Stefan Molyneux and Jeffrey Tucker discuss Stefan's upcoming speech on how bitcoin could end war, the evils of fiat currency, the democratic nature of bitcoin, bitcoin as an economic safe-haven and what would happen if Stefan ruled the world.
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| Alright, so I thought we'd get started in the cozy, what, 18 minutes that we have to solve the world's problems. | |
| I hope you're all going to come. | |
| I'm going to do a good speech tonight. | |
| Sorry, not that this isn't going to be good. | |
| What are you speaking on? | |
| Bitcoin versus war. | |
| Oh, are you going back through the history of central banks and... | |
| Central banks and... | |
| So I had a researcher pull together a real short preview, trying to find out the cost of war is really tough because it's all self-reported and it doesn't count in the long-term cost of war, like long-term health care and benefits and also... | |
| The war is often funded with bonds, right, which have to be paid back over time and all that. | |
| So he basically took, and also CPI, inflation, it's all lies anyway, right? | |
| So he did costs of war relative to gold. | |
| So he took the price of gold at the time of the war, took the official cost and converted it to gold. | |
| Going from World War I? Yeah. | |
| Which is your benchmark, right? | |
| Because that's the beginning of central banking. | |
| So yeah, so I'm going to talk about that. | |
| And basically it's going to be audience participation. | |
| We're going to try and figure out how we can use Bitcoin to start a war. | |
| So, no, we're going to try and test the architecture and we're going to brainstorm and try and figure out if we were evil or we worked for the government. | |
| Wait. | |
| Something's not right about that. | |
| I'll work that out. | |
| But, yeah, we should discuss how we could use the architecture to start a war. | |
| And if we can't, then we have a cure for war in Bitcoin, which I think is quite important. | |
| This is an unexplored area. | |
| And it's so obvious, though, once you realize it, the very first big program funded by central banking was World War I. Yeah. | |
| I mean, it wasn't scientific monetary policy. | |
| It wasn't low unemployment. | |
| It wasn't low inflation. | |
| It wasn't the end of business cycles. | |
| No. | |
| It was the beginning of total war. | |
| That was the beginning of Central Bank. | |
| And it could not, I mean, even on a gold standard, you know, the cost of World War II for just America, which was never invaded, It was more than all the gold that had ever been mined in human history. | |
| Even with the gold standard, that's why you had to get rid of the gold standard beginning in 1913 and then all the way through the war. | |
| Then Vietnam broke. | |
| Bretton Woods and the convertibility of U.S. debt to gold in the 71s. | |
| Do you find yourself ever more sort of conscious of the costs of nationalization of money for humanity? | |
| I mean, this happened to me when I discovered Bitcoin. | |
| It was like, okay, this is weird. | |
| This is a monetary technology we should have had all along, and we've missed this development for 100 years. | |
| It might have come a long time ago. | |
| Yeah, my argument, fiat currency is the greatest virus ever to strike the planet. | |
| Because it causes so many deaths, hundreds of millions. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And it's a little strange too, isn't it? | |
| Because you figure money is half of every economic transaction. | |
| And for the last hundred years, it's been basically produced by, managed by, directed by states all over the world. | |
| And yet, I don't feel like I've been entirely aware of just how intensely costly this has been for civilization. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, I mean, fiat currency is like this ultimate beheading paper cut to humanity. | |
| It's like this massive guillotine with government money coming down 100 times a second on people. | |
| Because you can't make these wars. | |
| You can't sustain these wars. | |
| You can't possibly pay for these wars using existing assets. | |
| No. | |
| I mean, the best cure for bloodlust is the bill, the butcher's bill, right? | |
| It never comes to the people. | |
| It's so diffused. | |
| Now, people in America are like, oh, man, I can't get a job. | |
| I lost my house. | |
| It's like, you remember cheering that war in 2003? | |
| You know, payback's a bitch, you know? | |
| Sorry. | |
| You pay for your bloodlust. | |
| I don't care how diffuse it is. | |
| And in many ways, even the Great Depression was sort of the fallout of World War I. I mean, the bills still hadn't been paid. | |
| Well, I mean, the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation was driven by paying off the reparations war debt, which was going to go on until the 1980s for Germany. | |
| And so you destroy the middle class with hyperinflation. | |
