 Welcome, I'm very grateful to have you both here and also happy to be able to moderate this and this is particularly interesting in my view because both of you gentlemen are I think it's not a exaggeration to say among the best qualified to actually participate in such kind of debate so that's why I'm really excited that we're having it I'm gonna just briefly introduce the two of you for people who don't know you so taking the CV of both of your home pages starting with Roy Roy Cibarck he's a director chief executive officer from goldmoney which is the world's largest precious metals saving payments and custody platform overseeing nearly two billion dollars of precious metal savings for over 1.5 million clients worldwide. Mr. Cibarck is also the founder and chief executive officer of many a direct to customer jewelry brand which crafts pure 24 karat gold and platinum jewelry that is transparently sold by Graham Waite. Previously Mr. Cibarck founded Bitgold which launched in 2014 and rapidly became the most successful digital gold payments and savings platform in history. Bitgold ultimately merged with goldmoney in 2015 resulting in the creation of goldmoney in corporate. Prior to Bitgold Mr. Cibarck was portfolio manager that engaged in a fundamental long and short equity investing in distressed event driven and natural resource related opportunities. Very impressive CV Roy also very impressive CV of his opponent who is Dr. Saifadeem Amoose. Saifadeem Amoose is an economist and author focusing on Bitcoin who authored the first academic book on the economics of Bitcoin the Bitcoin standard decentralized alternative to central banking published by Wiley in 2018. And apart from being author he also offers an academy so this is I think also something very interesting. So Bitcoin is a highly volatile and risky asset whose future is uncertain and whose ownership that's not my bio that's not your bio. Sorry yeah let's jump into the discussion please Saif tell me tell me a little bit more about you and add to the bio of yours. Yeah so I've written a book on Bitcoin and I'm also now independently teaching economics online so I left my university job and I teach Austrian economics and Bitcoin economics online on my course on my website Saifadeem.com you can join courses download the lectures and watch them and join live discussions and yeah I'm working on an economics textbook to be completed next year as well as my next book The Fiat Standard. Beautiful okay that's great Roy do you have anything to add from from your side. No that was a long long explanation so that's great and I guess I just want to say that you know when you asked me to join the conversation and you called it a gold versus Bitcoin debate I think the first thing I said to you was well if it's gonna be with Saifdeem I think it might not necessarily be a debate because everything that I've seen or remember from Saifdeem is generally in alignment with me and so it's probably gonna be more of a meaningful conversation but in any event because I've had a few issues in with the Bitcoin community I just want to say out from the start that no matter which way the conversation goes you know my position today is is to respond to any claims that are made with regards to gold so if I'm responding and I'm giving my arguments against Bitcoin there they're within that context and overall as I've continually said I'm I am very sympathetic to the Bitcoin project you know I hear today as an owner of Bitcoin and we own Bitcoin in two companies where I sit on the board and I'm a shareholder. Okay that's great just to to have a very short context what I do in within this debate I mean my background is I'm coming from the gold side but I'm very enthusiastically also endorsing Bitcoin so I think I'm pretty neutral we had increased to invest in both so we have a fund which invests in gold and Bitcoin so so that's basically in a nutshell how I fit into this debate and I want to keep it pretty open as well so I think that's that's a good idea I just would like to perhaps go through a few topics along this discussion or debate and if I may I would like to start with with one point since it's so relevant today just kind of to to get it out of the room because I know a lot of people when it comes to gold versus Bitcoin obviously talk about supply talk about stock to flow and why don't we just start comparing these two assets from from the quantitative perspective stock to flow and as Roy basically I say is is the guest since this is a Bitcoin conference I'd like to start with with his thoughts when it comes to stock to flow gold versus Bitcoin how do you compare these two to these two things yeah so I think that's going to be an issue for me because I reject the comparison I think it's a flawed comparison from the start I think that Bitcoin represents faith in the reality of mathematics and a flawed understanding that this man-made language is unchanging gold requires no such faith it's exists as part of nature we have no choice in believing the reality of nature it just is gold just is and so when you get into this idea of comparing something that's abstract existing with abstract quantities with something that's physical rooted in the actual natural world that can be weighed and measured I reject comparison so I think that that's that's one of my my core issues and I don't think it's an issue that that needs to hurt Bitcoin in the long term I just think it's a mistake to talk about Bitcoin in golden that way I'd say that it's ultimately the fact that Bitcoin has been around for 10 12 years now and the supply growth rate has stuck to the original schedule and that with every passing day it gets harder and harder to imagine how this could possibly change because if it couldn't change and be changed in 2010 12 15 it's much harder to change it in 2020 when the network is much bigger and people already invested in it so obviously Bitcoin has nowhere near the long track record of gold of you know thousands of years of being there and being reliable and proving itself but that advantage is declining with every single day in which Bitcoin survives and Bitcoin continues to operate that I think it's it's it's it's it's we can very confidently assume that the supply growth rate is good for Bitcoin is going to continue according to schedule and I think that's ultimately what makes gold money and that's why gold matters is money and I think the difference between something being physical or being abstract or non physical is completely immaterial here because they both can perform the function of being used as a medium of exchange so I could give you a gold coin or I could give you I could send you Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network and you would accept it and we've seen Bitcoin operate for 10 years as as this medium of exchange people can exchange it and can know that it is part of the supply and know that there won't be any inflation beyond it so the guarantees of mathematics have proven strong enough that it's I mean obviously there's nothing certain in life so it is an entrepreneurial decision for somebody to decide whether they want to hold gold or not but with every passing day it just becomes more and more clear that the physicality is not an object the scarcity is guaranteed the physicality is not a problem and the scarcity is guaranteed of the supply and I think that then brings us to the issue of the supply growth rate which in Bitcoin you know in the next hour or so is going to decline to being around the same level as gold supply growth rate and then it will continue to decline further and further so as it stands the gold supply increases every year at around 1.5% and that's as I explained in my book that is why gold is money it's not because it's yellow it's not because it's shiny it's not because of anything else it's because it's the one thing whose supply can reliably grow at the lowest rate every year and so I think we're going to be seeing this getting challenged by Bitcoin right now and I think it's it's it's very important because if you think about it in the long run you know in 50 years from now or in 20 30 years from now the gold supply is going to be doubling or 50 years or so it'll take for the gold supply to double whereas Bitcoin supplies never going to double so when you think about it as a long-term store of value Bitcoin has the edge here but of course the bigger edge that Bitcoin has is that it is usable internationally whereas gold unfortunately is not because