 Thanks very much, Jürgen, very warm welcome to all of you, it's great to be here, ladies and gentlemen. Let me start with talking about bad money, by which I mean the US dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen, the Chinese renminbi, the British pound, the Swiss franc, basically all official currencies. They all represent fired money. The term fired is derived from the Latin word fiat or fired and means so be it. Fired money is coercive, money or money forced upon the people. There are three major characteristics that come with fired money. One, the state or its agent, the central bank, has a monopoly on money production, has a monopoly on money production. Fired money is produced through bank landing, it is literally created out of thin air. Three, fired money is intrinsically valueless, it is just brightly colored paper tickets and intangible bits and bytes that can be produced at any time in any amount deemed politically expedient. Just in passing, I would like to let you know that fired money has not come into this world naturally. The states have worked long and hard to replace commodity money in the form of gold and silver by their own fired money. The final blow to commodity money came on August 15th, 1971. Most of you might not have been born then, but I was. President Nixon announced that the US dollar would no longer be convertible into gold. This very decision, which I like to call the greatest monetary expropriation in modern history, effectively put the world on a fired money regime. Against this backdrop, it may not come as a surprise to all of us that fired money suffers from economic and ethical deficiencies. First, fired money is inflationary. It's buying power dwindles over time, and history has shown that this entropy is almost as irreversible as gravity. Second, fired money enriches a chosen few at the expense of many others. The first receivers to get hold of the new money benefit to the detriment of the late comers. Third, fired money fosters speculative bubbles and capital misallocations that culminate in crises. This is why economies boom and bust. Fourth, fired money lures states, banks, consumers, and firms into the pitfall trap of excessive debt. Sooner or later, borrowers find themselves in a deep hole with no way out. And lastly, fifth, fired money feeds big government, the deep state. And as the state expands and sprouts like weeds in an untended garden, this outgrows, strangles, even destroys, individual freedom and liberty. I guess I've spoken enough about bad money. Let us talk about good money. What is good money then? To answer this question, we just have to think about how a free market in money works. Here, people are free to decide which kind of money they would like to use. And they have the freedom to cater to the needs of fellow people seeking good money. The outcome will, of course, be good money, simply because people will demand out of self-interest good money, not bad money. This is actually what sound monetary theory would tell us. Indeed, money has emerged from a commodity and spontaneously from the free market. No state, no central bank was needed in the process. To qualify as good money, the thing or good in question must have specific properties. It must be scarce, homogeneous, divisible, durable, transportable, mintable, maybe there are other attributes. Gold and silver meet these requirements by excellence, and this is why they were chosen as the universally accepted means of payment whenever people had been free to choose. So how does Bitcoin fit in? I would argue that from a monetary theory point of view, Bitcoin qualifies as a good money candidate. It has emerged from the free market through voluntary actions of all participants involved respecting individual freedom and private property rights. I would also argue that Bitcoin complies with the so-called regression theorem. Some of you may know about the regression theorem. An issue I will not explain further at this point. The key question is whether Bitcoin will stand a chance to out-compete official fiat currencies or gold money. Let us think about this in further detail. One really exciting feature of Bitcoin is that its quantity is limited to 21 million units according to the protocol. This hard cap means that at some point the quantity of Bitcoins will no longer grow any further. Now you may ask, would that not be a problem for money users or the economy? No, it wouldn't. Firms can still be successful if prices decline. Their profits result from the spread between revenues and costs. If good prices fall, in normal terms, firms just have to make sure that revenues keep exceeding costs. Consumers would be pleased to see the prices of goods fall. Their money becomes more valuable. They can reduce their cash balances and increase spending. But wait, would consumer not refrain from buying goods if and when prices can be expected to decline? Imagine a car costs you 50,000 bucks today and only 40,000 bucks in a year. Well, if I need the car right now, because my old one has broken down, I would have to buy a new one right away. I would not and I could not wait. But generally speaking, people make their decision to buy now or later based on the so-called discounted marginal utility. What does it mean? The marginal utility of buying the car for 50,000 US dollar ranks lower on people's value scale, of course, than paying only 40,000 US dollars. But the car available for 40,000 dollars is not for sale now, but in a year. When it comes to decision making, people will therefore discount the marginal utility of purchasing the good for 40,000 dollars in a year using their individual time preference. They will then compare the result with the marginal utility of buying the good now for 50,000 dollars. And if the discounted marginal utility of buying the car for 40,000 in a year is lower than the marginal utility of buying at 50,000 now, people