| You open up the power vacuum for Hitler to come in. | |
| That's it. | |
| Really, there were two wars that were an effective monetary policy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, the cause of war is always so confusing to people, but it is really just an effect of monetary policy. | |
| Because it's monetary policy that gives license to the state to do these things. | |
| Otherwise, it's just not possible. | |
| Free evil. | |
| You know, whatever you subsidize, you get war off. | |
| And fiat currency is the ultimate subsidy for evil. | |
| And so, yeah, I think that the evils of the 20th century have almost everything to do with monetary policy. | |
| Do you know that America has spent much more on the war on terror than it did on the Second World War? | |
| That's amazing. | |
| To get what? | |
| What they say is 50 al-Qaeda operatives? | |
| It costs more than to take down the entire Nazi empire. | |
| You know, it's like, wow, those guys are tough. | |
| I mean, each one of them is a panzer division or something like that. | |
| I mean, holy crap, they're like Superman. | |
| You know, I laugh at your rockets. | |
| You know, I mean, the amount of money that they have to spend for these hit jobs, even if we assume it's true, which it probably isn't, it's astounding just how much it is. | |
| Yeah, and then you also have the problem of politicians constantly claiming that they're going to get the system under control. | |
| We're going to pass a balanced budget amendment. | |
| We've got a new legislator, right? | |
| We're going to cut the budget. | |
| We'll elect the right politicians. | |
| They'll cut the budget and get this whole insane system under control. | |
| But it can't be controlled. | |
| No. | |
| And this is just to lure you back in. | |
| Right? | |
| Like every time a guy beats up his wife, he shows up the next day with flowers. | |
| Right? | |
| Because, you know, he's worried about her leaving. | |
| So they always come back, but don't worry. | |
| We've got it now. | |
| This is a war to end all war. | |
| Okay, well, next one. | |
| No next one. | |
| No next one, right? | |
| We've got it under control. | |
| We've got a tea party. | |
| Don't worry. | |
| We're fine, right? | |
| I mean, even George Washington. | |
| I mean, he goes to war against King George for a 3% tax on tea. | |
| The moment he gets power, imposes a 25% tax on whiskey. | |
| You know, which for American settlers, tea... | |
| Whiskey? | |
| You know? | |
| I mean, how are you going to live in Pennsylvania sober? | |
| You can't. | |
| You can't. | |
| It's not possible. | |
| I mean, they're really hitting them where it hurts. | |
| It's like, whoa, I'm a farmer in Pennsylvania and I can't get my whiskey? | |
| Oh, that's it. | |
| That's a bad day. | |
| You know, it's a very interesting thing to think that prohibitionism really began at the founding of the country. | |
| What do you people really want? | |
| Oh yeah, we'll tax that. | |
| I want to do a show for tax day. | |
| You know, this Obama, like, you didn't build that, this whole thing, pop it into the kid building a sign, you didn't build that, you know, that whole thing that came around before. | |
| But, you know, the government is just so horrible in a way because, I mean, the genius it took to create and propagate Bitcoin, I mean, that's, I mean, to me, that's like a laser focus of human genius. | |
| And the government's like, yeah, we'll tax that. | |
| You're like, did you make it? | |
| Did you create anything? | |
| Do you know how to cut? | |
| No, but we'll tax it. | |
| You know, it's like, you didn't make it, they say to us, and therefore we're like, you didn't make any of this stuff, and you get to tax it. | |
| Oh, someone built a house? | |
| I don't know how to build a house, but I can tax it. | |
| Oh, does somebody want to have their cattle go on land? | |
| I don't know how to build the land. | |
| Don't know anything about that. | |
| Don't know about cattle farmers, but I sure know how to order 200 DEA. But Stefan, like 24 months ago, people in the power elite structure are making fun of Bitcoin. | |
| If you raise the subject of Bitcoin at a Federal Reserve conference, people would just laugh and say, well, that's the stupidest thing ever. | |
| And now, here we are in the spring of 2014, and the state's actively plotting, is it a currency? | |
| Will it tax it? | |
| Is it property? | |
| We'll tax that. | |
| But there's a presumption that it's real. | |
| And sadly, that's the best you can hope for, is the government starts to profit on it, because then they won't ban it. | |
| This is the best opportunity we have to not have it banned, to have the government get addicted to the money flow, right? | |
| Yeah, let its beak, as they say, right? | |
| But I'm actually hoping for even more corruption than that. | |
| I'm hoping that... | |
| Right. | |
