home PC to sort of keep up with the volume of transactions. But certainly in principle, you could, you might, you know, in a few years, you might have to get like a pretty beefy server to do this. But yes, anybody can just join, be kind of a full member of that network and can get, can download this record of every transaction that ever happened. And so when you make a payment, you simply announce this to the rest of the network. Once there's kind of a consensus of the network that yes, this transaction occurred, then the bitcoins that you formally owned now officially belong to me. And there's no, in terms of what they are, how you store them. There's just a, there's like a private key, which is like a password that gives you the ability to transfer the bitcoins. And you just store that on your hard drive, or you can write it on a piece of paper, or there's, you know, it's just a little piece of information that gives you the ability to control those bitcoins. And that's all there is to it. It's just, it's a record in this shared address and a private key that gives you the ability to transfer it. So why are they valuable? So that's a very interesting question. I mean, and so in some ways you can ask the same question about conventional currencies, right? I mean, the reason that Bitcoin is valuable, reason dollars are valuable is because people have an expectation that other people will accept them in exchange for goods and services. And, you know, that's a very familiar notion for the dollar. Like obviously Google green pieces of paper are not intrinsically valuable, but, you know, we have this convention that has existed for many decades, so that's true. But it is an interesting question. How do you bootstrap this process? And basically, it just was a gradual process with Bitcoin. If you go back to 2010, when Bitcoin was young, you could buy 10,000 Bitcoins for about $50. There was a pizza that was purchased for 10,000 Bitcoins. And now it's worth about, right. And so at that point, that was less than a penny. Now a Bitcoin is worth about $600. So that's expensive pizza. Yeah. So that pizza, you know, would have cost you $6 million or something like that. I mean, if you'd save those Bitcoins, the guy that bought the pizza, that was not a good financial transaction. And it was just, I think to a larger extent, it's just kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy where people, they see that there's this interesting new payment network that they think might be valuable in the future, and they see that if it is valuable in the future, these individual Bitcoins will have to be valuable in order to accommodate all the transactions people want. And so they make kind of a speculative bet that if I buy now, it'll be valuable later. And then as everybody does that, it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the prediction that it'll be valuable actually becomes valuable. Where do these Bitcoins come from? So we've got this ledger. So if I understand it correctly, like, I don't actually have, if I own Bitcoins, I don't actually have Bitcoins themselves anywhere. Rather, I have an address, a passcode of some kind, and then there's this ledger that exists out there. That says I have 10 Bitcoins. You say this address has 10 Bitcoins and you have the passcode. But all I have in my possession is this address. So where do those, what's to stop me from entering into that ledger? You know, I'm transferring you a thousand Bitcoins that I didn't have. Is there some? Yeah. So the two things, the way the ledger works is that anytime there's a Bitcoin transaction, the network every node checks to make sure that the from address actually had the number of Bitcoins and it debits that amount. So that's why you couldn't just say, I get 10,000. Another question, obviously, is where do they come from? I mean, this is one of the really clever things about the way Bitcoin is designed. So the process of clearing transactions, of receiving all these announcements of transactions and making sure they're consistent and distributing some other nodes, you know, that costs, that takes some, some work, some, you know, take some effort. And so the way the Bitcoin network is organized, everybody who participates in the network has what amounts to a lottery. There's a difficult mathematical problem that everybody tries to solve. And the first computer to solve it gets to add a new block of transactions to this thing called the blockchain. And as a reward for that, they get to award themselves a fixed number of block of Bitcoins, which right now is 25 Bitcoins. And so this is this kind of clever incentive mechanism where it's, like I said, it's kind of like a lottery where if you participate in this process that benefits the Bitcoin network, every once in a while, you'll win the lottery and get 25 Bitcoins, which is worth like $15,000. So it's a significant amount of money. And so those Bitcoins then just show up as, again, an entry on this ledger saying this address that happened to win the lottery here has them. Yes. Then does this mean so one of the things that you hear about is people losing Bitcoins. I remember hearing a story recently about some guy who said that he had a hard drive, that he had mined Bitcoins to and then he threw it out or he lost or something until those Bitcoins were lost. But if I'm understanding you correctly, they're not really lost. Those Bitcoins still exist in the ledger. It's just that he can't access them and no one else can because they don't have whatever code was sitting right on that hard drive. Right. There's a private key or kind of a password that you need to access those Bitcoins. And there's no like password recovery mechanism, right? If you lose the password, then in theory, those Bitcoins still exist. And if somebody happened to guess what the password is, they'd be able to use them, but it's very difficult to do that. And so in practice, nobody's ever going to be able to do anything with those particular Bitcoins again. So these computers, they're incentivizing them to mine. I think it's called mining, right? That's right. They mine the Bitcoins to produce more by solving these problems. I'm thinking of like Fermat's last theorem or something like maybe something less less difficult than that. So it's actually very repetitive. The problem that's being solved is just a very repetitive one. There's a function called a hash function that just produces a random string and they just do this computation over and over again with a different sort of input value until they get a very low number as the output. And so it's not it's not actually like an interesting mathematical problem. It's