 Afternoon. This question is actually for Saifedian. It's pretty straightforward, and I think it's a key to get an answer, not necessarily today, I think it's an evolving question. Basically the question is, what technical challenges must we overcome before we experience everybody in the world, or at least the majority of the people can enjoy free money like Bitcoin, so that everybody can enjoy the benefits, not just the small people, the small kind of people that have acquired it. That's the question. I think the real challenge is not so much technical. I think Bitcoin is operational as it is, and it's been working for 12, 13 years. On the base layer, it works fine. It does about up to half a million transactions a day. Obviously that's not going to be anywhere near enough for the whole world to do all of their transactions, but what I argue in the Bitcoin standard is that we need to think of base layer transactions in Bitcoin as being more like settlement transactions between financial institutions rather than consumer payments. Consumer payments can be built on secondary layers, and we already have all the secondary layers that are existing. They can all be adapted to Bitcoin, so Visa, Mastercard, they already support about 150 fiat currencies. They can do 151, and all they need to do is just start buying some Bitcoin. I'm not going to say it's trivial, but there's no technical hurdle that is standing in the way of more Bitcoin adoption. I think the real hurdle is economical. It's an economic problem, which is that 100% of people's cash balances today, or about 99% plus percent of people's cash balances are not Bitcoin. People hold their cash balances in government currencies, but they also hold government bonds, and they also hold real estate as a cash substitute, and they hold stock indices. All of these things are substitutes for holding cash money that you want to hold for the long term. The challenge really is how do these people change their cash reserves from fiat-denominated assets into Bitcoin, and this is not like switching from Android to Apple. It's not a question of switching from one form of consumer product to another, because it's a very complicated liquidity question. If you're a business operating in the fiat world, all of your income is in fiat, and all of your expenditures are in fiat, and you have these constant obligations that come every day. People pay you every day, and you pay other people every day, and all of that is in fiat, so you have to hold the cash balance in fiat, and you can't just switch 100% to Bitcoin because of the volatility in the value, and because of transaction costs that would be involved. You can't switch completely, and it's not something that Bitcoin is not a product of central planning. We're not going to get a government that's just going to say, all right, everybody's bonds are marked to zero, and here, take Bitcoin instead. Nobody can do that. Nobody can print Bitcoin to hand it out, and nobody can unroll other stores of value in favor of Bitcoin. So it's going to be a gradual market process, and this is exactly what we're seeing. The value of Bitcoin goes up, and the amount of Bitcoin held on cash balances continues to increase while fiat cash balances decline in real value. We're still at a point where Bitcoin is less than 1%, but I think as the price goes up, we're going to see this gradually happen, so business will first hold 5% in Bitcoin, and then as Bitcoin appreciates, they're able to hold more and more and more, and then more of their clients and more of their customers will start being willing to pay in Bitcoin, and so gradually we'll see this kind of transformation take place, and of course it's going to be significantly hastened and sped up if any of these fiat currencies fail, so people will switch much faster to Bitcoin in that case. Thank you. I also have a question about Bitcoin for Mr. Amos primarily. I let me preface by saying I'm a big fan of Bitcoin. I've been using it actively for more than 10 years, and I'm heavily invested in it, but there's one thing I worry about, which is the possibility that governments might ban it in some way. So what would happen if major governments started introducing some kind of bans against using Bitcoin, trading Bitcoin? Obviously we could still use Bitcoin. The blockchain would still exist, we could use the technology still, but if it's illegal, then obviously very few people would actually be willing to do it. So what would happen in this kind of scenario? Could Bitcoin still remain viable? Could it be a sort of underground technology, and how would it affect the price of Bitcoin? I would say the short answer is that Bitcoin is optimized for this kind of operating environment where it is not favored by governments, and it's designed in a way where it will be able to survive, something like a very powerful government crackdown. You know, you won't be able to pay for your coffee and lunch with Bitcoin in that kind of world, but it will continue to survive, it will continue to make a block every 10 minutes. So when you think of it surviving in spite of this massive crackdown, then that changes the rationale for what governments should do. So if they do crackdown on it, and it continues to survive, they're basically doing two things. A, they're advertising Bitcoin's resilience, and advertising Bitcoin's value proposition, which is here, you know, we are trying to kill this thing, but we can't kill it, and B, they're advertising their own weakness. So Bitcoin's value proposition is that it has money outside the control of the state, and if the state clamps down on it and fails, then that massively increases it. But I think from the other side, I think I would have expected the last 10 years to have witnessed the serious government crackdown on Bitcoin, and when I first heard about Bitcoin, I spent many years thinking, well, you know, I wouldn't touch this because