| I'm hoping that politicians will figure out that this is a great way to accept and... | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Campaign donations and legal bribes. | |
| Yeah, bribes, graft. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I mean, if they can use Bitcoin to do this, then maybe we're safe. | |
| Yeah, it's... | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Every politician has own Swiss bank account. | |
| Yeah, if it goes off banks, yeah, if it goes off book and completely under the table and it's untraceable and they can run their campaigns off it, oh, man, oh man, they'll never, they'll never get rid of it. | |
| I mean, half the political fortunes in America founded during prohibition. | |
| I mean, the whole foundation of the Kennedy's money was prohibition, right? | |
| Yeah, make something illegal. | |
| So anyway, I hope that they will start accepting campaign contributions anonymously through Bitcoin. | |
| And that way, for sure, it's not going anywhere. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But it's probably not going anywhere anyway. | |
| Do you agree that with Bitcoin we have something completely new? | |
| Living on a distributed network that you can't kill. | |
| Open source software development, so it can always be improved. | |
| And you're consisting basically of mathematics that the state can't control. | |
| Living on the cloud, that state's notoriously bad at managing. | |
| I mean, have we stumbled upon something that actually sort of has the state met its match with something like cryptocurrency? | |
| Well, I mean, it's the worst thing for a government, which is it's real democracy, right? | |
| So, I mean, the government loves paper democracy, you know, like, well, you know, you can vote for whoever has been bribed the most to steal from you. | |
| But this is real democracy in that the rules of Bitcoin have to be accepted by the majority of people in order for it to propagate. | |
| And so this is a real example of what government claims to be, which is like the worst enemy of what government is. | |
| So I think it's got massive, huge potential for just rewriting it. | |
| Are you interested at all in... | |
| Like 12 months ago, there weren't that many altcoins around, but now there's tens of thousands. | |
| Are you interested in this movement of altcoins, you know, in addition to Bitcoin, as a kind of a reflection of sort of the way people can exercise their cultural political preferences within a market context? | |
| I was thinking about this the other day because I met a I mean, we already have... | |
| The altcoins in the current economy, they're called gift certificates, right? | |
| They're called Starbucks cards and all that, right? | |
| Canadian Tire has its own money, which actually a friend of mine paid his way through Thailand brothels using Canadian Tire money because they didn't know that it wasn't a real currency, but that's... | |
| Another story for another time. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, we already have all these alt currencies. | |
| I love the fact that there are lots of alt currencies because then whoever wins is the clear winner. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, so, I mean, yeah, it's a fair, like, you know the fastest runner is, you know, the most people in the race, and this guy wins, right? | |
| So he's the fastest, right? | |
| So I think, to me, the more competition allows the market leader to be really legitimately, you know, with no doubt, the market leader. | |
| And I think that will always be Bitcoin myself. | |
| It's just, you know, adoptability and so on, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| You're like, nobody's going to really improve on TCP IPs. | |
| Why bother, right? | |
| It's like, ooh, I've got a better width for your railroad tracks. | |
| Actually, all our wheels are kind of... | |
| Anyway, so I think that there is a clear winner. | |
| And so I think the more competition, the more altcoins, the better. | |
| And I think that people can give good deals on altcoins because you know they kind of have to return in some ways to that. | |
| At least for now. | |
| But truly, I'm unwilling to say that, actually, because the world is so full of surprises these days. | |
| I never imagined five years ago that we'd be seeing anything like Bitcoin. | |
| I mean, having studied monetary policy for many years, I never imagined that we would get to the point where the market would actually generate its own money. | |
| It would be sustainable and usable on a global basis. | |
| I mean, this is very inspiring to me. | |
| It's not just about Bitcoin. | |
| It's about a way to build a new world free of coercion and violence, you know? | |
| Well, I mean, free market money has been the dream of free marketers forever. | |
| Because people confuse government money, like trading government money with the free market. | |