just they need some way of kind of calibrating the you know, as more people during the network, they need some way of calibrating it so you don't have too many people getting these rewards. And so this is just a way of by setting how low of a number you have to get. It's a way of ensuring that you get these rewards get distributed as standard rate. The next thing, so this actually creates more computers on the network though, which would seem to help the network, right? In terms of how how many transactions you can make on it and how useful it is. Right. So one of the advantages of this is that given that it takes a huge amount of computing power now to to what's called solve a block and get this reward, it means that if some hostile person wanted to kind of take over the network and destroy it or add bogus transactions or something, they would need a huge amount of computing power in order to do that. And so it makes the system more robust and more secure. And there's I understand there's a cap to the number of bitcoins that can never be mined, right? This doesn't the mining doesn't go on and on forever. Yeah. So what it does is is that the amount of bitcoins falls by half every four years. And so if you do your sort of power series, the amount you get for winning. Yeah, the amount you get every 10 minutes on average for for winning this lottery. Right now it's 25 bitcoins. It'll be 12 and a half bitcoins starting in about 2017 and six and a quarter, etc. And if you just sort of add up all those numbers, you'll asymptotically approach 21 million is the long term number. Then one thing I wonder about was if so bitcoins is so they can't the bitcoins themselves can't be lost. But the address that they are attached to can be lost such those bitcoins now kind of out of circulation effectively and can't really be brought back into circulation. Right. So bitcoins can be lost, but there's a cap at the maximum number. Then does that end up meaning that Bitcoin at some point is kind of necessarily deflationary because bitcoins like we all cash gets lost. It gets lost in the washing machine. Everybody gets replaced. Yes, but it doesn't sound like these can be replaced. So it'll deflate. Yeah, I think it's reasonable to expect not only that, but economies grow over time. And so you probably in an ideal world, you want the supply to be expanding if your goal is have stable prices. So yes, I think it's reasonable to expect the value of a Bitcoin. You know, it's gone up very quickly in the past. I think that will probably slow down eventually. But yes, I think over time you should expect the value of a Bitcoin to go up over time. Are there mechanisms? So this is a distributed network and it's this open source. Then if that was at some point in the future, enough people decided that was a serious problem and they wanted to fix that in the code. Right. Is there a way that can be done in this system that Bitcoin can be modified? Sure. I mean, so it's you know, like any kind of social system, if everybody agreed to change the rules, the rules could be changed. But it's, you know, I actually think there's kind of an analogy to the US Constitution, right? I mean, the Constitution came into existence because a bunch of a bunch of guys said we think this is better than the system we have before. In principle, if a critical mass for Americans decided we don't like the Constitution, we like some other system, they could change that. There's nothing in the Bitcoin system analogous to kind of the amendment process where you can sort of propose changes. But if a critical mass of people on the network decided to accept a new version of the software that say issued currency at a faster rate than currently, then that new network could become come to be seen as the real Bitcoin network. I think that's not very likely to happen because, of course, the people that you'd have to persuade are largely people who have a lot of bitcoins themselves. And the precedent of saying, oh, we're going to start increasing the supply of bitcoins more quickly would be not in their financial interest. So I think the expectation that will never be 21 million, more than 21 million bitcoins is probably a pretty good bet that that will actually be true. But yeah, it's certainly possible that it could change. When will that happen based on the current? Well, so it's a gradual thing. So about half of them have in mind. And then you'll get halfway to 20, 21 million every four years. So a good about three quarters by about 2016, I think, and then to 7 eighths by, you know, but it'll continue. It's asymptotic. Asymptotic is the technical term, but it'll continue for like a century. Of very, very small amounts of so some point you might get point two bitcoins exactly. From from solving the same. Yeah, and it'll get closer and closer to 21 million, but never quite reach it. So give a little bit of history. Where did this come from? If we have I know this has been talked about recently about it created the code. Yeah. So so we don't know for sure like who the person was that somebody calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto released a paper in 2008 describing the system and then released the first version of the software in 2009. Was it a peer reviewed paper or just an online paper? It was just a paper. I don't think it was peer reviewed. He posted it to a cryptography mailing list that was interested in these kinds of issues of cryptocurrencies and peer to peer systems. And for the first couple of years, he actively led development of the project. He controlled sort of what changes were made to the open source software. And he kind of cultivated a community. There was a programmer, one of the early people who kind of came into the community and offered to start helping was this guy named Gavin Andresen, who's a computer programmer. In 2011, maybe late 2010, Satoshi put Andresen's name on the Bitcoin mailing list around the website as kind of the owner and basically stop contributing. And ever since then, Gavin Andresen has been the lead developer. And Satoshi Nakamoto with one exception has not been heard from since 2011. And that exception was recently. Yeah. So the one exception. So people have been speculating who is you. The various people have been named as possible candidates. It's not you. I'm not Satoshi Nakamoto. I can confirm that. So yeah. So a few weeks ago, a Newsweek magazine found a Japanese guy whose name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto. Actually, he used to be Satoshi Nakamoto. He changed his name to Dorian Nakamoto. But anyway, he Newsweek identified him as the real Satoshi Nakamoto that created Bitcoin. He has