they're going to start throwing people in Guantanamo Bay for touching Bitcoin, and that was a very expensive mistake, it turns out, because they didn't come after people who use Bitcoin, they didn't throw them in Guantanamo, and Bitcoin's price just kept going up. So I think what we see is that a lot of people in government are beginning to realize the value proposition and realize that this is a very powerful technology. Instead of banning it, what you want to do is you want to own it. So I like to liken it to gunpowder or dynamite. When gunpowder is invented, all the world's armies were running on swords and sticks, and if you had a strong army and you heard about the country next door have developed dynamite, I don't think the smart thing to do would be to ban dynamite in your country or to ban gunpowder, because what ends up happening is, you know, you can ban it for your own soldiers, but you can't ban it from the people who are going to shoot at your soldiers. And so what ends up happening is that dynamite is going to come into your country, but one way or the other is going to come, either you're going to give it to your soldiers or somebody else is going to shoot it at your soldiers and then replace your soldiers with their soldiers. And I think Bitcoin is a little bit like that, and I think more and more people are beginning to see it this way, that first of all, you can't win a war against Bitcoin because it's just designed to survive no matter how much government pressure is against it. And secondly, if you fight it, all that you're doing is your, as I said earlier, advertising it, but also giving your opponents an advantage in being able to accumulate it instead of you. So it's like you're banning dynamite and you're letting your neighbors accumulate more and more dynamite. Perhaps there will be a massive government attack on Bitcoin, but I think with every passing day, it's growing and normalized as part of global financial markets, and this becomes less likely of a scenario. Well, Torsten, since we have a gold expert on the stage also, what is your estimation of your view on the function of gold and Bitcoin as an alternative for today's possible monetary crisis? Thank you very much, Thomas, for the question. I think gold is still the ultimate means of payments in this world. It's a 5,000-year tested means of payment of exchange. There's certain features that make it unique. It's scarce, it's homogeneous. It's actually perfect money, I would say. And gold, in comparison now maybe to Bitcoin, one feature that's often overlooked is gold. There's a demand for gold for a variety of reasons, namely technology or dentists, dentistry, industrial purposes, and the monetary demand. Even if no one would ask for monetary purposes, there would still be a demand for gold for other purposes. So the chances that gold will become worthless at any point in time is basically zero. With Bitcoin it's different. Bitcoin has just one demand. The demand for money, or people hope that at some point it will serve as money. Now, assume that Bitcoin 0.2 enters the market, which is as good as the current Bitcoin, except it has one feature that makes it special. Then the price of the current Bitcoin could go down to zero because the demand would collapse. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but that's the difference any investor should keep in mind. And the great advantage of the Bitcoin is the idea that you can escape from the power grip of governments. You know, that you can move somewhere where the government cannot tax you and cannot see what you're doing in terms of monetary exchanges. I think money in a modern economy must be an intermediation process by which I mean people want to hold their money not only on their personal USB stick or on their computer drive at home, but places somewhere else where it's safeguarded. So people typically demand banking services. And that I think is also the case in Bitcoin at the moment. Most people do not have the private key, but many, I speak for myself, hold their Bitcoin at a trading platform, for instance. And the reason why I do it is I feel comfortable, you know, and they can charge me for this. I'm happy to pay for it. And once you have this intermediation process in place, then the government starts breathing down your neck. And so I cannot imagine that Bitcoin can really become a widespread means of exchange under current conditions. If the government would go, if we would get rid of government interventionism, and we would have a truly free market in money, I'm not that sure that Bitcoin would outperform or outdo or have all the advantages over, for instance, having a digitalized gold or silver money standard. But to conclude, the important point is to get nearer to free market in money, to put pressure on governments, and that's a brilliant and most favorable development more than we can ask for at the moment. But at the end of the day, I'm not really sure. I mean, the Bitcoin, as far as I can see it, will retain its market. It's going to hear to stay. I think the interesting question is really how far it can still expand. But maybe for all of you who consider putting your money into certain investments, maybe diversification is a good approach. So put some money into Bitcoin, but not all of it in Bitcoin. Put some of it into gold, but not all of your money into gold. My question is for Juan. So if we accept that human bodies are capital goods, how would macroeconomic analysis use this? How would it change? What would we see? Do you think if human bodies were taken into account? Thank you, Greg, for the question. We would see all sorts of activities that, as I said, the good character of certain activities wasn't even recognized 100 years ago. We have new professions, we have new trades, we have new arts, technical activities and inventions, etc. So all of these would have to be valued because Mengehr not only criticized