| But once you have government money, you always have to have government control of interest rates. | |
| You have government control of money and government control of interest rates, you no longer have a free market. | |
| That's really true. | |
| We haven't had a free market for 100 years. | |
| Yeah, you can't clean your hands washing them in blood, and that's the way it works, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| In the past, we thought the only way to reform the system was to convince our leaders to do the right thing. | |
| And it hasn't worked out. | |
| It turns out they don't really want to do the right thing. | |
| Oh, no. | |
| I don't want to be in charge of an evil empire to do good. | |
| I'm going to work the system from within. | |
| I'm going to get swallowed by the shark and pray for it to be a dolphin. | |
| Anyway, but no, so yeah, the idea of convincing evil people to give up their power over human beings, you know? | |
| I mean, you don't become a dairy farmer to turn your cows free. | |
| The only reason you want to do it is to keep them in the enclosure, right? | |
| And I think that there has been a competition that's interesting in the 20th century and the 19th century, which is... | |
| War is so resource consumptive, right, that the country with the most resources generally wins. | |
| You know, everyone says, well, it's the strategy, but it's all a war of attrition. | |
| So if you have the most manpower and you have the most resources, then you can win the war. | |
| But the way you get resources is give your people some economic freedom. | |
| So I think the economic freedoms that have been achieved, people think it's a victory of ideology. | |
| I think it's a victory of needing to feed the war machines, right? | |
| Like, give people more economic freedom. | |
| They'll be more productive. | |
| They'll give you more technology. | |
| They'll give you more value. | |
| Right, so it's like... | |
| If free-range chickens give you 10 times the eggs, guess what? | |
| They're out of their cages, but that doesn't mean that the next step is freedom. | |
| It's just more profitable to have free-range chickens in that sense than it is to put them in a tiny box. | |
| And I think we've mistaken the economic freedoms we've gotten as some sort of ideological victory that we can then pursue to the next step when what it is is better tax war livestock management techniques. | |
| Well, it was true also in the Roman Empire, of course. | |
| I mean, Rome was a fairly free economy by standards at the time, but then the state was fed this vast tax revenue, which caused it to be more and more imperialistic. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, the end of the Roman Empire, I think Rome had a population of a million and a half people. | |
| And in a couple of years, it went down to 17,000. | |
| Because currency is the lifeblood of cities. | |
| If you don't have currency, you can't have cities. | |
| Because you have to have something to trade with the farmers, right? | |
| I mean, the farmers want stuff from the cities, and the cities want the farm. | |
| This is why it's so great that there's any kind of alternative currency being set up because it is a way for people to trade and keep cities alive during whatever transition. | |
| But until very recently, it was hard money. | |
| It was gold, silver. | |
| But now, what do you think about the prospect that Bitcoin has become a kind of safe haven? | |
| I guess we're going to discover this, right? | |
| I mean, if we have another banking crisis, which surely we will in the next few years, what do you think about the prospect that Bitcoin will become the safe haven of choice, that it'll propel people into the crypto world as there's never been before? | |
| Well, I think that's inevitable. | |
| I had this debate with Peter Schiff about gold, and of course gold has its advantages, but it has its disadvantages in that you can find it and steal it, right? | |
| I mean, you know, it's like in the army. | |
| If it moves, move it. | |
| If it doesn't move, paint it. | |
| But in the government, if it's valuable, steal it, right? | |
| But you can't find this stuff, right? | |
| The cryptocurrency. | |
| So my hope, my hope, my hope is that The political leaders start to take refuge in Bitcoin, and then they really get what's possible. | |
| I had to send some money the other day. | |
| Who's done this recently? | |
| Gone to a bank and tried to send some money? | |
| Oh, listen. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| It's just crazy. | |
| It's like an ancient system. | |
| It's like trying to run a video game on an abacus. | |
| It's insane. | |
| It's like, I'll need your address. | |
| I'll need the phone number. | |
| I'll, you know, 35 bucks. | |
| You gotta, you know, and blah, blah, blah. | |
| And it's like, what? | |
| Are you kidding? | |
| Are you like releasing pigeons to do this? | |