of government restrictions and that's probably the next thing we should talk about but yeah Manak yeah I mean go ahead I reject most of what you said I think you're you're conflating a lot of concepts and a lot of topics but let's just start with you use the word medium of exchange to define Bitcoin so I just want to understand are you differentiating there between the word money and medium of exchange or do you recognize you're not so you money is the general exchange sorry money is the general medium of exchange okay but so you're not so you didn't say money though you said medium of exchange which which I would agree with but the other word that you used was it's immaterial and I think that's a very important word that is going to keep coming up if we're going to try to make these comparisons so when you talk about the stock and the supply of Bitcoin implicit in everything you're saying even though you're not mentioning it is a tremendous amount of faith in so many aspects of the fundamental architecture of Bitcoin you have faith in a specific elliptic curve secp256k1 a curve that was invented by blackberry you have a specific faith in the discrete logarithm problem being something that is under mathematical theory today just hard you have distinct faith in modulus arithmetic you have distinct faith in the prime number theorem you have so much faith in something that you have the that yet you have the confidence to assert that it just so happens that you were born at this time at this era and based on something that's been around for 10 years which I don't think would be enough to even have a regression claim that we can estimate into the future that the supply of this unit which can only be measured by itself which is abstract is somehow comparable to gold and then you claimed that the certainty for why gold is money was because of its supply and I would argue that the certainty for why gold is money is because it belongs to the same certainty of the natural world with which we engage perceive and act and it is under that standard the standard of reality that gold exists as an immutable element part of an irreducible building block of elements that make up all the tangible objects that are ready to hand and then lastly I disagree with how you even portray the supply of gold because first of all you begin with an assumption that you know what the stock of gold is and then based on that knowledge of the stock and most of the people that are using this gold stock are relying on one of my good friends analysis James Turks analysis for the gold stock from 15 years ago there is no way to know how many grains of sand there are there is no way to know how much gold exists we can know how much gold is produced by publicly traded corporations and some private entities I used to put together a report called the natural annual ranking of gold mines and deposits and I tried to do just that but nowhere in even the projections of investment banks that cover these companies is anyone forecasting a doubling of the annual mine supply of gold so even there I just have to disagree with you because if anything what we're seeing is declining head grades in mining and we're seeing mining companies shift from focusing on producing ounces to producing return on equity free cash for like Barrick and new monster companies like that so I don't necessarily see that the gold supply is going to double but more importantly I absolutely have no faith to predict that in 10 or 20 or 30 years the Bitcoin elliptic curve won't have to be replaced and in that case you'll have to fork it again or merge it and I don't have faith that the supply is purely limited to what the algorithm states right now based on a world of mathematics okay so first of all when it comes to discussing these things in terms of faith I think you know we all we all we have if you want to call it faith you know we have faith in so many sophisticated technology all over the world not collapsing and not falling and not destroying life everywhere so if encryption and these curves in this these problems of mathematics break down we have far bigger problems than just Bitcoin breaking down not necessarily because you have it you know necessarily because then you know internet traffic and credit cards and finance and nuclear launch codes all of that stuff stops functioning if mathematics stops the function so because of the closed systems you're dealing with an open system so no a nuclear bomb going off is not a closed system it doesn't require anyone to figure out a point on a curve these are closed systems with air gaps and that's why but anyways I let you finish so let me respond so the point is that you know we're already taking far larger faith in math in all other aspects of things and then the other thing is that this is being one day by day and nobody's saying in your Bitcoin is going to take over the world today but with every day that it continues to survive and that people continue to try and attack it and continue to find fault lies in it and then still they fail it continues to prove that okay maybe this is something that is reliable that is as real as physical things and you say that gold is money because of its it's part of reality and part of the material world well a lot of other things are part of the material world and they are not money why isn't copper or nickel or zinc money why isn't silver money or or or nickel or iron copper and silver where money and they've gotten demonetized so just the fact that something is material doesn't mean that it makes good money and it only became money you know why was it silver and gold that were the last two physical monies because they're the ones that have the lowest supply growth rate we cannot be sure of gold's exact supply growth rate but as you said we have pretty good data on annual production over the past few years and if you look at the last few decades and you look at annual production you know that pretty much is the majority of the supply because a hundred years ago the the the entire supply that was around has increased dramatically over the 100 years because with all the annual production so even if there are errors in estimating how much gold there is in Indian temples and some people say there's much more gold there than we imagine that might well be the case and it might be the case that the gold stock to flow might be even lower than we suspected is but it can't be much lower and it can't be much higher than around the 1% range just because we have pretty reliable data on the production over the last 50 years and that constitutes the majority of the supply so annual production every year is going to continue to be a small amount and I I don't think you dispute the fact that the gold supply does not increase at large percentages every year it increases its small percentages but it does increase and these percentage increases add up and so over 50 years we know that there will be more gold produced every year we're going to just keep digging deeper holes finding better ways of finding gold and we're going to get more gold but we're only ever going to get about another three million bitcoins and that's it that's all the bitcoins that is ever going to be there because I mean your argument seems to suggest that if you're saying that the supply of gold is larger then are you saying that gold production is going to be increasing at a higher rate so we're going to be getting faster supply growth of gold in any case this isn't I think the difference in the stock to flow might be important in the long run but I think the real and most important difference between gold and Bitcoin and why I think it's it is just the ability to get around government restrictions and it's something that to be honest you know with this current crisis and what we're seeing happen over the last year or so it's something that's driving me more and more toward considering the idea that yeah gold is becoming demonetized like silver because you know currencies all over the world are imploding people are having so many problems with their money and what are the alternatives that they're seeking they're seeking the dollar or they're seeking Bitcoin and that's basically it because you can't sell the gold internationally because governments won't let you send gold internationally and so this is the period in which you would have expected gold to shoot up you would have expected gold payment solutions to emerge to allow people to use gold for international trade and yet we