three definitions of capital at the microeconomic level, he actually also spoke of capital as a macroeconomic dimension or category. And he was very clear again on his 1888 work about capital not being something that we can do in the aggregate, although he accepted it for the lack of a better term, you can use a national capital or something like that. But he was very clear about it having to be an individual valuation. My point was not that the body is a capital good but the body can be a capital good for some people at certain points and it's only advancing, we're beginning to recognize this and all future capital investments and enhancements in your body and your brain, etc. may have to be recognized by your employer, etc. But it's already happening with insurance and major figures in different arts and trades. Thank you. Well Tim, you said that the militia is actually the priority of everything basically. Now what about secession? Do people or regions first build up an army to have a good secession process? I mean basically also the civil war in America, two militias fighting each other. Thank you for the question. I think the priority is to preserve peace and to avoid conflict as much as possible. And I believe that Professor Hoppe's work in this area also about successful secession movement would require a posture of non-provocation, at least especially I should say in the initial stages. So to allow the powers that be to carry on their activities just without the support of that local region. To allow them access to their facilities unimpeded, unobstructed, at least initially until one can reasonably expect to secure their territory. But the first thing, the first step of secession would be the nullification piece. Is to make sure that you don't provide any support to the quote unquote enemy. Once a declaration of having our own territory it would be essential to gather strength and to avoid any provocations that might lead to any type of harsh penalties. But it's about, at this point it's about legitimacy rather than relative power. Relative power would be able to overwhelm any type of security forces in a small polity. So again it's having that recognition and part of that recognition is to be legitimate in your own internal fortification. So build strength militarily, take care of one's own laws, protect property try not to be antagonistic to those around you. And ultimately economic integration is the greatest security. So in the event of a crisis or some type of collapse the solution is not necessarily the gun the solution is the network, the community. And that's the greatest sense of integration that would lead to better security I think. The ability to resist in the extreme is indispensable and again I think it's valid to have that capacity, that martial capacity whether it be a minimal state or the ideal of a completely private law society. I have a question for Tim as well. And you know in most European countries, in most countries, possessing weapons is very difficult, it's close to impossible and we are very far from the ideal of the Second Amendment and of the militia. And my question is how could we in Europe especially and especially in these times when there would be the necessity of fighting governments and resisting governments even on a military basis, how could we move from point A where we are now so basically citizens without any arms and exposed to government violence to point B where we could come closer to a militia or something like that. Any suggestions how we could move towards this direction? My focus would be more on the institution building rather than the arms. Initially the institutions of police in the U.S. we have police and sheriff but they don't exist in the Constitution. So the idea of placing the police or the sheriff or whatever the enforcement entity under a committee of citizen activists that are involved in the day-to-day decision making would be part of that institution building. Now focusing on the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and things along those lines is not looked at as so legitimate and they're trying to bring that type of argument to the United States that you don't need this type of firearm for hunting or things along those lines. What I was trying to convey earlier that it's really not about the weapons themselves it's about who is in charge of executing the laws. Who is the enforcement authority in a given geographic territory and the message is it has to be about self-governance rather than about having a top-down structure. So the idea of changing legitimacy of who is executing the law and it's going to require that sea change within the mentality of the people that they are in charge of their own security and having a hand in directly contracting with whoever else is going to provide that supplementary security. So I wouldn't focus on the weapons so much but more about the institution building and then from there you start to gain more confidence in the ability to secure the right to keep and bear arms but it's more about the organizations and the institutions. My question is to Tim again. Do you think it's a good way to think about outsourcing defense? Outsourcing defense always brings risks with it. Like any kind of outsourcing brings risks. People can steal your secrets. They're not really loyal to you. They're an outside organization or something like that. And when we think about defense or self-defense it's best, the closest it is to us. If we defend ourselves on a household level and then a neighborhood level what I mean to say that it is probably best when you do it yourself but then violence is a little nasty and the wealthier you get, the higher in status, you get the further away you want to get from that possibly. People are tempted to outsource the defensive violence that needs to be done for them and that will always bring risk and there will always be this push and pull