| Two years ago, I spoke in Brazil and got paid for it. | |
| It took six weeks to get my money just through a bank transfer because there's so many complications, paperwork, confusions, missed numbers, rejections, approvals, blah, blah, blah. | |
| This time I spoke in Brazil last week and it took about 10 minutes to get paid. | |
| He asked my bitcoin address, I sent it, I got it. | |
| You know, this is just such an obviously superior technology in every single respect. | |
| There are kids, I know kids who are in high school now that trade bitcoin all the time, you know, for various things. | |
| Pokemon cards, Kamiguchis, I assume. | |
| Yeah, yeah, I understand. | |
| Magic the Gathering? | |
| Right. | |
| And I hired one of them to do a job and I was going to pay him cash. | |
| And I got his bank account number. | |
| And it took fully five days for the money to arrive in his bank. | |
| And he was like, what are you doing wrong that it's taking me five days to give my money? | |
| Well, you have to explain to him that they spray paint gold paint on the back of a tortoise. | |
| They release it into the wild after smelling your gym sock and it finds you. | |
| And that's the technology that we're using. | |
| Hopefully it doesn't go through Nevada. | |
| It hasn't been improved in decades, really, and they still think it's modern. | |
| It's very silly. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Now, you were an early adopter in the Bitcoin space, right? | |
| I mean, you were accepting Bitcoin, what, two years ago? | |
| No more. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I think three, four? | |
| Yeah. | |
| 2011. | |
| Yeah, early 2011, we started accepting Bitcoins. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Was there ever a time when you thought it was maybe not real, that it was magic, you know, silly money, that it was a Ponzi scheme, that something was wrong, or you always believed it? | |
| No, I mean, I'm a software guy. | |
| Like, I started coding when I was 11, and I sort of understood the possibilities. | |
| I certainly didn't think it was going to go as high as it did. | |
| I mean, I don't think anyone could have expected that. | |
| That's right. | |
| But, no, I thought it was great. | |
| I was willing to take it and hold it, you know. | |
| It's email versus postal mail, right? | |
| But it's even better than email. | |
| I mean, to me, anything you can do digitally that priorly was done in some sort of physical means is a vast improvement. | |
| And so it seemed inevitable that it was going to be worth more and more. | |
| But I certainly didn't expect it to get that big. | |
| That would be ridiculously prescient. | |
| Plus, I would have sold my kidney and invested. | |
| So I was accepting it early and promoting it early, but I didn't expect it to go this big. | |
| It took something like 20 years for email to go from sort of technologically viable to mainstream use, right? | |
| What is your expectation concerning Bitcoin? | |
| It has to be. | |
| Yeah, because email was competing against like inter-office mail, you know, those tubes. | |
| You can still see them in some buildings in Toronto. | |
| These tubes, you know, from the movie Brazil, they shoot all these things through tubes, right? | |
| So it was competing against that, and mail service was not deteriorating. | |
| But Bitcoin is competing against central currency cash, which is deteriorating, right? | |
| So you have a robust and expanding and improving architecture competing against a decaying architecture, which I think really is that you can't get faster. | |
| Well, also history in general is speeding up. | |
| I mean, thanks to communication technology, people know about things faster than they otherwise would. | |
| Yeah, I think once there's a way for people to trade them more easily, that's not, you know, rolling the dice and crossing your fingers with the integrity of people in Japan, it is, I think then it will be, you know, and I saw some technology, so I went to the, please everyone go to the vendor tables if you get a chance, what these guys are doing. | |
| I mean, if I wasn't wrapped up in a philosophy show, I'd be like all over Bitcoin. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Like white on rice. | |
| But stuff that they're doing to facilitate trading, secure trading, anonymous trading, once that breaks through and you get an app where you can securely and, you know, pings your phone to confirm it and all that kind of stuff, I think that the trade is still challenging. | |
| How to get it, how to trade it is still challenging for a lot of people, which wasn't really the case with email. | |
| But there are so many smart people working on solving that. | |
| I think that's just... | |
| The whole space has changed in the course of 12 months. | |
| I mean, a year ago today, most of these vendors, you know, were just a dream, right? | |
| And now they're really existing. | |