buy now. And if it is higher, they will postpone their purchase. The important point I make is this. There is no reason to fear that the economy comes to a standstill if and when the prices of goods decline over time as would be presumably the case if Bitcoin would be treated as money with a constant supply. Money that has a limited quantity such as Bitcoin would work just fine. Let me stress a very important point. The quantity of money in an economy does not have to grow to make increases in production and employment possible. The sole function of money is the exchange function or other functions are derivatives or sub functions of the exchange function of money. A rise in its quantity does not make an economy richer. It does not bring about a social benefit. All in an increase in the quantity of money does is lowering the purchasing power of one money unit compared to a situation where the money stock has not been increased. Of course there are people who benefit if the money gets increased. You know the first receivers and these guys are typically relatively close to the central banking industry or the financial industry in general. We just heard that in a Bitcoin money regime we would have to expect price deflation. So declining prices of goods and services over time. What would that do to the credit market? As the prices of goods fall holding money becomes more profitable. If for instance prices fall by say 3% a year it means that the purchasing power of my money increases by 3% a year. In this case I would not exchange my money for a T-bill that yields say 2% per year. To make me depart from my money a borrower would have to offer me a return on investment that is higher than the increase in the purchasing power of money. Borrowers would be careful taking up debt. As they know that in times of stress there will not be bailed out by an inflationary monetary policy. It is therefore likely, very likely that in an economy where there is a constant quantity of money like in the Bitcoin universe it would be, the credit market will remain relatively small especially compared to the debt pyramid that has come that has built up basically with today's or under today's fiat money regime. At the same time firms retaining earnings and issuing equity for funding purposes would be much more commonplace. Borrowers would invest their lifetime savings in company stock rather than debt and keep money that increases in terms of its purchasing power over time. So a very different world we are thinking about compared to today's fiat money regime. What about the market interest rate in a world in which price deflation occurs? We know that in a free market the nominal interest rates, the real interest rate plus the inflation premium cannot drop below zero, which makes sense. This is easy to understand by the way, if I lend 100 bucks to you for one year at say minus 5% you would return $95 in one year time. Of course any lender who is not out of his mind would politely reject this kind of deal. There would be better off just holding on to cash. I would not lend at a negative interest rate and so a negative interest rate would simply not occur in such a free market money regime. I cannot go into detail here but let me say that in a free market of money the market clearing interest rate is determined by people's time preference. And time preference is always and everywhere positive and so its manifestation is the originary interest rate which is always positive as well. In other words the interest rate would not and cannot fall to zero let alone go into negative territory. So far I have argued that the limited quantity of Bitcoin does not stand in the way of the crypto unit becoming money in the sense of a universally accepted means of exchange. However, some aspects appear to be disadvantageous for Bitcoin's aspirations to become money. I'm not saying that's fixed into stone but we should address these shortcomings. From the current state of technical capabilities the distributed ledger technology is unlikely to be put to widespread use in retail and large value payments. Currently there are around 360,000 Bitcoin transactions per day and given its current configuration the Bitcoin network is presumably running at full capacity. But this is not enough. Note that alone in Germany there is an average of around 75 million transactions per business day. It's just Germany. What is more, Bitcoin transactions costs vary widely. For instance in July 2016 it costs around $8.00 for the next block free. In December 2017 more than $37.00 and currently around $4.00. High and volatile transaction costs might discourage the use of Bitcoin from the point of view of at least some people and some institutions. Another aspect is finality. Digital transactions require a point in time from which they can be taken as valid. However the distributed ledger technology consensus mechanism does not offer this. Some of them don't offer this. For instance the proof of work protocol for instance merely provides a probabilistic finality due to the occurrence of folks. What about safety? Well progress has been made in Bitcoin safekeeping, think for instance of called storage wallets. However vulnerabilities remain as scams and thefts at even the largest and most sophisticated crypto exchanges proof. A central issue in this context is where to store your private cryptographic keys. We have heard about some ideas already this morning. They need to be stored offline or could be stored offline so they cannot be hacked and the place of storage must be secured to prevent theft and immune to electromagnetic fields otherwise the stored codes could be wiped out. And for professional investors this is a challenge. They might need a bunker storage solution but this could turn out to be quite inconvenient. How to get access to private keys quickly and at low costs as market developments might recommend. Bitcoin