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May 12, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
13:44
Money, gold, crypto, COWS and coins: What is MONEY?
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Time Text
This podcast is about money, gold, crypto, cows, and coins.
And it starts with two really important questions.
Question number one, what is money?
And question number two, what is a store of value?
And my thinking on this has been greatly expanded, almost...
As if I had a...
What's that mushroom called?
Psilocybin.
Like, if I had a psilocybin trip about finances, that's how my mind is expanding.
I actually have not taken psilocybin mushrooms ever, but that's what it feels like.
I'm experienced from what people tell me.
So, what is money?
And Jim Rickards was talking in an interview the other day And he said, you know, money can be anything that people agree upon as a means of exchange.
And it can be cows.
And I was like, really?
It could be cows?
And he says that other cultures throughout history have used, from time to time, they have successfully used cows as a form of currency.
So everything was pricing cows.
Like, oh, you want to buy this house, it's going to cost you, you know, 50 cows.
Or you need this piece of land, it's two cows, or two and a half cows, because they butcher the cows, right?
Or whatever they want to trade, they could trade it in cows, and that can work.
And they didn't need actual currency in these examples.
So money can be literally anything.
It can be, you know, pieces of paper with green ink and purple ink, which is the $5 bill.
It can be gold.
It can be silver.
It can be crypto.
It can be electronic receipts, electronic transactions.
It can be pieces of paper that represent gold, which is what the dollar used to be long ago.
It could be electronic receipts that represent gold, by the way.
It could be ammunition.
It could be anything.
As long as people agree that that's money, that they will accept that thing, whatever that thing is, then that makes it money.
And it got me thinking, well, what about intrinsic value?
Because I've always understood that gold and silver have intrinsic value.
I've talked about this a lot because they are physical materials.
They're elements.
They're on the table of elements.
And you can't destroy gold.
You could just change its form.
You could melt it.
You could heat it.
You could turn it into a liquid.
But it's still, it's just liquid gold.
You can't burn gold.
You can't burn silver.
Try to light a silver coin.
You're just going to maybe put some lighter smoke on the coin.
Even if you had a very high temperature oven, if you got that coin to 5,000 degrees, it's still silver.
It's just liquid silver.
And if you heat it enough, it'll vaporize.
But it's just silver vapor.
It's still silver.
So I was asking myself, well, gold and silver have intrinsic value, right?
That's what makes it...
Really, really special.
And then a question came to mind, because I have a lot of animals, and I was, I don't know, out of the blue, again, maybe this is like another psilocybin trip, which I did not take, just to be clear.
I'm just saying that's a metaphor.
But I was wondering, what do my donkeys think of silver?
What do my donkeys value gold at?
And the answer is, they don't.
Or my dogs, or my chickens, or my goats.
If I show a piece of silver to a goat, or let's say I give my goat a choice.
Here's a one ounce gold coin, and here's a delicious potato chip that are the same size.
Which one is the goat going to value more?
The goat is going to value the delicious potato chip.
Or even better, really salty banana chip snacks that I have.
They love those, and goats love any kind of salty snack, by the way.
But they care nothing about gold and silver.
And so when I came to grips with that realization, it hit me.
Gold and silver have intrinsic value only to people.
And actually only to some people.
Not even all people, but definitely not non-people.
Gold and silver have no value to animals.
And have you seen those Mark Dice videos where he tries to give away...
I don't know if it was a gold coin or a silver coin or something.
Maybe it was silver.
He's giving people a choice.
This is from a couple years ago.
He said, here, you can have a Hershey's chocolate bar or a one ounce piece of silver.
People chose the chocolate bar.
Why?
Because they don't value silver.
And yeah, they're idiots on top of that.
But not everybody values silver.
Obviously people have different definitions of what is money, what is value, what is a store of value.
And once I realized that animals don't value gold and silver, then I realized that the thing that gives gold and silver value is, in fact, it is found only in human psychology.
And it comes down to the fact, I believe, A lot of it.
I mean, yes, gold and silver are pretty.
They're shiny.
They have high density, especially gold.
It's fun to hold it in your hand.
It really is.
But they have utility.
And utility is something that humans understand.
That it is the utility that silver is used in so many areas of industry and that gold has all these uses as well, industrial uses, scientific uses.
It's used in instruments.
It's used in electronics.
Silver is used in solar panels.
You have to have a lot of silver to make solar panels.
You've got to have silver to make wind turbines and all these things.
It has utility.
And thus there's always a market of people buying silver Because they need to build stuff with it.
And so you and I might look at a piece of silver or gold and say, wow, that's pretty.
But somebody else is looking at it and say, hey, I can turn that into solar panels and add value to it and then sell that for a greater profit.
The silver is just a utilitarian element for all of industry.
And once I realized that...
I understood that, well, frankly, anything that has utility can be money.