between how much violence are you actually willing to do when you want to defend yourself or maybe you can't take it and you need someone else to do it and maybe some kind of how to prepare yourself for that as well or do you think not everyone needs to be a warrior? Short answer is not everyone needs to be a warrior however but there's the eternal struggle between power and market and vigilance is the price of liberty and you cannot 100% outsource your security without expecting those others to take advantage of the position so again self-governance requires engagement and that is the mentality that needs to change it's difficult within libertarian communities to organize individualistic personalities it's like herding cats yet at the same time property is a social function Robinson Caruso alone on his island doesn't need property rights property is about enforcing or signaling proper behavior in human relationships so to give a monopoly or to outsource the decision making to someone else creates the incentive structure for them to take advantage of that position so the contract has to be severable but if they have all the arms and they have all the organization then of course they can alter the terms of the deal unilaterally and then start to enforce things that the customer might not have wanted and we're starting to see that in the realm of big tech they're starting to look more and more like states they're starting to perform more and more like states and they're starting to merge with the existing states so the capacity to enforce that severability needs to be held from the client and as I indicated those territories that might have more money than time might do less of their own militia work and outsource that to a market provider whether it be an insurance company or a mercenary firm that's what the rough combination is and when it comes to libertarian strategy strategy is an art and a science so how to implement it in your particular area is going to require some finesse and analysis yet again that overarching structure of how it would work you have to have the capacity to sever the contract unilaterally if you no longer feel that your market provider is abiding by the terms that you had agreed that's the main thing is to understand that self-governance is going to require personal engagement what that level of engagement is will be dependent upon the circumstances locally the question that I have is especially for Safideen but not exclusively you're probably familiar with the money speech of Ein Rand where she calls money being the barometer of society's virtue following that can you imagine that a bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general can cause a rise in society's virtue? I think so, yeah I kind of make this case in the bitcoin standard and in my next book the fiat standard I think the corruption of money well in very simple terms when money is a free market good nobody forces you to accept any form of money then the only way that you can make money in that kind of system is if you provide others with value and so you live your life the greedier you are the more you want to make more money the more you want to serve others and I really think you can see this you can glean it from looking at the cultures of different places so in times of hard money you see that people in society are focused on providing value for each other and providing services for each other people have real jobs, they wake up, they have a work ethic and because that's the only way that you can eat you have to provide value for others when you corrupt that and when you make it so that first of all the producer witnesses their wealth disappear so yeah you've worked and you've provided value for others but next year it's worth 10% less because you know the government had to print money in order to finance all of the things that it wants to finance on the one hand you're discouraging or honest work because you're taxing it and reducing the reward for it and on the other hand you're providing a lot of income for people who are not doing honest productive work that is rewarded on the market so you have a lot of people in fiat societies that don't produce anything of value they sit in offices in jobs that are essentially guaranteed by government fiat whether it's in the private or the public sector and they receive their salary regardless of how well they serve and how well they do their job and you see this all over the world you see it in advanced societies where they have a powerful money printer that allows them to pay a lot of their population but you also see it in very poor societies where a big chunk of the population lives off the foreign aid that comes into the country and they don't have to work real jobs because they live off the printers of foreign countries and in fact it's a serious problem in poor countries not the smartest, not all but a lot of the smartest, most capable, most talented people instead of getting real jobs serving others, being valuable to society they just want to get a job in the local aid organization writing reports that nobody reads because that secures the money from the money printer of the foreign country that is the donor so those two things I think are massively corrosive of the work ethic of society and it makes sense money is the coordinating mechanism of the economic society money is how we perform economic calculation and when you're corrupting money so deeply you're corrupting economic value you're corrupting people's conception of economic value and you're giving people the incentive not to work at not to focus on serving each other and not to work to the benefit of society but to figure out how do I get rich how do I get my share of the money printer and the longer this goes on the more that the parasites are rewarded at the expense of productive people the more the culture of parasitism prevails spreads and increases and the