denied it. And the real Satoshi Nakamoto, we believe, posted on one of the accounts that had previously been associated with him saying he was not Dorian Nakamoto. Anyway, so that's that's the guy who created it. But today, there is a large community of volunteers in the open source project. And as with any open source project, a lot of the work is done by commercial companies that use Bitcoin. So there's a number of Bitcoin startups that have venture capital funding. And so a lot of the source code did a lot of the contributions to the software is made by these companies that rely on it. Is this the first cryptocurrency? And if it's not, why? What about this one? Because this seems to be a pretty big deal in a way that I don't hear about other alternative. It's the first it's the first cryptocurrency of this type, certainly. So the key thing that no one had previously figured out is you have this thing called the double spending problem. So let's say that the basic idea of e-cash is very simple. You've got you've got a private key that describes some coins and you can give them to you can. There's an easy way to mathematically say, you know, transfer these coins to me. The question, though, is you still have your coin question is how do we make sure that you didn't also write the same transaction to Trevor and the only way previously that was known to do that is to have a central authority that just keeps so that keeps that ledger themselves. And if you try to send transactions to both of us, they say, no, no, you couldn't do that. We're only going to recognize one of them. The question is, how do you do that in a decentralized fashion? And so this process we were talking about before with the mining and the shared ledger and all that sort of thing. There's some very clever technical aspects to how you actually make that work. And Bitcoin is the first system that actually got that to work. And I think the reason that's really important is that if you have a centralized authority, if you have a PayPal Incorporated and there were a number of digital currencies in the 90s that had a company a startup that was behind them, that startup becomes a kind of focus of control. It becomes a focus for regulation and it also becomes something if I'm thinking about building something on top of, you know, beans or flues, which are a couple of the currency in the past, I have to worry is this company going to be around in five years? Is this company going to jack up their fees in the future? And so that becomes kind of a single point of failure for this network, for this currency. Whereas with Bitcoin, since nobody owns it, there's nobody to do that for regulators to impose regulations on. There's nobody to sort of, you know, erect whole gates and say, you know, you can't do this. And so it's a much more open technology. Okay, that's very fascinating because it seems this very bottom up hierarchy and type of thing where you actually had this thing grow without any point of central control. But I think a lot of people would say, well, that's exactly the problem. They think of money as something that requires central control, something that you need to find that person so you can hold them responsible. We need to know where Satoshi Nakamoto is so we can hold them responsible if he breaks the law. But there's no one to hold responsible. So is this something you can trust? And actually, I think for your personal experience, because I think you said that you didn't trust Bitcoin originally, or you were pretty skeptical about it. And now maybe you were less skeptical. So can you describe why you changed your mind and why maybe people can be less skeptical than they might be about it? Yeah. So I mean, I think that there's different senses of trust, right? So having confidence that Bitcoin is a useful payment technology doesn't depend on trusting in any specific institution or person the way it does with PayPal or something like that. If people choose to trust in Bitcoin, it's because they have examined the source code, they've studied how the protocol works, or that they've talked to experts who've done that, and they've convinced themselves that these set of kind of processes that make Bitcoin work are reliable, that they won't easily be broken, and so forth. And so I think it just took time for people to examine that. And this isn't that unusual. If you think about other open source projects, you know, people build billion dollar businesses on top of Linux, on top of Apache, there's these kind of core infrastructure of the Internet and the Internet itself in some ways is an open technology where nobody owns the TCP IP protocols that make the Internet the Internet. But people and people were skeptical of those of those technologies initially. But over time, as people use them, as they continue to be reliable, as they grew, people were like, okay, this works. This has various advantages over a more closed system. And so it became kind of the foundation of a lot of important technology. But we've been hearing all of these high profile hacking cases, right with this. So Mt. Gox, which was a big Bitcoin exchange, right, either went down or was hacked, I don't quite know, but but these instances and people are losing all of these bitcoins. And so is that is that a problem unique to how Bitcoin is set up? Is there a way to address it? And also, how does that fit in? What are these exchanges doing? If going back to this ledger, you know, am I storing? Is that how Mt. Gox works? Like I'm storing that my wallet code there and then it gets lost or Yeah, so I think it's important to distinguish between the core Bitcoin protocol for Bitcoin network, which is a pure peer to peer network that nobody controls. And then there's lots of individual institutions that provide services kind of on top of that on top of that basic network. So in the case of Mt. Gox, what they actually did was you would simply transfer the bitcoins to them. And then they would act kind of like a bank where they would have an account on their own computers saying Aaron has 10 bitcoins. But that part wasn't really in the Bitcoin system. That was just a separate computer system. That computer system was insecure. People thought oh, I have 10 bitcoins because I have this account with Mt. Gox. And so you know one of the things that's different about Bitcoin right now compared with say the dollar is that Bitcoin institutions traditionally have not been regulated the way to traditional banks have. And so you don't have a deposit insurance, you don't have the rigorous auditing. Now arguably maybe those things should exist. I mean if you're certainly at a minimum if you're holding