find that basically gold barely moves as a price nobody can use it because you can't send it abroad and really it's it was the gold's time to shine but I think Bitcoin is going to be taking over that shine because you can send Bitcoin across borders yeah so okay you basically never responded to what I argued and then you threw in a bunch of new topics so let me just get back to what I was saying and see if we can either agree or disagree because I think that's the best way to have a meaningful conversation so what I said about the natural world was not that something has to be material to be money what I said clearly was that something in the natural world that exhibits natural properties is how we even have the notion of certainty we wouldn't have the scientific method if we didn't have irreducible unchanging corporeal elements that we can observe measure test and predict in fact we wouldn't even have language or a logos if we didn't have something that we could point to to compare to something else so my issue is that I don't see Bitcoin as belonging to the realm of corporeality I see it belonging to the realm of mathematics and with regards to so I reject the comparison and then I also reject your attempt to analyze gold supply based on the numbers that you're just using and and to try to quantify those numbers as somehow relating in any way shape or form to Bitcoin and then the other issue here is that when you think about gold and gold supply the the reason that the gold supply is different from the silver supply or different the copper supply it has nothing to do with the act of mining it has to do with those natural attributes again so specific gravity conductivity a lecture negativity malleability ductility crustal abundance these are entirely different elements with different features that's why the head grade on a silver mine you know I own a silver mine that has 30 grams per ton head grade but a good gold mine as mark will tell you is half a gram or one gram per ton so there are these physical limits that restrict how much gold you can produce per physical space relative to how much silver you can produce per physical space which then coupled with the other natural attributes provide for the diminishing utility of every element how much it costs to move it how much cost to transport it but fundamentally I think they're they're two different things and like I said I think it's a flawed comparison because you know what I generally see is I see this predilection to invoke the Austrian tradition the tradition of Austrian economics and then the natural features of gold which you just did but in the process you're just advocating for like a supercessionaire movement that subsumes the tradition of Austrian economics subsumes the immutability predictability the neutrality of gold and then you just inject your own human ideas and somehow mix them all together and so I see very clear leaps and logic with something even very basic like the definition of a mendarian saleable good or the notion of regressions so you've taken the concepts predicated on neutrality and objectivity and and then you take a great liberty by maintaining the theory but but adding an abstract service which you keep calling a digital good based on the human language of mathematics okay well that's a lot but I think the important thing the important disagreement is that you say that it's the physical properties of gold that are what make it money but I think there's an important distinction here the physical properties of gold are what give it the low supply growth rate or the high stock to flow ratio that's what makes it money okay what comes first in the law of causality it's yes but bitcoin finds another way of establishing that stock to flow ratio a bunch of human and I totally understand that it's totally acceptable that for you to not find this to be convincing and for you to not join bitcoin and you know it's it's it's an entrepreneurial call just like your entrepreneurial call to use bitcoin cash and tell it and tell us that this was the future of digital currency a few years ago we still have all those tweets where you talk about how bitcoin cash is the future so I mean this is this this is just entrepreneurial decisions you can think that bitcoin cash will be better than bitcoin you can think that bitcoin will never be able to make it because of math not being reliable and that's you know the market will reward or punish that statement so it's not something that I can argue with because it's it's it's about your belief however I think the key point to keep in mind is that it isn't the physicality of gold that matters to make it money we can have a digital good that we could use as money as long as people can see it show up on their node and they can know that it is reliable they know that the system isn't being hacked if you're able to establish the high stock to flow on something that is not physical then you've gotten the properties that you need for money that's that's really the key point and so continuing to obsess over the physicality of it over the physical properties misses the point and this is and you know we get into the realm of mystic thought and the alchemists have been obsessed with alchemists are the ones that are the mathematicians actually that's the exact problem I mean you yourself before we started are concerned about certain technologies why is that why don't you trust epitomeology why don't you trust these predictions that are made in math why does menger fundamentally reject the use of mathematical methods and insist that the soul of economics is to investigate essences phenomena not specific quantities but your entire comparison of s2f which you guys got again from the gold gold industry is trying to compare something I just think there's a much more powerful way to argue for bitcoin and I don't need to get into the I mean I've seen your arguments for bitcoin cash I would disagree that's a serious you really think that saying something like that is a serious way to engage in a conversation that out of thousands of tweets taking some tweets out of context or tongue-in-cheek that dictate everything about me about how it wasn't involved in which you were very convinced that bitcoin cash was the future at one period okay okay gentlemen I'm gonna I'm gonna step in here I'm gonna step in here we've got a I mean yesterday I was on Twitter and I saw Charlie Magara who's was head of Goldman Sachs metals trading and now works for blockchain one of the big blockchain companies and he said you know I went to dinner with some wall street people that was trying to sell bitcoin and at the end of the dinner I tried to send them some bitcoins and it took too long so I ended up sending them bitcoin cash you know sometimes I wonder and you know the maximas came in and destroyed him and but but the point is people are allowed to criticize a technology if something is a technology it's a service and this is this is my bigger issue I'm trying to understand nobody is disputing your right to criticize again I'm saying that maybe perhaps you might want to consider that your understanding of this problem of this topic is a little bit problematic when you think that is an obvious scam like bitcoin cash is even comparable to bitcoin it didn't seem like an obvious scam at the time and you can't make it seem like obvious scam for people who understood bitcoin no that's that's not true the only thing that you guys have done is you've stuck to one thing thick or thin hodl which is a very commendable thing that's what people with a joint belief do and that may very well be a strength but I just want to try to understand something what where do you get the idea that money can be a digital good or a service through austrian economics I really try to understand that the key concept in austrian economics is you know that there's no religious dictates that gold has to be money in fact you see that the austrian economists are constantly talking about how gold how money is subjective and the choice of what makes money is the is the function of the market and the free market is about and that the correct you know the correct austrian prescription for this is not that we need the government to install a gold standard we need the government to let the free market emerge and then from the free market you would get gold as money or gold and silver and you know that there are clear there's a clear so omegle doesn't discuss anything about a good needing no he doesn't he talks