less the culture of productive work spreads and the more it recedes so I think bitcoin offers us a way out of this because and of course the amazing thing about bitcoin is that it's not like we need to get the government we need to vote for the right government that will force society to accept bitcoin it's a spontaneous market phenomenon on its own that's rewarding people who save in bitcoin that's rewarding people who get back to the natural order of money who get back to the natural order of society and work and save and it's effectively devaluing government money it's not yet at that point because it's still very small but if you think about it 10, 20, 30 years ago 10, 20, 30 years from now as it increases in value it's going to eat up it's going to eat up the ability of the government to finance itself through inflation because it's going to devalue government currency further and further either it's going to force monetary discipline on governments or it's going to help in the collapse of national government currencies as they resort to more and more economic printing and people have an exit out of it so I am quite optimistic about this I think and I don't see it as if it's bitcoin being this magical cure in as much as it is this is the natural order of society always has been and this is what normal functioning money brings about and this is what fiat money in the 20th century destroyed this is what statism and democracy and high time preference caused by fiat money brought about and destroyed in the 20th century creating all these massive governments that we've heard about and all of their drive towards centralization and power so yeah I would think so, yeah also for Safeday you could also argue that people had the choice before by choosing gold to choose a hard currency and they rejected it or maybe they were you know, wind of it or somehow that failed, that opportunity failed, how would you think that in this case in bitcoin that would not happen yeah that's a great question and that's kind of one of the focuses of my next book which is not standard I think there are two reasons really why bitcoin can fix this where gold failed and the first one is you can't send gold anywhere further than your arm without having to trust somebody else to do it for you and that just means that you need extensive physical infrastructure for the clearance for the secure clearance of gold and that just means that you can't take over which is what the central bank is so if you think about it and the way that I think of it in the fiat standard I could discuss it in terms of the salability across space how much does your money lose in its value as you send it across space in the case of gold the further you want to send gold around the world the more you have to pay so if you wanted to send gold from New York to London you're going to lose something between the shipping and transportation and verification and the insurance of the sending of the gold so as a result obviously you're not going to have all transactions of gold settled individually you batch all these transactions and then central banks will settle with one another with one big shipment of gold at the end of the month or the year or something like that so because of the very high cost of moving gold tends towards centralization and centralization leaves it vulnerable for capture so governments can just come in take over the gold give you pieces of paper and then what are you going to do you have the pieces of paper all the gold was captured and even even if they don't capture the gold you know you're kind of stuck with their monopoly where they can issue more fiduciary media than gold that they have because your local central bank is your only mechanism for trading with the rest of the world to hold out and tell them okay I don't want this paper I want the gold well what you have is essentially useless as a monetary asset outside of your own town you can take it to pay for people in your own town but if you wanted to buy something from abroad you can't really send it so you're reliant on these monopoly institutions in the case of central banking with gold which at the beginning of the 20th century you had maybe 40, 50 central banks around the world that was it to perform final settlement with one another and so it was highly centralized and highly capable of being taken over by government Bitcoin I think in its current form allows us to have something in the range of tens of thousands of central banks that are able to settle with one another internationally at a tiny fraction of the cost of moving gold around so you can still send Bitcoin right now you can send a billion dollars of Bitcoin from New York to London and you pay about a one dollar transaction fee I'm sure the transaction fees are going to go up significantly over time but it's still going to be a tiny fraction of a billion dollars that you're sending in terms of value so because of this I think Bitcoin is naturally going to be far more decentralized and far harder to capture that's the first advantage the second advantage is what I'd like to call Bitcoin's number go up technology gold is already an asset worth around ten trillion dollars of gold being held everywhere and so if we were to dump all national currencies and everybody were to move toward using gold gold will appreciate significantly it will go from being about ten trillion dollars to maybe a hundred trillion dollars in terms of its market value so it goes up about ten fold in the best case scenario maybe it will go up two fold three fold something like that but in the case of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is starting a small base so the incentive to get in is much higher for people because the potential for it to increase if it does go up to it's less than a trillion today if it does go up to about a hundred trillion that's a hundred fold and if it goes up to ten trillion if it