other people's wealth, you know, there's certain basic due diligence that you ought to be expected to do that Mt. Gox clearly did not do probably, you know, I think they, you know, they should have done a better job of that. But that does not, you know, just as an insolvent bank doesn't mean the dollar is not a reliable currency, the fact that some Bitcoin institutions are unreliable doesn't I think really fundamentally reflect on the reliability of the Bitcoin network. Now I think it is important on the other hand to say that if you're an ordinary consumer, it is relatively difficult to save Bitcoin securely. And it's probably not a good idea if you have a significant amount of wealth, you wouldn't want to put them in a Bitcoin wallet and store them on your hard drive because your hard drive could crash, your computer could get hacked, other, you know, kinds of problems could come up. And so I think in the long run, we are going to need Bitcoin institutions that perform the same kind of role that banks do in the conventional banking system that maybe are more regulator may not be. But that people over time earn people's trust and then provide people with some of the same assurances. So ordinary consumers I think should expect that if they put one Bitcoin in some institution, they have a high degree of confidence that it won't be stolen, that if their computer gets hacked, that maybe that company will make them whole, etc. But that's individual institutions as opposed to the underlying Bitcoin network. That's fascinating because in the history of money in the regular money, I guess I would call it not cryptocurrencies, that was of course how some of the first paper money emerged because you would store your gold in some place that you had confidence they would keep your gold. And so the confidence is a huge part of that. And then they would give you a slip so you could go get your gold but then you started trading that slip amongst people. Of course it was confidence in the person holding your gold that made it transferable in the first place. If you think it might be stolen then it's not going to be transferable. So which brings my question about this seems like kind of like a gold standard type of thing. If there's a little hard limit on how much you can actually, how many Bitcoins can actually exist, there will be asymptotically then it's sort of controlled from inflation. And it's the kind of thing that possibly is better than a gold standard or similar to a gold standard or something that can control currency. So do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. So one of the things I think is important to say about Bitcoin at least now and I think this may continue to be true in the future is nobody really prices things in Bitcoin. So certainly there are you can at any given time if you know if I want to spend $100 that's you know two tenths of a Bitcoin or something like that so you can make those conversions but you don't have like electronic stores that say you know the stereo is three Bitcoins right what what they do is they say the stereo is $500 and then at the at the point of sale they convert that to the equivalent amount of Bitcoins when you want to make your purchase. I mean even the Bitcoin Foundation which is a nonprofit that sort of advocates for Bitcoin. They pay their employees in Bitcoin but the salaries are not set in Bitcoin. You don't get five Bitcoins a month you get you know $50,000 and then right so one of the consequences I think of that I think is that inflation is does not have the same kind of concern or deflation does not I think may not create the same kinds of problems you see with conventional currencies because a lot of the problems you see with inflation and deflation and conventional currencies is because people's salaries their mortgages other you know their rent other kind of long term contracts are made in dollars and so it can be very disruptive if the dollar becomes worth twice as much or half as much as it was a year ago that sort of throws a lot of long term economic relationships out of whack whereas if everybody is still using conventional currencies to set their prices you know nobody would it be crazy to take out of Morgan and Bitcoin so people do that in dollars fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin doesn't I think doesn't create the same kind of economic dislocations the fluctuations and say the value of the dollar would so we've covered so far how this thing works why why it works but I want to turn out like why we might want to use it what advantages it has why it seems so exciting and I want to start with the one that a lot of people seem to point to which is anonymity right like so a lot of the stories originally around Bitcoin were it was being used to buy and sell all sorts of illegal things online because you couldn't be traced but I guess from what you told us earlier about the way this ledger works it's not quite entirely anonymous right because a ledger of every transaction is open for anyone to look at at any time that's right so it's definitely more traceable than than paper money is if I take a bunch of hundred dollar bills and give them to a drug dealer it's gonna be very hard for the authorities unless they had previously kind of marked the bills it's gonna be very hard for them to track that transaction whereas if I go online to you know the online drug market and do that they will be able to see these these sequence of transactions that led up to that money going to that person and depending on how I got the bitcoins that might be able to tie it to my identity what Bitcoin doesn't have is it doesn't have a network a mechanism like traditional banks have traditional banks have this what's called know your customer regulations where anytime you open a bank account you have to give them you like your real identity and your social security number and so forth the core Bitcoin protocol doesn't have anything like that these Bitcoin addresses are just strings of numbers and you can have as many as you want so you can use you know one address for kind of legitimate transactions and if you're then gambling you know it can use a different address for that and so by default there's no way to tie addresses to people on the other hand though I think that in the long run what's going to happen is that regulatory authorities are going to insist that any institution that provides conversions between bitcoins and conventional currencies do the same kind of know your customer processes that other any other kind of financial institution does and so in practice I think it will not be easy to use Bitcoin in an anonymous way because if