and he explains why characters of a good and it is about the saleability and we see that ultimately the function of the saleability can be best attained by something that has a low supply growth rate but ultimately what really matters is it more than important than anything that menger said what matters is that bitcoin is being used as money and it has been used as money for 10 years so people use it as money whether you like it or not and if it continues to work and they continue to work it they continue to use it and the value continues to go up and more and more people join your theoretical problems with mathematics or with the physicality or the lack of physicality become really just the problems that delay your ability to adopt bitcoin but not a problem for bitcoin so so this goes into the whole reason that you need to have this this pitch but i went back to menger and i went back to the principles of economics and i read the term that he uses for goods and he uses a term nutzlichkeiten or usefulness in german within the great universal structure of relationships subject to the law of causality so what he's actually referring to here is the is the notion of goods the concept of goods advanced by Aristotle in the politics so he's so the so the word here in greek is things goods property tools a thing physical that one uses or needs sofakly uses the term to refer to apollo's cattle as a thing to be desired so we can be an inanimate good or an animate good but nowhere is it mentioned that the good can be a service or a labor service there was no digital world back then the concept of there being something digital was just not present and that changed and you know also you know menger and me and those people aren't divine this isn't a religion they have been wrong about things and they will continue to be wrong and the world will find things that are wrong about them but in this case they're not even wrong they cannot have possibly imagined the category of a digital good before the digital world had been even invented and that doesn't mean we throw away everything that they wrote because they didn't write about the digital era but also you can't tell all the billions of dollars worth of bitcoin all the people that are trading billions of dollars worth of bitcoin for actual goods and services every day you cannot tell those people that no no no this thing isn't money it's not i mean that's exactly what we do with fiat i mean the austrian specifically singled out fiat and their entire project was an annihilation of fiat so my argument at least if you want to emerge on the market fiat needs a gun in order to make it work and so the option argument is that you should stop putting guns to people's head and let the market decide what money is and bitcoin is an example of that it emerges on the market yes so if you agree with me that bitcoin can't be a good and it's a service i think that's fair i don't agree so you still think it could be a good even though the definition of a good was always a physical useful tool something in it of itself because the problem here is if you think bitcoin can exist as a good that's just money then the real issue is when menger is referring to Aristotle's politics and the law of causation what he's specifically referring to is where Aristotle argues that as it relates to money we should always treat the physical objects in ways that are benefiting of their final nature and since the concept of money is not meant to be a good in itself it is unnatural to desire money as an end in itself so this is of course that fetishism of marx the mcm but the issue here is you can't have something which doesn't exist that has no actual usefulness which is then desired just as as something in itself as the concept of money devoid devoid divorced from the actual good why not this is what we have the austrian say that was their entire argument so you're invoking their tradition i have no but the thing is that this this tradition is essentially to counter the claim that government was needed for money this was not to counter the claim that a digital good could be money so this is being applied out of context you have the state theory of money that was saying all right money has to be whatever the government says it is and if a government puts the king's head on a coin then that coin becomes money so according to the state theory of money a golden coin is money because it has the head of the king on it not because it was made out of gold the kings of the austrian answer is that no gold is money and the king has to put his head on gold in order for his coins to be money because if he put it on something else then the market will never accept it as money or you know he'd have to use force in order to try and make it but natural money that emerges on the market can emerge on its own so in other words the austrian argument is that is is to try and show people that actually money can emerge and that's the point from the regression argument it's not to say that and when they say that money emerges from a market good the point is that it doesn't emerge from the barrel of a gun not that it somehow you know meases or menger were riding a hundred years ago and could foresee a digital good and where dismissing the prospect that you could have a digital good or that you could have a purely monetary good it was never imaginable before that we could have a purely monetary good but here we are although to be fair bitcoin is not entirely free monitor and entirely monetary good because it's also needed to pay the transaction costs on the bitcoin network so it's the only thing that you can use in order to pay the bitcoin network okay so again i i just have a problem with with how you're describing this because menger goes on in his own book to specifically single out and distinguish between things and a special category of goods such as personal services and rights so the point here and then von Mises goes even further and says that all the goods are ordered with the the first order goods being of ultimate value and all other things of value are valued according to the part they play in the production of those goods so how can you have a a digital good which i am calling a service because i think that's exactly how the austrians would have defined it and i have no problem i think you could still argue for bitcoin as a service but how can a service or a good that clearly isn't of the first order ever be useful enough to be money it would impact the pricing and the economic calculations of every household why would a household ever desire that the same way that desires the fundamental goods that it needs in order to cooperate and achieve prosperity because money is a good on its own being able to hold a cash balance is a service that is valuable that is useful that has a utility to people no in other words not no no no no you use the money in order to be able to exchange the fact that you need to go and use the money means that the money has value to you that that's not how the austrians that's not how the austrians define it that's neither how aerosol to find it austrians discuss cash balances talk you see the discussion of cash balance yeah but you just think that's for cash balance it's because of uncertainty life is uncertain and that means that you cannot structure all of your payments and all of your receipts so that they need that you know that you never have to hold cash i mean optimally if you could do this you'd rather have all of your money invested at all times and to only liquidate it immediately when you want to spend it and you wouldn't want to hold any cash because cash doesn't earn returns and yet everybody has a cash balance why because there's value in it and because of the use of money as a medium exchange has value in it so this is a valuable thing on its own and just the fact that gold had a market use other than money doesn't mean that money on its own is not a good that's i think a very important point it's not gold it's any good but but again what you're doing here is you're you're taking various analyses in the tradition of austrian school like a Rothbard analysis of cash balances or of onmeses and you and you've divorced the original conception of money having to be a good that's useful and having being economically ordered where there's an economic order so so the problem is that in in doing so you're basically again conflating the various concepts because i can meditate on what money is or i can have a reflection on what