Anything that has properties that make it useful can quite literally be money.
And then, right then, I understood more that the argument of the crypto people who have always said that, you know, well, especially with Bitcoin, I've said Bitcoin is digital gold, which I disagree with, by the way.
But what they were arguing is that Bitcoin has utility, which it does.
All crypto has some level of utility that is beyond physical things like gold or silver or beyond fiat currency.
And so all crypto is able to be moved or transferred relatively quickly across all borders.
It's not subject to banking controls.
It's not usually subject to government controls.
Some of it's private.
If you have the right coins, there are privacy properties.
It's under your control, right?
Depending on what kind of crypto you're using, some of it's scalable.
Although Bitcoin has had a lot of hiccups lately because of ordinals on its blockchain, which I call the giant graffiti fest of the BTC blockchain.
Everybody's spraying their bored ape image graffiti all over the blockchain right now, which is causing huge problems, but that's a different debate.
But overall, cryptocurrency actually does have...
Utilitarian properties that make it valuable.
And right now, one of the best properties of cryptocurrency is that it's not the dollar.
And it's not in a bank.
It's not in a bank that can fail.
Now, of course, there are all these crap fraud coins like FTX and Sam Bankman fraud, and there's a bunch of crap out there as well.
But no matter what you have in that space, isn't it cool that A bank failure can't wipe out your wallet, you see?
I mean, suddenly that has incredible value.
That's intrinsic value at this point.
So, you know, I pick up an ounce of gold and I'm like, this is awesome.
This is physical material.
This is an element.
Like, this is going to outlast the rise and fall of civilizations.
Like, everybody, well, almost everybody except...
Hershey chocolate bar moron.
Everybody recognizes this as something of value, and I can barter this, I can trade this, I can use this at a farmer's market, or maybe silver would be a better choice for that.
Gold is too big of a denomination.
Divisibility is an issue when it comes to gold.
But gold has all these amazing properties, but then I think about right now, Getting out of the banking system and getting into all kinds of systems of money that are recognized, it has to include crypto.
It has to include it.
And as you know, I was very critical of Bitcoin hype and crap coin hype over all the years because I didn't want people to get ripped off and lose money.
Chasing a bunch of FOMO. And, you know, a lot of the people on YouTube, they just sound like con artists.
Like, you know, buy it now.
It's going to go to a million.
And they're like, come on.
But what's changed since then is that cryptocurrency has become highly utilitarian money.
It has use cases now that give it intrinsic value, high value, in a parallel way to how silver has high intrinsic value because there are use cases for manufacturing.
And so I now have to say publicly, cryptocurrency is money.
Cryptocurrency is money.
And I was reluctant to state this for a long time.
It took an expanding of my understanding.
It took, frankly, some bank failures for me to really get to the, you know, understanding the utilitarian value.
of cryptocurrency.
And now, realizing that more banks are going to fail and more governments are going to become even more authoritarian about money and how they're going to be bank bail-ins and bank freezes and bank holidays and currency collapses and great resets and whatever else, the utility factor of cryptocurrency has now skyrocketed.
And note, I'm not telling you to go out and buy one specific type of cryptocurrency.
I'm just saying as a general principle, Cryptocurrency is money.
There are different types of cryptocurrencies that have different properties, some advantages, some disadvantages.
Some are scams.
A lot are scams.
Most cryptocurrencies that have ever existed have already failed.
It's a bit of a Wild West out there, which is why you have to do a lot of due diligence if you're going to buy crypto and trust that it has value.
But I'll tell you one thing.
In the ecosystem that I control, Health Ranger Store and Brighteon and Natural News and so on, we are absolutely looking at ways right now to implement cryptocurrencies as various means of payment, of tipping, of rewards, of all kinds of things.
And that, those decisions have been made because of Of understanding the utilitarian value of crypto, the speed of transfers, the privacy aspects of certain coins, the security of encryption, cryptography, and the fact that governments would have, if they could ban Bitcoin, they would have done so already.
All they can do is name certain wallet IDs and tell exchanges not to recognize those, which is...
They can't really ban the whole thing.
They can just segment certain wallets.
But those wallets function perfectly well outside of those exchanges.
So internationally, still working fine.
I will keep up to speed on what we're implementing, what we're researching, whatever conclusions I come to about all of this.
But cryptocurrency is money.
It's money...
Gold is money.
Silver is money.
For now, fiat currency is money, but it might not be for much longer.
But crypto is absolutely money.
I recognize that.
I'm implementing that.
And I agree with all those who ever stated that.
It is money.
And we will recognize it as money in our ecosystem.
So stay tuned.
There will be some exciting announcements ahead.
I can't wait until we have a tipping system that uses crypto.
And I'll keep you posted.
Thanks for listening.
Mike Adams here, HealthRanger, naturalnews.com, and also the founder of brighteon.com.
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