becomes equal to gold it will be ten X larger than it is today so an increase of one trillion dollars of demand for gold will cause a ten percent rise in price an increase of one trillion so the amount of demand in Bitcoin is going to cause a doubling of price roughly so because gold is tiny sorry, because Bitcoin is tiny and it has a very small capitalization it has an enormous potential for appreciation which can be more attractive for people so the barriers towards this happening for gold is that it's hard to move gold around and there's not a lot of financial incentive for the appreciation of gold to draw investors into gold in the same kind of excited to Bitcoin today maybe one additional remark to moving gold to and fro if there would be a really free market in money presumably there will be a lot of money warehouses showing up where people would deposit the physical gold and you would receive on your app a monetary certificate on your app you could bank basically and then you would presumably have some settlement locations centers let's say in Europe and in Japan and in the United States and this settlement wouldn't necessarily involve the physical movement every day, every week maybe they would settle half a year and if they would see there's no drawdown in terms of physical gold then they would settle maybe once a year that would bring costs of transactions in digitalized gold balances down so I think it would still be competitive and for instance the Perthman in Australia offers such a service for those who are interested how it works can go to your website and look it up and I mean it's very important to know that the gold standard was not abolished because it didn't work the reason was governments wanted inflation and gold stood in the way and also it is important to note still governments want to control our money and once an alternative to the fiat currencies that circulate the government will come and try to kill it that's for sure they will discourage the use of using let's say gold or silver or bitcoin they will do everything they can the only solution to this is getting rid of governments or a large majority of people finding it interesting and being in favor of a free market in money but as long as the state as it is today I cannot really imagine that the fiat currencies process will be driven out of business and what I put out I mean the governments expand further and further as we talk today and so the first step for free market in money is a change in the mindset of the people I think it's not just a technological advantage that can do the trick I have a comment myself on the golden versus bitcoin first of all I think we should be rejoicing in the appearance of honest money it's money based on truth and math after a hundred years and it really bothers me when even some of the best of us try to armchair define what is money or bitcoin may become money or may be money I have used bitcoin as money so it's human action what defines something as money and we have used seashells how can bitcoin not be money and gold has already failed us in a year or couple of years where 25% of all or more more than one fourth of all dollars in human history have been printed gold lost around 10% and gold has failed us not because there's anything wrong with gold but because it's easy to censor and it's under censorship since 1933 or even before that I would probably go even further than Professor Poliet I'd say that if we did have a free market in money if you know tomorrow all of the world is taken over by classical liberal governments that don't care what money you use and they give the world free choice to give a very significant probability for a global gold standard emerging and I think there's a good chance that it would be very bad for bitcoin because we already have 10 trillion dollars of gold out there so gold has a much bigger liquidity pool it has a much bigger first mover advantage people are familiar with it people's cultures and religions and traditions and marriage and dowry and all of that stuff is intertwined with gold and with specific measurements and I think in a totally free market gold's first mover advantage is quite significant over bitcoin but we don't live in that world we live in a world in which governments want to take over not only do they want to protect their fiat currencies they want to as Professor Poliet was saying they want to move us to one international fiat currency controlled by one board one central planning board so we're headed in that direction and bitcoin is kind of our only way patch it's our only insurance policy against this it's our only way it's the life boat really and I think the dangerous thing about a lot of the criticisms of bitcoin is that you know you're standing on a sinking boat and you're considering whether the life boats colors match your clothes it's a life boat it's the difference between life and death would it be nicer if it was pink if it was yellow if it was orange perhaps but it'll get you to safety that's what really matters keep you busy I think it's important to note what money is you know money is the universally accepted means of exchange and if you with your trading partner use bitcoin it doesn't make bitcoin money it's important to note that money is the unit of account you know for pricing purposes for making economic calculation and as I noted earlier the productive power of money is optimized if all people use the same unit of account if you use bitcoin I use gold and you use silver we are still in a state of barter economy and that is something people want to overcome we people want to have a single unit of account and I'm pretty sure if we have a free market and money if I would have a button I can press and would start a free market and money on a global scale it wouldn't take long that people go for a single unit of account the ultimate means of payment maybe it's gold then but they wouldn't