you go to a conventional exchange and you buy 10 bitcoins and you use it to buy some cocaine the authorities will be able to subpoena the institution that helped you buy your bitcoins and say you know what what real world identity is associated with these Bitcoin addresses now there probably will still be people who are really determined to maintain their anonymity they can do things like find somebody on the street and give them a hundred dollars in cash and get you know a Bitcoin from from them that way and that will still be difficult to track but it will be a hassle in much the same way that like dealing with large amounts of cash is a hassle there will be ways to stay under the radar but for most people it won't be really practical this so this would be like a money laundering type of thing where where in that I think is something that the the SEC has already come out with a rule about that or a proposed rule one of the first regulations or what well so there's an agency called the FinCEN the Financial Crime Enforcement Network that enforces the nation's money laundering rules and they have said that so the term of art here is money transmitter they have said that Bitcoin exchanges which are the companies that let you buy and sell bitcoins with other Bitcoin users that they are subject to these rules and that they need to collect identifying information about their customers but ordinary Bitcoin users are not considered money transmitters and so if you're just buying and selling you don't have to you know say if you send money to somebody you don't have to figure out what their real-life world identity is before you make the transaction and you know I think that's probably a reasonable interpretation of the law so what's good about all this I mean what what is Bitcoin offer us assuming it was widely used or you know we let it mature more more people are feel secure about it like what what's it going to give us that our current system of cash and credit cards and banks and all that doesn't so I think the way to think about this is to think about the early internet so if you go back to say 1984 there was a network called the internet it was very small it was frankly not very useful I mean you had email but you didn't have any of the other sort of modern services you expect it's very complicated to use in a crash a lot and so forth but the thing that was really good about the internet was it was an open technology so then in 1990 a guy named Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web which was this very useful new platform for creating websites and then companies like Google and Facebook created new services on top of that and the thing that made the internet a better platform for that kind of thing than AOL or CompuServe or any of the other online services was that it was this open platform where there was no bureaucracy there was no company saying oh that's not consistent with our business model you have to pay this amount of money to do this it was just kind of a wide open free-for-all where anybody could could sort of build on top of this platform I think Bitcoin is in a similar situation relative to conventional credit cards so if you want to be a credit card merchant you want to accept credit card payments there's a book that's literally hundreds of pages long that specifies all the procedures you have to go through and all the rules you have to follow and all the fees you have to pay in order to be a credit card merchant and there are lots of types of financial transactions or financial services that you just can't provide without going through a long discussion with the credit card bureaucracy and all these big banks to get permission to do this whereas in contrast there's nothing like that in Bitcoin you can just you know Bitcoin services just code you can just on a weekend you can whip up you know a service that does whatever you want and so I think that what we're likely to see in the future is not that people will use the kind of raw Bitcoin network in the sense that they'll actually have Bitcoins on their hard drive and they're sending Bitcoins to their friends what we'll see is it will have companies that use the basic facilities provided by Bitcoin to build more sophisticated services that allow people to do many of the things that the conventional financial network does but better or cheaper so a couple of specific examples one that I've always pointed to is is an international money transfer so if you think about a company like Western Union they charge anywhere from five to eight percent of the amount you're sending to send the money and I think if you pay the higher rate it maybe takes a few hours if you pay a lower rate it can take up to three days Bitcoin transactions the core network has very, very low fees and a transaction takes 10 to 30 minutes to process now obviously you have to get Bitcoins in you have to get your dollars into Bitcoins and then your Bitcoins into whatever the currency you're sending to so it's the low fees on the Bitcoin network by itself doesn't get you a viable alternative but it's still eight percent gives you a lot of headroom you can imagine lots of Bitcoin based startups so there are Bitcoin ATMs now that charge I think two to three percent and you would expect those prices to go down over time so that's one case where just as the internet disrupted an application like Skype disrupted the conventional phone system you could expect a new generation of Bitcoin based Western Union competitors disrupting Western Union so this seems less like a currency now which is the way we always often seem to talk about it or at least libertarians than a payment system that's right and I think so the reason it is also a currency is that the reason that a dollar in PayPal is worth a dollar is that the PayPal company stands ready anytime you want to take your PayPal units out to give you the dollars even promised it's hard to see how you could have a decentralized network with that property because you'll have units of currency inside the network but there's nobody to guarantee that you'll get a dollar or a euro or whatever out so I think that the in some ways the currency is a necessary evil of having this open network because in order to have something with no owner you have to have have it float against conventional currencies and the good thing is that people are willing to kind of make that leap of faith to say even though this is completely made up we have confident that it's such a useful network that we're willing to treat it as though it has value and once a critical mass of people are willing to make that leap of faith it actually does have value well