money is as money money qua money but that doesn't mean that i've changed the definition that the money has to be a good so we can agree to disagree but but but what i was hoping i was really hoping to hear if you if you could see that at least bitcoin is a service and it could be a valuable service because that's how von nises described immaterial things and by the way i don't i don't accept that other argument too i don't think that the austrians were too stupid to predict that something like a fiat money issued by private people which is what bitcoin is it's not some magic mystical technology it's people working together in a decentralized way just like everyone is today under covid and and building something but then bitcoin has this aspect to it where once the thing was built everyone revels in it like oh my god look it's working the way we hoped it was going to work and then they go on to start convincing everyone about how good it is but it can never replace that austrian understanding of the thing having to be a good which basically separates it from a service in a very important way making it completely truly decentralized in the real world and then that usefulness of the good allowing it to become money yeah now i think i mean mises is pretty clear about the fact that he discusses the fact that gold and silver are affected by their monetary uses and by the variations in in their industrial demand and he says that this is actually makes this is not ideal but he says they're better money than government money because these forces of industrial demand and variations in mining supply these forces are far more are far less influential on their role as money than the forces of government intervention into money in other words the ability if mises had ever seen a purely monetary good he would have thought it would be even superior as money you can't say that though you can't just i don't say it mises says it i'll share the quote uh i'll dig it up and i'll share and i think somebody from the chat must know it because i shared all the time on twitter but anyways i think um putting the philosophical aside discussion aside we can we can we can argue about what is right and what is wrong but at the end of the day people all over the world have to make decisions and they need to make their decisions based on what they think is um based on what they think is the most a beneficial thing for them and people are going to start taking these choices and these decisions in their life based on what works for them and what they see around them and the reality is i think really the the thing that roi needs to come to terms with is you look at gold today where the world is falling apart central banks all over the world are in crisis um currencies are getting debauched and destroyed in many many countries liquidity crisis in all countries and instead people are running to the us dollar which is the root of the problem people are going back to the to the root of the problem because it's it's and and that's really the problem you know it's it's it's not possible for something like bit gold to function like bitcoin it's it's it's always centralized it has a single point of failure and therefore it's never going to be possible for you to be able to trade money internationally and allow and use this and that's why you know we see that as this catastrophe is happening we don't see gold taking over it's just yet another crisis that happens in which gold bugs come in with the high hopes that yet this is the time everything is going to collapse and gold is going to be the money and here we are we see it again it's not happening for gold and people are sticking to the dollar and the only alternative that can actually work is bitcoin plus i think the other thing to keep in mind is gold has a market capital capitalization of about eight trillion dollars so the potential for it to rise is very very slow very small in other words if you wanted to double the price of bitcoin the price of gold you need eight trillion dollars more of holders to be holding more of a gold which is a lot of money on the other hand bitcoin needs another 200 billion dollars worth of holders in order for it to double and price so the upside potential is much much much larger in bitcoin so you add to that the fact that it can be sent across borders and you know most people unfortunately don't have the ability to have all of these very sophisticated intellectual philosophical discussions about what manger actually meant and the material reality and all that stuff and whether math is real or math is not real most people are going to learn from looking around them that people who are using bitcoin are doing much better and they're being able to avert the damages from the crisis and that's going to influence more and more people and that's ultimately what it's going to be driving and you know the the number go up technology which bitcoiners which bitcoiners says you know the actual underlying technology behind bitcoin is going to continue to attract more and more people to bitcoin it's it's what gold bugs have been dreaming about since the 1970s which is you know a continuation of the 1970s when the dollar fell from 30 dollars an ounce to 800 an ounce that we would have just continued this but it hasn't continued but bitcoin has an opportunity to do it because it's small it has massive scope for appreciation and it has wings it can run it can cross international borders so i'm sorry i want to i want to i want to step in here because this is a very lively discussion an open discussion this is great we've been talking just to recapitulate so far what we've been talking we've been talking about the stop-to-flow ratio and then we've been talking about all sort of different topics mainly academic topics i think in both these areas you have to agree to disagree as far as i could take away i would like to go a little bit into more a practically to practical points which which often have been discussed for instance would start like to start some points of criticism which are often brought against gold from the bitcoin side which is verification divisibility and storage so roi how could you perhaps make an argument that that the verification is not a big problem or not a problem at all when using gold divisibility is not a problem and and storage can also be solved yes i appreciate that mark but i i do need to respond to what they've been said earlier so i agree that we we agree to disagree on everything we discussed thus far and i'm happy to advance to some of the other points that i think is making so syph Dean continues to make these comparisons now what syph deans ultimately doing now after after establishing this weak foundation is he's essentially making the following argument that a hyperinflation is an opportunity for profit so owning money doesn't make you rich it merely preserves your purchasing power the whole bitcoin narrative now has essentially become a macro hedge fund thesis on how to profit from the coming hyperinflation this is not how the real economy works that's why i was stressing the real physical corporeal economy versus the illusory economy a hyperinflation will hyperinflate real goods and real industries but illusory services will just as easily easily be deleted these kinds of industries which power most of our global economy today we're illusory to begin with and existed only because of fiat monetary debasement if anything advocating for bitcoin to rise in a hyperinflation only results in the supporting of the service economy which is inflated it reduces localism it increases centralized dependence on the internet and the state which control it gold does not care syph deans if you think that it hasn't risen enough in lieu of the money printing to the person owning it it has preserved purchasing power effortlessly on any human saving cycle and it's at an all-time high in every currency except for usd so in a hyperinflation entire industries will get destroyed and gold will continue to maintain its purchasing power relative to the real human cooperation which never changes the things that do not change gold is not supposed to appreciate an inflate nominally against a bubble economy or illusory values doing so would support that immeasurable economy the gold that gold is currently at a 10 trillion dollar stock while global financial assets are at a 300 trillion dollar stock doesn't make me say well why isn't gold higher it makes me realize that the 300 trillion dollar global