 Fiat currencies have markets which reflect the time value of interest rates. How about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Are you aware of interest rate type markets for Bitcoin and other currencies? Yes, there are interest rate markets for Bitcoin. You don't see them that often, simply because a lot of these markets are over the counter. If you're in the mining industry and you're going to have a steady stream of Bitcoin, but you don't know what its value is going to be, you have Bitcoin now, you may want to have futures contracts to protect yourself against volatility. Out of these futures contracts, what emerges is various forms of interest payments. That would be a market in reference to some other currency. I just mean Bitcoin itself, Bitcoin now versus Bitcoin. There are actually some investment funds that are in Bitcoin into companies directly in Bitcoin, and presumably generate returns in Bitcoin. These investment vehicles pay some kind of rate of return. Therefore, that is represented in interest rates. Future value of money doesn't change if you change the currency. It still exists as an economic concept. Nothing changes. What we don't have yet is the mechanism to carefully and quickly discover the correct market price for the future value of money in this economy, yet. You'll see that mature. If you remember, in the beginning of Bitcoin, we didn't have a market mechanism to discover what the price of Bitcoin was. How much do you want for two pizzas? I don't know. 10,000 Bitcoin each? Sure. That was March 2010, I think. No, wait. Stop the monetary system for a while. Not really my area of focus. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm interested in the historic, political, philosophical implications of this technology. I know it's coming. For sure. I see the future of digital currencies is the future we will live in. If you put an open system that offers an unbiased neutral medium of exchange on a level playing field, where people can enter it next to a closed system of control, the system of control loses every time. Financially, it's unviable. It does not have the flexibility, the liquidity, the return, the capability, and it will lose. So it's just a matter of time. Now, I don't think we've seen anything yet. Right now, this is not even a trickle. This industry, this economy, this system, is a trifling curiosity, compared to the $114 trillion global GDP or the flows of international money through SWIFT, or the foreign exchange markets. It's a drop in the ocean. It's just one little trickle. But it's a trickle in a dam that has a lot of pressure built up behind it. One trickle becomes ten, and ten becomes a thousand, and eventually the dam gets washed away. So we'll see. I think we're going to live in very interesting times over the next ten years. Daniel asks, gold bugs complain that futures markets are used to manipulate the gold price. Is there a risk of Bitcoin price manipulation with futures, particularly naked shorting? I don't know. I'm not really a trader. I don't usually have strong opinions about trading and investments. One of the concerns that you point out in your question is naked shorting. Naked shorting is where you sell short or take a contrarian position to an increasing market, and say, this asset should go down in price. What you do is offer to sell the asset at a specific future date, but you don't actually have the asset to sell. Which means that if that date arrives and you don't have the asset and you need to sell it, you have to buy it on the market and sell it to the person who took the opposite end of that order, who essentially holds the opposite end of that contract. If the price increases dramatically, the amount of risk you take when you do a naked short is unlimited. Quite honestly, I think the parties that are most capable of shorting in a futures market are miners who would do it in order to hedge the risk of a price downturn and essentially protect their ability to have cash flow to pay for the electricity that they're consuming. The reason for that is because they're not shorting naked, meaning they own the underlying assets. If I have 100 Bitcoin and I make a futures contract, a short contract on the price for 10 Bitcoin, and the price goes up, yes, I have to sell 10 Bitcoin, potentially at a much lower price than I would like, and lose some money. But hey, the other 90 Bitcoin went up in price, so it's not so bad. My risk is fairly limited, because I actually have that Bitcoin, so it's more opportunity cost than loss. There is a great deal of risk in a market that is only $160 billion in capacity with not that much liquidity trading. To find yourself in a situation where, if you take a naked shorting position, your risk is enormous. If the price balloons suddenly, and then you try to go out on the market to buy back that security in order to cover your short, you might find that you can't buy it, or that the price keeps going up, and your risk gets bigger and bigger. It depends on how the futures market works. In the particular case, what you're probably referring to is the upcoming announced launch of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange futures market, which is a cash-settled market, in which case you don't need to own or sell the underlying security, or buy the underlying assets, in this case Bitcoin, in order to take a position. Instead, you just have to pay the cash value in dollars to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and they won't let you take a position that you can't capitalize adequately. In order to be a member of the CME, you have to have a capital account with the CME, and they will expect you to have collateral against that. They won't let you take a position that's larger than the collateral that you have. Yes, there is a possibility of futures markets, I guess, could be used to manipulate the price of Bitcoin. I do expect that we're going to see more opportunities for investors to short Bitcoin, and to put downward pressure on Bitcoin, which means that the bubbles are less bubbly, but by increasing liquidity, the drops are less sudden, too. Overall, I think futures markets, especially cash-settled futures markets, on an exchange that actually does have collateral against these futures, or requires collateral by its members, it's not that easy to really manipulate this market. There are big risks. It's more likely to decrease volatility and increase liquidity, which are both good things. I don't know. We'll have to find out. Let's see.