be dealing with all sorts of different units of accounts of means of exchange I think that the competition out there is really for who provides global money in the future so far I'm concerned it will be the cartel of states and we fear single currency it's a quite dystopian perspective but there is this tendency towards pushing out all units of account which do not live up to the standard of being money and that's why I think it's important you know to get that clear bitcoin is not yet money it is a means of exchange that is used by some people the dollar is very close to the world currency at the moment because all kinds of people use the dollar to make financing transactions to make purchases and goods and services and I think it's important to know what money is I have one question do you think with gold certificates or with paper gold the banks are printing out gold out of thin air and what percentage of gold demand is directed to paper gold I mean not physically backed a very important question at the moment many institutional investors consider holding physical gold as an equivalent to holding gold futures for instance so if they have to take up a hedge position they typically even decide for gold futures so paper gold it's not backed by physical gold and this market is huge and this market actually determines the price of physical gold and so you are well advised if you go for gold to buy it in physical form and don't buy it as a gold certificate because if you buy a gold certificate it is backed by gold futures if you buy a gold ETF you have to see whether it's backed by 100% physical gold or not holding physical gold is important for you to be on the safe side because all the paper gold instruments have certain risks county party risks etc and in April 2020 something very interesting happened normally the paper market gold price equals the price in the physical market but because of this huge uncertainty back then the lockdown and the gold couldn't be moved logistically from one continent to the other there was a coupling between the paper money gold price and the physical gold price physical gold traded at a premium at a very high premium and this is actually a good example to show where the breaking point in this in this game is once people lose faith in the fiat currency system and all the instruments that have been built up on this paper money pyramid then at some point the link between the physical gold market and the paper gold market will break and you as an investor should be aware that there are risks you will be on the safe side if you hold physical gold in forms of bars and coins I have a question to Tim Hafner first of all thank you very much for giving us this insight on the economics of a militia based on this Japanese example my question is as followed can you imagine private law society developing on the base of a private military company especially for example in the case of a desperate government seeking help in the case of a total chaos what type of government a private law society basically developing on the base of a private military company I think private military companies number one they exist now they've existed all throughout history and they'll continue to exist could a private law society evolve from that well again we have to look not necessarily to the company but to the culture and the people need to recognize their responsibility to self-govern and not to completely farm out those security functions to any contracted solution and so the idea and I referenced the United States Constitution because I'm an American and it is a good document with regard to these particular aspects that the whole body of the people need to be organized, armed and disciplined that discipline is the most important piece because it's a culture and to refer back to the earlier question how can we create change especially Europeans that might not have a second amendment might not have a militia within their operating charters of their government if one even exists it's to start to honor and value that armed, organized and disciplined character so perhaps instead of subsidizing sports that involve chasing a ball that you subsidize sports that involve militia related activities to start to bring esteem to people that are organized and disciplined and then the arms can also follow so I wouldn't put faith in any private solution like a private military company but again it's more about culture and so many other social issues can be solved once that cultural piece is addressed you mentioned the Japanese society being a polite society, I think it was armed or was it secure what was the basis for a polite society and what about how they behave outside of Japan I would premise my statement by saying for a long time there were no good guys but Japanese culture evolved over a thousand years of warrior leadership and at certain points the legislation allowed for the warrior class to cut down a commoner for any reason now it didn't happen very much but there are instances of it and the fact that it was legal to do so again as we indicated when your life is on the line you're going to act very polite and not provide any offense just as a matter of self-preservation so not using that as the example to move forward in the future so that there's one class that warrior class was embedded in law to have certain privileges that's to be avoided in the future what we need is an armed equilibrium in which no one will be able to provide that type of offense and nobody will be able to enjoy that type of legal privilege to impose upon anyone else that being said over a thousand years you can see that cultural change so that they do become extremely polite so as to not cause any offense and I think that's something that we can look to in terms of the type of culture we want to exist in what does it have to do with what's the same people can you give me an example the atrociousness