financial assets are likely going to drop in real terms and so with bitcoin you're looking to profit on this hyperinflation which is just such an illogical proposition because you're betting that bitcoin will rise in a hyperinflation relative to everything else even an improved version of bitcoin in 50 years so i see this ideology of blind faith in the evolutionism of bitcoin and then you contextualize everything is changing for the better all the time and and i think that's going to end up being a double-edged sword because a hyperinflation will destroy so many industries that you have no uh no sure way of saying that bitcoin will survive a hyperinflation or somehow benefit better than gold no i have to be clear i i did not mean that it would be hyperinflation that is necessary for bitcoin in fact in one of my recent papers i argue that i think bitcoin is a way to get out of the fiat catastrophe without hyperinflation because bitcoin and and and and it's not about hyperinflation at this point it's about the fact that you have a financial crisis it's about the fact that people are looking for a safe haven and it's about the fact that people are looking for ways to escape capital controls and to escape inflation confiscation and bail ins all of those things happening worldwide are quite distinct from hyperinflation in fact we could be talking about a strong deflationary crisis over the coming year so the and and the key thing that i mentioned in in that paper is that i don't think bitcoin needs hyperinflation because bitcoin is the monetization of a hard asset just like gold however the fiat system is the monetization of debt and so what is happening as more and more demand for bitcoin increases on the one hand you'd think all right well demand for bitcoin increases that means demand for holding dollars declines and that in then will then lead to the collapse collapse dollar however if demand for holding bitcoin increased then you would also that the demand for holding uh for for us debt would decline and so bitcoin can solve the problem of fiat by simply allowing the world to monetize something better which is a hard asset which is bitcoin rather than monetizing debt and so we can reduce the amount of debt reduce the money supply and effectively we don't have to have a hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar we can just bitcoin can continue to grow as the in real terms as the dollar economy maintains its size or grows at a lower rate in real terms and i think eventually we could look back at this and see it as being more like an upgrade and and and the difference is that gold cannot have this gold cannot monetize without a hyperinflationary episode because it would require an enormous amount of capital to go into gold and to be dropped out of fiat and that's not uh you know there isn't that much even even though you'd need a lot of capital to go in there isn't a lot of appreciation potential because we are already an eight trillion dollar or ten trillion dollar market so even if you bring in another ten trillion dollars that's only a hundred percent which you know in bitcoin terms is really not that much so in bitcoin on the other hand if you bring in eight trillion dollars the price of a bitcoin is going to go much much much much higher so this is far more enticing plus of course the fact as i mentioned earlier the the the difficulty of moving gold around so i'm not saying that this is a a play to profit on hyper inflation i'm saying as the current system continues to suffer its problems it's the time for gold and bitcoin to shine and you know you started off by saying this is going to be more of a discussion but i think you know over the last year i've revised my views a little bit more and i'm beginning to think more and more that the the the inability of gold to deliver might just see it continuously get more and more demonetized and we can see it happening just like what happened with silver that as the thing stops appreciating which was what happened toward the end of the 19th century when everybody switched to the gold standard the price of silver started depreciating in terms of gold and so as the price of silver increased as the price of gold increased and the price of silver decreased there was less demand for silver and that then meant that silver became cheaper in real terms and so started being used in industrial applications further and further and when you start getting used in industrial applications it's actually bad for the monetary role because you're taking parts of the stockpile that is already existing which could be liquid in a market which is there as part of the stockpile that formulates the entire supply the liquidity pool you start taking it out of that liquid supply and you put it into industrial uses it stops being part of the money and so it brings the stockpile down and then new production becomes larger percentage of the stockpile in other words putting existing gold or silver in industrial uses lowers the stock the flow of gold and silver and this is the process that's been going around with silver for the past 150 years and as a result of it you know 150 years ago the price of silver to gold the gold to silver ratio was about 15 to 1 today it's around 120 to 1 so perhaps we're beginning to see something similar happening with gold you know we've seen so much inflation in the fiat world and yet gold has been at this kind of level for the past 10 years or so another 10 and 20 years of gold not rising significantly it's going to start getting used more and more in industrial applications and then new production will become more significant so the stock to flow for gold will decline further and it becomes more and more of an industrial metal okay i completely reject everything you say again so you're completely misunderstanding something like silver and you once you separate the notion of the real economy from the abstract economy you're likely to make those errors because you don't understand things the way they naturally are so the fundamental purpose of silver being a good that has usefulness is never as a store of value it's based on its utility so if someone is using silver they're you know turning it into tableware or a mirror or a solar panel and it provides them with utility and then it also has a store of value function by virtue of the debasement fiat money that this relationship between silver and gold and all other elements naturally never changes so i understand that you take the ratios of silver to gold to be set in stone based on the edicts and the ratios of governments trying to essentially reverse Gresham's law get people to use silver and accumulate their gold but i don't i look at the head graves of silver i look at the crustal abundance and what i see is silver has always been just as rare relative to gold in the past as it was today but to a family that you know had a tableware set of silver 100 years ago that provides them with antiseptic properties when they're eating and is beautiful and that was 65 cents an ounce and now it's $16 an ounce silver has done just fine in preserving the store of value for that utility function that haven't given up time and effort that they had to put in to keep shining it and preventing it from rusting throughout those all of that time it doesn't silver doesn't rust it tarnishes exactly you need to keep rubbing it in if they bought stainless steel it would have looked nicer that's absolutely that's an absolute nonsense in fact this this goes back to a greater issue here which is when you're stuck with the paradigm of analyzing the illusory fiat money economy and you miss something so important here about silver because what you have to understand is that in the gold standard economy the kinds of products that were produced and i think i've heard you speak about this before were of higher quality such that the good itself had a component of labor and a component of the commodity value so a family would be able to afford a silverware set today a tableware set is made out of pig iron or shitty nickel and the family's primarily paying for the marginal service of producing that at the highest possible margin and then we get the debt based consumption and we get the debasement of money and that keeps going further and further so we have shittier products lower quality products that have less utility but in the old days when we had a gold standard you would basically be able to consume products use them and they would have a subsequent monetary value