| Altcoins pretty much didn't even exist. | |
| I remember when Bitcoin achieved $30, you know, people were screaming, it's a bubble, you know, and it's going to come crashing down in a matter of minutes, you know. | |
| But I see skepticism sort of melting away just over the last 12, 14 months. | |
| Well, I mean, I went through an IPO in the 90s, and a lot of people, like, they look at the up price and the down price like this is a negative, but it's not. | |
| If there's never a down price, nobody's cashing out. | |
| You need people to sell these Bitcoins, A, so other people can get them who want them more, and B, so they're profitable. | |
| If nobody ever sold a Bitcoin, the price would be zero. | |
| So the fact that there's peaks and people are like, great, I want to sell, and then there's the allocation of resources to people with a longer-term time frame. | |
| You want Bitcoin to be held by people with a longer-term time frame of its value. | |
| The people who want to sell in the short run are really driving the value as a whole. | |
| So it's like, oh, it went to 1,200. | |
| Oh, now it's down to 400. | |
| This is exactly what you want in a space like this. | |
| You want people to be getting the money, cashing it out, and transferring it to people with a longer-term time. | |
| So it's volatility you see as a strength? | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| If it wasn't volatile, it wouldn't be in play. | |
| It wouldn't be profitable. | |
| People wouldn't be interested in it because they couldn't make money from it. | |
| So, no, this is exactly what you want. | |
| I know it's a little exciting at times, but this is exactly what you want in this kind of space. | |
| You know, if it goes down to two bucks, it won't. | |
| But if it goes down to two bucks, so much the better. | |
| Then a whole bunch of people will buy it at two bucks and use it as a trading mechanism, and then the price will go even higher over time. | |
| I think of it as a first world problem. | |
| People complain about the volatility of Bitcoin. | |
| I'm like, you know, probably you never imagined that, you know, five years ago there would be such a thing in existence as Bitcoin. | |
| Now all you do is complain about its volatility. | |
| You know, it's pretty silly. | |
| Oh, there's a meme, you know, that meme with the lady with the first world problems, you know, like this. | |
| She's like, my husband, all these Bitcoins, I don't know how to spend them. | |
| And my favorite one of that is the same picture. | |
| It was last April. | |
| She said, my Bitcoin's worth the same amount today as it was yesterday. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, no. | |
| Oh, no. | |
| That was when it was like, you know, soaring up, you know, $10 a day. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so people are still, they're pricing Bitcoin relative to fiat currency. | |
| And that's, you know, but when Bitcoin will really achieve its own is when Bitcoin is the standard of value. | |
| Like I know a Bitcoin is two cars or something like that. | |
| Within firms and things like that? | |
| Yeah, or you think of it relative to a car or a house, then relative to fiat currency, because right now it's saying Bitcoin is worth X fiat currency, which is like one ounce of goodness is worth nine pounds of evil. | |
| It's just not the right metric. | |
| You want Bitcoin to be relative to goods rather than to fiat currency, but we're still, I think, transitioning through that process, right? | |
| Probably will stay there for a very long time. | |
| Oh yeah, for sure. | |
| People are so used to that paradigm of, what's a Bitcoin worth? | |
| Well, I'll think of fiat currency. | |
| It's like, no, no, no. | |
| One email is not worth half a letter. | |
| It just doesn't make any sense. | |
| But this is particularly bad for Americans, where you have no experience in competitive currencies at all. | |
| This is different from Canada, where people are used to accepting Canadian dollars or Canadian dollars. | |
| Or as Americans call it, monopoly money. | |
| I think that's it. | |
| It's multicolored. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Can't quite be real. | |
| A little silly. | |
| Who's the old bag on the currency? | |
| I don't understand. | |
| It's all plastic and everything. | |
| But in Latin America, of course, it's very common for people to trade many currencies at once. | |
| They trade cell phone minutes, as Andreas has pointed out, and so on, right? | |
| They have phones with leftover cell minutes and you can trade it for eggs and they become things that you can use for internet access or phone calls to people and stuff. | |
| So, I mean, currency in South America, I don't know, for those who don't know the history of Argentina, anyone, it's a boring topic, but, you know, in the 1920s, Argentina had the same GDP as America, same per capita money as America. | |