was developed for peer-to-peer exchange without any intermediation and now this intermediation is basically my big gorilla in this presentation. But would people really want a monetary and financial system without any middleman without any intermediation? For some payments you may not need intermediation like buying a book but for others you may wish to involve an intermediary or a custodian. Imagine you mistakenly send 100 bitcoins instead of just one bitcoin. How would you get it back? Who is going to help you in a peer-to-peer world without any intermediation? The answer is nobody and nobody would help you if your wallet got hacked. What about more sophisticated financial transactions such as borrowing and lending and putting your savings with some depository institution? It is hard to imagine that this can be done in an anonymous and trustless regime as envisaged by the Bitcoin protocol. Interestingly enough many Bitcoin owners seem to keep their coins with crypto exchanges which control the private keys. Obviously people trust some of these intermediaries in the Bitcoin space actively demanding the services supplied by these middlemen. This observation points us towards a rather important but unfortunately often neglected issue to support economic progress and a sophisticated more or less sophisticated monetary sphere a currency must be compatible with some form of financial intermediation. Otherwise, I would argue it will be difficult, not impossible, but it will be difficult to compete effectively with existing fiat currencies which offer money users many convenient intermediary services. How would an intermediation structure look like in a market in a free market in money? For the sake of illustration, let us review the workings of a digitalized gold money system. Let us say Mr. Miller owns one ounce of gold which is around about 31.10 grams. It is recorded on the asset side of his private balance sheet. For greater convenience, Mr. Miller deposits 10 grams of gold with a money warehouse, let's call it money warehouse, which offers security, storage and settlement services. The 10 gram gold is credited on Mr. Miller's account held with the money warehouse and the accounting unit is, say, gold gram. In return, Mr. Miller gets a digital gold gram certificate documenting that he owns 10 grams of gold deposited with the money warehouse. The digital gold gram certificate serves as the means of payment by your iPhone for instance or personal computer and it can be redeemed into gold at any time at par at the money warehouse. Now there's a steel company which wants to raise money through the issuance of a bond. Mr. Miller wishes to earn some return on his money and so he decides to exchange 10 grams of gold against the bond. In Mr. Miller's balance sheet, the digital money certificate is replaced by the bond, the steel company records the digital gold gram certificate as an asset on the left hand side of its balance sheet and shows a liability on the right hand side of its balance sheet. Now the steel company can spend the money, the digitalized gold gram certificate on input factor, salaries, rents, you name it. In addition to these direct credit transactions, a digitalized gold money also facilitates all sorts of indirect credit transactions as well as all kinds of transactions in stock and bond markets, derivative and commodity markets, M&A markets and so on. In fact in a free market in money you would not only have money warehouses offering safekeeping and settlement services for money proper but also institution specialized in say credit hedging, pooling risk, insurance, etc. Of course we could easily imagine Bitcoin rather than gold being base money, the voluntarily chosen means of exchange and digital Bitcoin certificates rather than digital gold certificates being used as the means of payment. Either way intermediation could be expected to work just fine and unhampered competition in a free market in money would effectively prevent the practice of money warehouses operating on fractional reserves, I would argue. However with the need of having an intermediation structure in place it is hard to see how the monetary system could escape the repression of the state. For under intermediation it is no longer possible to have transfers of any kind confined to the purely virtual realm. Transfers would have a point of reference in the real world where the state has become unfortunately so over-helmingly powerful. While states might no longer be in a position to stamp out cryptocurrencies they can and actually do everything in their power to increase the hurdles preventing money candidates like Bitcoin or precious metals from replacing fiat currencies. For instance the states impose VIT and capital gains taxes and restrictive regulation on these potential money candidates. Ladies and gentlemen the emergence of cryptocurrencies has given great impetus to the search for better money. This paradox as it sounds it is the state that is the greatest ally of Bitcoin in particular or any other cryptocurrency in general. For if there were no state as we know it today we would for sure have a free market in money. People would be free to decide what money they would choose. No one would have to hide. In a generally free market in money I think it would be far from being a dumb deal that Bitcoin would outcompete for instance digitalized gold money. But the word is that it is and so I would like to conclude by saying that technological progress is one aspect for making the emergence of good money possible. The other aspect is to inform the public at large that fiat money is bad money, that good money is possible and that it is advantageous for them and that all it takes is a free market in money unimpeded by the states. I hope that my remarks have been conducive in this regard and provide valuable input for our discussion. Thank you very much for your attention.