so i don't think you can analyze silver the way you do and arrive at any conclusion and more over the price of silver and all those other fiat currencies that i mentioned has been doing just fine too so i don't mean if i reject the comparison to bitcoin if i why not price it in gold why don't you look at the price of silver in gold it's gone down 90 percent the natural attributes my friend silver 90 percent of its value if you wanted to get a silver ounce you needed one ounce of gold could buy you 15 ounces of silver in 1870 today it can buy you 100 in a 100 or according to the according to the official ratio which has no ratio there's only been a market ratio and it's changed we've had this discussion on twitter and you continue to be in denial about it but the silver is a well-known thing mark i'll let you settle this what's the silver to go but i want to another point about about this silver so right now in the shanghai exchange the most actively traded contract futures contract is a silver contract okay so the idea that silver doesn't provide people with store of value properties is flawed because you have to go back to the natural properties because of the specific gravity of gold relative to silver and the crustal abundance of gold relative to silver it's much easier for someone the common man of the lower classes to accumulate a weight of silver and it's getting much much easier yeah it's much easier so what is silver ultimately reflect the savings of the common man and what it's it's it reflects the monetary future of copper that's what copper was copper used to be money now it's copper is the same sort of iron no but copper has no long-lasting store of value properties it's neither will silver it's it's really just very few people i believe i'm talking naturally speaking i can have i have a piece of silver here from 300 years ago i'm staring at it so the point i'm trying to say is if you're looking for an alternate explanation for why the gold silver ratio is so out of whack i can give you one why is it that at house in ohio hasn't gone up as fast as a luxury apartment in new york it's because we've been seeing one of the greatest transfers of wealth in the history of man we live in modernity is a serfdom and so we have essentially a situation where the richest people are accumulating wealth at the fastest pace under this fiat money system and in this liberal political system so the result is that the savings asset for the rich has grown at a faster rate than the savings asset for the poor silver is literally known as the poor man's gold but i don't see a problem with that i don't see anything to infer from that and i certainly don't see anything to infer that would allow me to say well now gold is next and bitcoin this thing that's been around for 10 years that we created is going to supplant it well the thing that you should look at is the silver to gold ratio the price of silver to gold in 1870 it was about 15 ounces 15 to 1 today it's 120 that massive massive massive decline and the price of silver compared to gold cannot be explained by fiat because it had started even before fiat you know between 1870 and 1914 silver had already been crashing and all of the countries that were on the silver standard had already moved from the silver standard onto a gold standard yeah if you have a fiat money system that's illusory and it's it's growing all industries because of silver's natural properties you produce it as a byproduct of every metal so as long as you have growth in the economy you're producing a shitload of silver it's very elastic in fact when the economy slows down so it has a very low stock to flow ratio and that's what is being demonetized and that's the same thing that we know but but if the economy slows down if you have the real economy slowed down then all of a sudden the supply of silver shrinks would you agree no because because you're not using all these other byproducts copper and steel and yeah but if it were to generate any significant monetary demand if people were to actually start using it as money even in the case of a financial utility and there's no limit on how much more you can increase the supply because it's much easier to find silver so i'm glad you've come around to admit that it is about the supply side the supply increase of silver and that's it i'm admitting it's about the natural property so what i'm saying is you you keep thinking that if the supply of silver shrinks but wait there's no monetary demand but if we establish what i've tried to argue in the initial part of the date that money arises from the utility of the good the utility of silver never changes because it's part of that natural world of unchanging truths so as a consumer good is different from its utility as money and its utility as money is very lousy because its supply continues to be increased you can't say that with any confidence because i am because the money the supply of silver every year goes up by significant percentages every year much higher than gold and that's why gold has maintained its value relatively well in fiat inflation but silver has not silver you know it's it's it's it's been a 150-year bear market for silver how has it been a 150-year bear market if it was 65 cents 100 years ago because that's in fiat fiat has been going down even further it's a bear market so now you're comparing it against but but i'm comparing it against fiat it was 65 cents us now it shouldn't compare it against fiat because fiat is toilet paper it's worthless it's meaningless we're comparing it against gold real money no that's no but that but you can't but i'm trying to tell you i'm giving you an alternate explanation that the people that are rich that buy gold because they can buy a small amount of gold people small buy smaller portions of the gold instead of buying big portions of silver they can't no but you literally can't do that so so you can buy an ounce of silver for $15 to try to get $15 of gold is impossible mark will tell you you can buy it on a bit gold on gold money on your side well okay okay so let let things cool down i think what what regarding gold silver ratio also uh follow this pretty closely uh it is not true i think that one can say it was in a 150 year bear market even priced in gold because if you take the 1970s gold silver ratio peaked at the end of the 1970s at uh i think 10 or so so so silver went actually into boom market also priced in gold okay you can you can it was like a pump and dump somebody bought a lot of silver it was the hunt brothers back then you know well okay but but there is not a there is there is also a potential explanation silver being very inflation sensitive so during rising environment of inflation silver probably will rise faster than gold and during a low inflation or deflationary period silver will underperform and that actually i think could also explain the current price of silver relative to gold because as as you already mentioned side we've we've got a lot of deflationary pressures here as well so that could be one possible explanation but i really i really don't want to go too far of the topic and and i really perhaps if we could progress to some of the more practical points when we compare gold and and bitcoin again because this is actually the title of the debate right so um i i just would like to address a few criticism as i already mentioned um from from the opposing side so um i i often hear from from the opposing side for from from the bitcoin side that gold the very the the the verification is a very difficult problem the visibility and the storage so i would just like right to address those three and then i've got three four for safe if you could go for for that so again i i reject the statement and it's also um it just comes about from a misunderstanding of of nature and it's just a prepackaged argument that's basically nonsense so the reason that we have the classic scientific method like i said earlier or we can observe measure repeat predict is because for some reason it's an unexplained mystery there are these elements that are the natural building blocks of everything and at a certain moment those elements become irreducible what does that mean that means each distinct element has unique attributes specific gravity conductivity electronegativity malleability ductility all these words mean something that you can sense with your eyes with your sense of touch with your smell gold has no smell it's chemically inert every other element has a smell so when we