| They were a first world country, right? | |
| And then they're like, hey, Socialism sounds great. | |
| And so they've lived with decayed and exploding currencies for so long that they've developed all of these alternate trading mechanisms. | |
| But as the reserve currency, Americans haven't really had to do that quite as much yet. | |
| No, not at all. | |
| But that certainly will be coming. | |
| I mean, that will be coming. | |
| So, Andreas says we have five minutes left. | |
| Should we take some... | |
| Yeah, any questions? | |
| Any comments? | |
| Anyone? | |
| What happened to the experiment for if you want to start a war? | |
| Oh, we're doing that tonight. | |
| That's going to be part of my speech tonight. | |
| So bring your Fu Manchu mustaches, where we'll be stroking them and plotting the overthrow of all the known virtues in the world. | |
| No, I really want the combined intelligence of people to try to use Bitcoin to start a war, because if smart people can't do it, that's a good... | |
| If Bitcoin is a cure for war, I'd really like that to be talked about a little more. | |
| So that'd be the speech tonight. | |
| We'll be doing that. | |
| That's rather important. | |
| I think that's a plus, you know. | |
| I sort of feel like I'm giving the speech with like half a billion ghosts over my shoulder saying Bitcoin might mean we didn't die for nothing, right? | |
| It literally, to me, is that serious a topic, but we'll have a lot of fun talking about it tonight. | |
| Special what rights? | |
| STRs. | |
| STRs. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| But special drawing rights are just an index number, aren't they, of prevailing currencies? | |
| This was a theoretical concept which, after the post-2008 banking crisis, they discussed about it. | |
| And it never materialized. | |
| Right. | |
| They do exist. | |
| They do exist. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| They exist. | |
| Yes, they exist. | |
| And at the same time, when Gavin was being called by In-Q-Tel, which is the incumbent for CIA, he had to come and explain Bitcoin technology to In-Q-Tel. | |
| I love this. | |
| I'm not a skeptic around it, but there's a theoretical, somebody can make a theoretical argument around it. | |
| Bitcoin code base, yes, has been audited by many, many developers across the globe. | |
| But at the same time, we want to take down the road of that. - Good. | |
| Conspiracy. | |
| No, we'll talk about it. | |
| And it's nice to see the UN starting to experiment with tyrannical concepts, because normally they're... | |
| No, we'll try it tonight. | |
| Yeah, so we'll talk about all that tonight, and then we're going to try to imagine, you know, if we became rulers of a country tomorrow, the first thing I would do is just say, we're not using... | |
| Any kind of fiat currency anymore, right? | |
| Bitcoin's right there. | |
| What would society look like? | |
| What would you do if you became the ruler of a country? | |
| Is there anything you would actually do at all? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| No, absolutely. | |
| I would, for sure. | |
| I mean, you privatize the currency. | |
| I mean, that's all you need to do. | |
| Everything follows from that. | |
| Like, imagine a country which only used Bitcoin, even for what we call now government services. | |
| And we'll talk about that tonight. | |
| I mean, what a fascinating concept. | |
| You couldn't have a system that we have right now without fiat currency. | |
| Like, you couldn't have anything close to it. | |
| There would be no such thing as a leviathan state, really. | |
| No, no. | |
| I mean, if you wanted to start the NSA, you'd have to go to all the people and say, hey, will you donate some money so we can spy on you? | |
| Are you down for that? | |
| This, to me, is the most exciting thing about Bitcoin. | |
| I love its sort of bottom-up revolutionary aspects. | |
| I mean, the fact that there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of full-time economists who have studied monetary policy and imagine themselves to be experts in how to manage a nation's money. | |
| They were all bypassed entirely with the release of this one protocol. | |
| On a free internet forum, you know? | |
| It was just a revolutionary idea. | |
| I mean, Satoshi never went to the Senate Banking Committee, never went to the Fed, never published his research in the American Economic Review. | |
| I mean, it's the most hilariously anti-elite, you know, sort of revolutionary strategy ever. | |
| Just to throw it out there, oh, here's my new money that I wrote, you know? | |
| If you like it, use it. | |
| You know, it took 10 months and it obtained value. | |
| It was beautiful, beautiful. | |
| And I think even today, I mean, you can look through economics journals and not find any articles on Bitcoin at all. | |