your point about about there being dollars being the same thing I think is well taken because that there's an onion article from a a year ago or so that said that you know US economy collapses as everyone realizes that dollars are worth anything right so we all just trust each other and so it's really building on the same thing that dollars themselves build off of but what about the libertarians who say oh this is gonna take over from the dollar or the euro that when the dollar is inflated to minuscule amounts and your bank account is empty people will go into bitcoins and where they are protected from those forces so I mean I think it's conceivable that in the very long run in 50 or 100 years that you could have a financial system that's based on bitcoins somehow but certainly in the the short to medium term I don't think it that argument makes very much sense frankly I mean partly because if you look at the volatility of bitcoin so okay so the dollar loses two or three percent of its value per year there have been days when bitcoin has lost 10, 20, 30 percent of its value so if what you are worried about is maintaining the value of your currency bitcoin is just not a good choice and obviously on the average you gain a little bit of money but the other thing is you don't you know the money in your pocket you're not holding for years you get you know you get paid on Friday and the next Tuesday you're spending it again you don't really care if a fraction of a percent of value so I think the value of bitcoin as a heading against inflation is probably overstated there are better ways to do that it's certainly not you know it's one benefit of holding bitcoin but I think the primary way is that it's a better way to make payments and could enable a lot of innovation how many of these advantages that you've outlined for bitcoin she talked about the huge book of rules you have to follow for processing credit cards and all that like how many of those are our result of government not having gotten involved really in this at all so far so there aren't many regulations and presumably a bitcoin gets big enough because it's still I mean even though bitcoin's individual bitcoins are worth a lot of money to you and me and all told they're not we're not talking huge amounts of numbers by right global economic standards but when they get if it gets big enough when the government's just kind of step in and say wait we got to start regulating this in all of these ways and then those advantages then we have a big stack of rules we have to follow for processing bitcoin yes I think it's it's a couple of things so one of the reasons that you have so many rules in the credit card system and other networks like PayPal I think are similar is that the conventional financial system is what's called reversible so if the way the credit card network works is you know you go to a restaurant you hand the waiter your credit card and it's basically on the honor system they can type in any number they want and if later you then see oh this number was not what I authorized you have to dispute it and then the money goes back to the credit card company it goes back to you through the credit card company and to make that system works requires this large bureaucracy requires a lot of rules governing when you can dispute things and who has to pay what back bitcoin has a different approach which is that transactions are irreversible so you give me your one bitcoin there's no no authority you can appeal to even if you can prove it was fraudulent you're just out of luck and that makes the core system much simpler so that's that's one thing is I think that there are some reasons that to think that in the long run the architecture of bitcoin will be will require less regulation thing to think about here is I think that I think that the analogy to the internet is important if you think about a company like Google or Facebook there are lots and lots of regulations that Google or Facebook need to comply with there's you know in your in some European countries you're not allowed to sell Nazi memorabilia and so yeah whose auctions have to worry about that but those regulations apply to specific companies they don't reply apply to the internet as a whole and in fact we have I think wisely given companies that provide the core internet infrastructure immunity so Verizon doesn't have to worry about selling Nazi memorabilia because that's seen as Yahoo's problem I think a similar thing is true of of bitcoin so I think if you have the sort of Bank of America bitcoin in the future that entity will have to comply with lots of regulations in every company country where it does business but the difference compared with the current system is that you will be able to that you'll be able to start new startups and because the core bitcoin protocol is open and no one controls it you'll be able to immediately to start doing business on that network without getting the approval of all the existing companies and existing regulators in a way that's not true if you want to start a new conventional bank you have to go to you basically have to get the other banks to recognize you as kind of a peer and that's a very difficult thing to have to do and they're going to throw all sorts of roadblocks in your way if you're threatening their business model with bitcoin because it's an open protocol like the internet new companies can kind of start up and in the same way that many internet companies kind of ignore say copyright rules for the first few years until they get big new Bitcoin startups may be able to do the same thing let me ask you another way what if say some congressman decides that bitcoin is a threat in some way to the US government so maybe like these if people start making lots of transactions buying and selling things paying each other in bitcoins it's hard to tax that and the unregulate I mean you're saying unregulated I can hear a politician being like these transactions are unregulated and irreversible right so he decides that this is a threat and gets a bunch of his congressman friends to agree and they pass a law shutting down bitcoins in some ways that possible is there a way that the government if it really wanted to could kind of stop this all dead in its tracks so there's at least one senator Senator John Manchin of West Virginia has in fact called for I think the abolition of bitcoin or you know curtailment yeah and it's theoretically possible I mean you could make it illegal to run the bitcoin software on your computer and that would probably mostly drive it out of the United States although not completely there's you could go through as there is technical means