of I mean was it particularly atrocious how they behaved against the Chinese and the later wars the Korean War and all of these yeah and so the examples during World War II the Great Pacific War and their conquest that was a very I'll use the term bastardized version of what's known as the samurai code which is largely a fiction of the 20th century so they took some of those samurai values and kind of manipulated them to honor the imperial state and then send those folks overseas with that very mutated form of virtue and then impose it upon anyone that wasn't them so again that's the ugly side of samurai culture that was again bastardized incorporated into the state and then set loose so that those Japanese troops during the war went overseas and looked at everyone else as being beneath them again that's to be avoided in the vein of asking about values and this is a question for all panelists what values have you seen in foreign cultures that you went made you go maybe we should adopt that at home and please feel free to answer everybody cause they're always interested in that I'll just use one example I was in Romania and I bought some candles from a street vendor and I said keep the change and they said no no no you're gonna get your change back they wanted to give the impression that they would not accept anything more but an exchange of value for value I think that's something to be honorable and admirable and adopted elsewhere maybe it's just a footnote in an exchange you surrender something you consider less valuable and receive something you consider of more value so I mean the Romanian guy did the right thing and you too but equivalent of values that were exchanged right yeah well you gave something you consider less valuable and received something you consider more valuable it was not the equivalent of value just value for the point that I was trying to make is that there's problems with corruption and Romania has its own issues so I was actually really moved when I was in Romania to feel what it was like in that environment where they were trying to claw their way out of their communist past and so I felt like I was being charitable by saying keep the change but they wanted to the regular people wanted to let me know that they weren't about corruption and they didn't want to receive anything more than what they had asked for and I thought that was honorable I think you know perhaps one aspect of Arab culture which I think is could benefit from learning from the west is probably the culture of saving and long term provision it's not that common it is common and people will save but it's not as common as it is in the west but it's also becoming less and less common in the west unfortunately and less and less common everywhere but I think there's a lot of emphasis culturally on the good values and the good traits but there's not much emphasis in many places on the low time preference aspect of just sacrifice the present for the future I think this is something that everywhere in the world could benefit from perhaps just to add to the discussion I think cultural is low and sometimes the people that have the picture very clear are not the best advocating or doing the marketing of ideas etc so I think liberty is going to come through innovation rather and I see inventions like bitcoin precisely as a sort of mangarian institutions that we are creating as we go so innovation is going to do more for freedom in the future it doesn't look like that at the moment because the state is using technology to oppress us even more right now but in the future we're going to innovate into freedom that's going to be faster than persuading other people into freedom I have a question to Juan regarding the actual time of COVID so the body represents capital and I think it's a good time to support that hypothesis so if you have so to speak increased your capital then you have a different reaction probably to this threat now my question I have a very strange hypothesis a very dangerous one now that we live in a time of capital consumption so we have this beautiful vaccination escape so to speak so there is absolutely no debate about this capital element of the body so there is no responsibility to look after your own health so you have a high time preference solution which is the vaccine and it immediately solves all problem and my question is could you comment on a feeling that I have concerning this spiritual element of capital consumption couldn't it be that the vaccine is actually a real danger to that capital because we are in this capital consumption time so basically the body is consumed by the vaccination so that in the future it's a hypothesis of course in the future we will see very bad signs neighbor vehicle so I don't know in English side effects of it that really puts your body in danger could you comment on that certainly the incentives are in place we live in a very sad moment in human history where all this mercantilistic incentive we know there's not only big pharma we have big health, we have big food we have a destruction of not only the family but the individual at the corporal level so now it's a conspiracy theory when students of classical liberalism and austral libertarianism have known this for decades there are horrible incentives towards the short term use of the body even in the medical profession the medical doctors have probably one course, one semester on nutrition they are not focused on prevention they are not focused on long term health it's all about patches and solutions or maybe solutions it depends on the case obviously all the bad incentives or these incentives are in place for this mess we know that most people affected with certain illnesses are obese or have other comorbidities and this has been totally ignored because it places again individual responsibility at the center and of course it places the state because of these evils and mis-incentives