| They're just sort of starting to appear, but, you know, they're appearing, but they're already out of date by the time they appear. | |
| And the revolution is happening without the intellectuals, which I think is a lovely thing. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, no. | |
| God, the intellectuals. | |
| Don't get me started. | |
| Anybody else has any questions? | |
| Comments? | |
| I just had a comment. | |
| The reason you can't price everything in Bitcoin now is because you can't really measure profit in Bitcoin because most capital is sold for dollars. | |
| It's nice to think about pricing everything. | |
| You know, one of the things that's stopping its adoption that I found in larger corporations that are older, the accounting departments resist it, the lawyers and compliance officers in the firms are resisting it, just basically because they're confused. | |
| The newest firms that have been founded in the last four or five years are much more open to it. | |
| This is why Overstock jumped on Bitcoin before Amazon, essentially. | |
| Well, they're also probably concerned about the death regime uncertainty. | |
| Right, with regards to how is this going to work from a regulatory standpoint. | |
| So wherever you've got lawyers, you've got this paralysis of negative consequences. | |
| This is actually stopping the advance of Bitcoin more than anything else. | |
| This regime uncertainty. | |
| The sense of fear, you know. | |
| But the state can slow it down, but it can't stop it. | |
| Yes, sir. | |
| So would you rather want the guidelines, the taxation, and the regime for a regime of certainty, or private companies that would prevent any regulation at all? | |
| But you'll get both, right? | |
| So the government will work to try and manage it and tax it because, you know, there's a parasite, there's a new host that's not going to go in. | |
| And then there'll be people who are like, I don't care what the government does. | |
| I'm anonymous, I'm Tor-enabled, and I'm just going to go and do my thing, right? | |
| So you will have these parallel worlds at the same time. | |
| So you don't think that a technology could come along to make Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies uncensorable such that Amazon would have Amazon would not risk that because they're too big a target for the government to go after. | |
| And so when you work for a big company, you have a whole legal department. | |
| And as a CEO, you will have a legal and fiduciary responsibility to follow the advice of the legal department. | |
| And the legal department is in a wait and see at the moment. | |
| And you actually... | |
| You can't. | |
| Like, you can go to jail for going against the advice of the legal department, and legal departments are very cautious, right? | |
| I mean, because legal departments, like regulators, they don't pay the price for things that don't happen. | |
| They pay the price for bad things that do happen, right? | |
| It's like the FDA, right? | |
| I mean, one drug gets through that kills one chihuahua, and they, you know, they all go insane, right? | |
| But half a million people die because some drug that's approved in Europe isn't approved here, and nobody has a problem with it. | |
| Yes, sir? | |
| Yeah, I can add to what you said, too, but the apple killing won't be cold enough. | |
| And that's good. | |
| They probably have some concern about legal, regulatory. | |
| Yeah. | |
| There seems to be, at least I keep hearing rumors, that there's a possibility that Apple is going to loosen up on their policies. | |
| But there are people at this conference that have already come up with some really nice, elegant workarounds to Apple. | |
| True. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yep. | |
| It's also a problem that Apple itself has a proprietary culture. | |
| You know, they think that everything cool can be invented by their technicians, their intellectuals, their employees, and anything else out of Apple is basically inferior. | |
| I mean, that seems to be the corporate... | |
| Well, Jobs resisted the marketplace in the first iPhone. | |
| He didn't want all Apple apps. | |
| The idea that other people could develop for it was... | |
| They had to really fight him to get that put in, so... | |
| I think it's a very bearish sign for Apple in general, their attitude. | |
| And I use an iPhone and I think it's awful, actually. | |
| I use an iPhone and I think it's awful. | |
| I'm ready to make the switch, you know. | |
| I mean, even if they open up to Bitcoin wallets at this point, I think it's just really bad what they did earlier. | |
| But it was 10 months ago or something like that. | |
| It was just really, really rotten. | |
| Shouldn't be forgiven. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So I think actually we're out of time. | |
| Yeah, we don't want to push the next people, but thanks everyone for your time. | |
| I'll be speaking tonight at 6, so come on by. | |
| Thank you. |