you could be inside the United States but make it look like your connection was outside the United States but of course this is a global network so one of the strengths I think of bitcoin is that you just need a few countries where it's legal that can kind of communicate with each other and so you could certainly drive it underground in much the same way I mean so internet gambling seems like a good analogy here it's officially illegal in most circumstances in the United States and it's inconvenient for American consumers but there are lots of gambling sites off shore any Americans that really want to gamble are probably going to be able to figure out how to do it and in the long run you're not going to be able to I think you're not going to be able to stop the bitcoin network but also I think we're past that point so we had the first few years my biggest concern was that you know that politicians and regulators are going to decide that this is just fundamentally too big of a threat to allow it to exist and shut it down but we had a series of hearings two different committees in the Senate had hearings last fall and called the most senior Obama administration officials to testify and it was basically completely positive I mean they understand I think that fundamentally this is a new payment technology unlike any technology any open technology it has the potential to be disruptive in much the same way the internet was disruptive but also you know if you shut down open technologies like that you lose a lot of the potential for innovation I mean you can imagine 20 years ago people said the internet is too big of a threat to our copyright laws or our you know defamation laws or something that what you would have lost from that is way larger than anything you would have gained and I think people understand the same thing applies for bitcoin so if it's if it's kind of maybe stabilize a little bit on that level and then you said about Mt. Gox going going being a bad bank and put in air quotes on that right and there's still other ones that come up to offer better so it's a highly competitive environment or like at least open access and you can supply these services so it seems like that it could stabilize the prices seem to stabilize around 500 to 600 going forward and you said it could be really volatile do you predict that will be stable going forward and the bad banks will go out of business it's only three or four years old right Mt. Gox was originally a trading card website right and it got into bitcoins so so yeah so I mean I think there's two different questions I think it's absolutely true that over time we'll see more sophisticated companies that have sort of grown-ups managing that have regular audits that comply with the various laws and that people will be able to have greater confidence so I mean there's a there's a startup called Coinbase that's based in in the United States and that is venture backed and you know I'm obviously I'm not going to say that there's no risk with them but there's certainly a more reputable organization than Mt. Gox was or some of the the other early startups and over time I think you will see more and more regulatory scrutiny I mean in some ways justifiably I mean if you're holding people's money you have an obligation to to do that correctly but I think that's a separate question from whether the price will be volatile because the the volatility is driven by supply and demand and if Bitcoin succeeds I think what you should expect to happen is that because the supply is is fixed if the volume of transactions goes up the basic economic says that the the value of the bitcoins has to go up to accommodate that and so I you know I I'm not going to predict what the price will be in ten years but I would not expect it to be between five hundred and six hundred dollars for even one hundred and a thousand dollars it could easily be ten thousand it could easily get down to a hundred and I think it just depends it depends on how big this market is I mean I think it makes more sense to at this point to think about it a little bit more like a technology stock right you're you're there isn't a Bitcoin incorporated but buying bitcoins is a way of essentially buying into the long term success of the Bitcoin network and if the Bitcoin network becomes as big of a deal as the Bitcoin supporters think it is bitcoins could be worth a lot more in the future so is this a bubble I mean that's a lot of people have been saying people are hoarding them maybe they're buying into it and is it a bubble that's going to burst at some point you know I'm not totally sure I understand what what people mean when they sound something as a bubble I mean obviously it's a it's an asset whose value has been very volatile and it has gone up a lot over time but the question is you know so if you think about a company like Amazon.com it had a quote unquote bubble in the 1990s and it went up to what seemed like an astronomical amount if you look backward there's not actually unreasonable because the company actually proved to be worth that much there were lots of other companies that proved not to be worth that much so is it a bubble in the sense that a lot of kind of speculative action has pushed up the price sure is it an unjustified bubble where it's not actually worth what people think it is I don't know I mean that's something my guess is probably the current price is justified but it's there's a lot of uncertainty we've been talking exclusively about Bitcoin so far but Bitcoin's not the only cryptocurrency out there and especially after Bitcoin came onto the scene a whole bunch of other ones appeared so are any of those other ones worth paying attention to are there ones that offer things that Bitcoin doesn't or has Bitcoin kind of taken over and it's going to be the one going forward if one of these things works yeah so there definitely are there's I think probably a hundred what's called altcoins cryptocurrencies that have non-trivial user adoption but yeah the thing is that the the value of all bitcoins and circulations is about eight billion dollars I think if you add up all the other ones put together it's about one billion dollars so Bitcoin is by far the most valuable and this is just because of what economists call network effects like a network is valuable because other people use it you know the internet's value because other people are on it and as long as Bitcoin as long as the Bitcoin community doesn't like really screw up somehow and really like do something that destroys its value there's going to be a strong advantage and being using the technology everybody else is using but they thought about my