measure how different elements smell we use gold as the baseline because it has no smell we compare it to everything else the idea that you can counterfeit gold easily is nonsense it came about from the media the financial media in those times where there was demand for gold and the fact is that if anyone actually handled gold here i have some gold right here you can verify its authenticity by simply comparing it to anything else we deal we're one of the largest bullion bankers we deal with billions of dollars in bullion we've never once run into a tungsten bar now with tungsten all you get is the ability to potentially trick the specific gravity but all you have to do is check for its malleability or ductility or light it and see its melting point so the people have been that's much more complicated than just checking your bitcoin node it's it's an enormous world of difference yeah but i'm not in a service which consumes me and respects my human action i have something here at hand that i can verify that i can improve on my own a good which then has utility and can become money you're forcing me in a system that ultimately requires faith in something else so i nobody's forcing anybody that's the point that you keep missing if people march into bitcoin and billions and trillions of dollars go into bitcoin it's going to be hard for you to continue to insist that this doesn't work it's reality economic reality doesn't care about your own i own just reality no but we we own bitcoin i have no problem speculating on technology like a tesla stock and i have no problem arguing which is what my good friends in the bitcoin world the ones that are that i consider to be uh uh kind of the most successful ones they their argument is first mover brand that's what's going to make bitcoin bitcoin and we can tell the people who just got in early because they're lucky and they don't really get people later people have gone a little bit later and and are supporting the project in a very big way so mark counterfeiting gold is not easy in fact i hope sydeme will read with me on this what generally you see is you don't counterfeit the gold you either clip the weight of the gold uh you know basically through through fraud or you try to introduce an inferior element and inferior good and tell people hey use this instead of gold and by doing that you accumulate the gold so it's gresham's law storage if you're going to make some kind of an abstract argument where you're uh comparing uh something not real with something real then yeah i can store all of my uh dreams in my brain um but if you're looking at elements again the irreducible building blocks you can't store anything else that has the same specific gravity and crustal abundance in the lowest amount of space as you can with gold that's why when you go into my vaults i can store a billion dollars of gold within a small area and if i want to store a billion dollars of silver i need warehouses upon warehouses upon warehouses because the the uh density the value density and here i'm using the fiat value term which i hate but the the fiat value density of silver is much much much lower than it is for gold so the storage of gold is the best thing you can store physically sure can you store things that are abstract better than something physical yes but i reject that argument okay how much of agreement do we have say from this one any no i think the obsession with the physicality is just uh becoming more and more quaint with every day that bitcoin continues to operate and you know i i urge you to recant before your children and grandchildren start laughing at you roe um we don't want you on on on the opposite end we don't want you getting left things that are necessary for you every day are real things real good they are necessary and they are real but for them right but it's not necessary for the monetary function the monetary function can be but they're able to yeah so so if you can show me the things that matter to people are the basic goods the average person just wants to live a life and provide for their family and they want to eat and they want to have clothing and shelter and those are the things that's the real economy that's based on the elements that never changes so in that way i can't compare something from that world just like if i don't eat i die or if i jump in front of a you know car or something happens to me i can't compare that to the possibilities of my mind or some service that's being offered to me i don't know that a service is scarcity once it becomes commoditized uh retains its scarcity because what i've seen throughout history with services no you've just called it a service and you just assume that you know math doesn't work and therefore you're not sure about the but again that's an entrepreneurial decision and again you know i tell you ultimately it's really human action and human choice that's going to decide this is people deciding what they want to do and what they wanted to put their money in and it's it's it's not as long as bitcoin can continue to be sent across borders when gold camp i think that's just what can you send better across borders that's physical like the things you need so right now they're within gold i can send a billion dollars in bitcoin across borders and like 10 transactions that'll take a couple of hours and it's done and it costs 50 cents or five cents in transaction fees with gold you know when the us and the really i think this is the final my punchline really when when germany tried to repatriate its gold from the us it took many years and many millions of dollars to ship that gold and insurance and carry it out and it's just the the cost of performing final settlement with gold with physical gold is massively expensive and without that you're relying on the credit of the people who run the banking system and that's how you end up with fiat and that's how bitcoin solved this problem by just making it so incredibly cheap to make final settlement across international borders and that's really you know the the checkmate for gold but gold cannot really do that so again if you have a service with an abstract unit measured of its in itself you can send it anywhere but that that is not comparable to a physical good i can send a billion dollars of gold from london to new york for $50 $500 i mean the example you use of germany so that's just like using the example of bitfinex having some of their money frozen by a bank somewhere it's not if we're trying to debate the fundamental first principles you can't say that bitcoin is better than gold the transferring value you you can say they're two different things in the real world gold is the best thing that's why it's continually used for that purpose and in the virtual world you can focus on trying to make the argument why bitcoin would be better than any version of bitcoin any version of libra or stablecoin and that's the realm where you can make that argument and i'd be happy to support that argument but you can't compare it to gold that's not strong enough argument to say that that bitcoin is going to supply gold because under that basis you'd have to tell me how bitcoin can feed me clothe me shelter me provide me with energy or be a commodity good that i can anyway gold does those things you don't live in gold and you don't eat gold and you don't wear it you exchange it for those things and you can also change part of the natural world this is the basis of the aris atelian metaphysics at menger based his own theory on so this is the basis of pre-digital monetary economics it's you know the you're talking about the post office will never be able to uh will you know email will never be able to replace letters no it can perform the function of a letter i can send you information with email and so it's going to be done and yes people will still use uh both for sending stuff but for sending information it's becoming far far far more useful just what do we see in that and what do we see with that commodification of a service the the original uniqueness and scarcity of a letter has become diluted so that all all the incidental features of a letter have become polished away with a physical letter you get an entirely different experience than with an email and so what we end up seeing is services end up consuming their users because they're just trying to distribute a service at the highest possible margin over time and and try to give everyone the same experience but they fundamentally can't because it's a closed system