space too they did think right I mean so right so there's yeah so it's certainly possible that there'll be a fatal flaw in the Bitcoin protocol and it'll stumble or the you know there's there's various ways that the network could sort of fall apart in which case I think you would see one of these alternatives so far nobody has come up with a really I don't think anybody's come up with really fundamental improvements on the Bitcoin design so there's the leading alternative Bitcoin is a currency called Litecoin that processes transactions a little bit faster and uses a a different the mining thing the mathematical problem you have to solve is different in a way that democratizes a little bit so it's a little bit easier for people with normal PCs to to do it you know if you were starting from scratch I think both of those are probably good things and it would be better off for the world if Litecoin was the one everybody was using but I don't think it's such a big advantage that people are going to jump away from Bitcoin and using Litecoin and what you've seen over time is that the relative prices of these currencies have been pretty stable so you know Bitcoin is worth I don't know like 10 or 20 times what Litecoin is and that was true a year ago and I think it'll be true probably in a year and so probably they'll all grow but Bitcoin is so much larger that for practical purposes it's still I think the only one that matters Well it seems like the really fascinating thing about that is that it reminds us about competitive currencies in general in a way that we haven't been reminded because there we didn't have we didn't print money in the United States until the 1860s and there were tons of possible currencies out there you could use and there were ones that were that would outcompete ones compared to other ones and those are the ones that had more people using them that had their own preferred networking effects to them so we're seeing that again Yeah the one difference I think is that those currencies were still mostly pegged to the dollar I mean they were effectively all versions they're all pegged to gold all totally right all pegged to some sort of like some sort of metal usually but they're also there's also commodity currencies trading in tobacco trading in tea trading in wampum yes all those types of so I don't know very much about the history but yes I think that's certainly it's something that wasn't true before you know in the last few decades and now we're seeing it and now we're seeing it again yeah and I think that it's interesting I do think that the in some ways that's a disadvantage of Bitcoin I don't think we want to oversell like it's interesting that it's an alternative currency but I think most people don't they're perfectly happy with the fact that dollars a dollar and everybody accepts the same unit of currency I don't think it would be a good thing for the world if we had ten alt currencies that each had ten percent market share and you had to like make all these computations your head if you wanted to you know convert from one to the other there's an old that monetary theory game you can play with networking effects to try and graph how different competing currencies will win out and then the way you would play it is you take some jelly beans and you have a bunch of them in a jar maybe a hundred multicolor jelly beans in a jar and then each player in a row of like twenty has also with their own jelly beans and they reach in they take out one it has like a red one and then they match it with a red one of their own they put it back in and then they pass it on to the next person and they just micro increase the chances of that person getting a red one when they get it and so each person does that and you can graph the colors as they go and you'll see one start to win out red and then we'll go down and then we'll be blue and then maybe at the end blue will take over half the jar which will which is how currencies emerge so we might watch that happen with bitcoins yeah I think in the long run there will almost certainly be one global cryptocurrency probably Bitcoin but if you could have some kind of disaster that let somebody else take the lead but yeah I think in the long run the network effects are very strong I mean it's the same reason there's only one internet there's not ten different internet networking protocols that kind of compete once people sort of settle on TCP IP as the one it's what everybody switched to I think probably something similar will happen with with currencies so what can I ask two questions what can people in general learn from Bitcoin and what we're seeing happening here I mean we've talked about some of them but and also what should libertarians what can libertarians learn from this well so I think one of the one of the interesting things about Bitcoin I mean it's it's a young technology still but I think it's a it underscores the the lesson that that technologies that are not controlled by anybody have a lot of advantages for both for innovation one of the other things we haven't talked about is the kind of anti-censorship properties of Bitcoin so the organization WikiLeaks has is not in the favor of the US government and US politicians when they were sort of in the spotlight in 2010 were use their sort of leverage over traditional credit card networks to basically starve WikiLeaks of funds that would be much harder to do for an open technology with Bitcoin and just as the internet is a pretty effective way at helping people and in you know repressive regimes get access to information I think Bitcoin can be a way and you know if you're an Iranian dissident and you want to buy space to host a blog outside of Iran it's probably easier to get your hands on some bitcoins and pay that way than it will be to pay with with credit cards so I think that's one of the big lessons is that any sort of centralized technology is a centralized point of control which can lead to various because we can limit freedom in various ways that liberty disrupts patterns and people find a way around it I think that's true, yes Thank you Tim for coming on Free Thoughts today Thanks, it's been a pleasure And if anyone or audiences wants to follow up with you it's really interesting this and has questions or whatever where can they find you online? So I am at Binary Bits on Twitter so you can certainly follow me there and send me messages there and I write for Vox.com which at least when we're recording this has not launched but we'll in the next few weeks that's just V-O-X.com Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks To learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org