Bitcoin's Potential Impact on Monetary Policy with Vijay Boyapati | The TRUTH Podcast #27
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I recently wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing for radical, drastic reform of the Federal Reserve, making
the case that our Federal Reserve has gone so far off the reservation in taking on a broad mandate that the Fed should have never had, hitting two targets effectively making the case that our Federal Reserve has gone so far off the reservation in taking one arrow, inflation and unemployment, and doing a disastrous job of each.
That's a longer story, but that's actually in many ways contributed to some of the financial crises we've experienced in the year 2000, 2008, and even some of the banking instability this year, where the Federal Reserve, when it's trying to balance inflation and unemployment, makes a whole host of errors. when it's trying to balance inflation and unemployment, makes a
One of them is it treats wage growth as a leading indicator, when in fact wage growth is a trailing indicator of the business cycle, which means they've consistently tightened monetary policy into a downturn in the business cycle itself, turning into actually a boom-bust cycle that then results in the calls for bailouts.
I think that's actually been the signature pattern 2008, now repeating itself in the year 2023. But beyond reform of the Federal Reserve, what many outside of government make the case for in the Bitcoin community,
it's where we're going to spend our time today, is to say that we should opt out of that system altogether and Transact in a currency that's not backstopped by a federal government at all, but is instead independent and finite in its quantity and is decentralized in a way that isn't subject to the same manipulation as the Federal Reserve.
And today we're going to end up talking about one of those leading alternatives, probably the leading alternative today, Bitcoin.
And in particular, I think it was apt because a big part of the piece that I wrote last week arguing for radical reform of the Federal Reserve Was the Fed's role in catalyzing financial crises, including 2008?
Well, turns out that it was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis that Bitcoin itself was born.
And so we'll pick it up right there with today's guest.
We have Vijay Boyapati, who's the author of The Bullish Case for Bitcoin, joining live from Seattle.
I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.
But the first thing I'll ask is, We can go into my critique of the Federal Reserve and the way I want to reform it, but you have a different kind of solution in mind.
I think a lot of Bitcoiners do to not just reforming the Federal Reserve top-down, putting it back in its place of stabilizing the US dollar.
That's where I come from.
But I think your perspective is that there's another alternative hiding in plain sight.
And I know that you're pretty eager to tell us what that is.
And I think it relates to the thesis in the heart of your book too.
So take it away and I'm looking forward to hearing and learning from you.
Yeah, I want to talk to you a little bit about Bitcoin, which I think is the greatest form of money that humankind has ever seen.
But firstly, I just want to say I'm super excited for your campaign.
I don't think I've been as excited about a campaign since the Ron Paul movement in 2007-2008 and I quit my very lucrative job at Google to go campaign for him, raise a bunch of money and Help him out because he was talking about something that no other candidate was talking about, which is the importance of monetary policy.
He was the only one really talking about the Federal Reserve and that was a message that really resonated with a lot of Americans who feel like this system is really unfair.
And if you look at American history, it's really not a part of the American tradition to have a central bank.
The founders wrote into the Constitution, gold and silver are money, not paper money.
And, you know, during the 19th century, there was a Numerous people fighting very hard to prevent the establishment of a central bank.
But eventually the bankers won over and they created a cartel, which is exactly what the central bank is.
It's a cartel of banks which benefit the banks at the expense of everyone else.
And they demonetized gold in 1933. Which is a huge blow to the American economy and sort of presage this era of constant inflation and credit expansion that the Fed has overseen.
As someone with an Indian background, as you are, I've always had this kind of affinity for gold.
I think Indians grew up distrusting their government and the monetary policy of their government, so they kept their savings in gold.
And Americans used to do that as well.
Unfortunately, gold has several disadvantages that Bitcoin fixes.
One is actually its physicality.
And its physicality makes it difficult to transport.
It makes it difficult to divide.
And these are some of the properties that are incredibly important for a money to have.
We understand what the properties of a good money are.
We've understood this for thousands of years.
Aristotle wrote about them.
Divisibility, portability, fungibility.
And probably the most important, the origin of where money gets its original demand is scarcity.
We want money to be scarce.
Because if money were abundant, if money were as commonplace as sand, no one would want to keep any of it.
They wouldn't want to save in it.
Is it really true that Aristotle talked about these attributes?
Because these are the attributes I know from like a modern study.
Of what comprises a good currency.
Yeah.
I mean, this has been known a long, long time.
You look up Aristotle and the attributes of good money.
They understood this a long, long, long time ago.
So, Bitcoin is...
I want to segue into Bitcoin here.
Bitcoin is very special because...
It was an invention that came out of nowhere in 2008. There was this mysterious figure, Satoshi Nakamoto, who published a paper that solved a problem in computer science that many people did not think had a solution.
It's called the Byzantine Generals Problem.
And in solving this problem in computer science, he was able to create a system that allowed something that's never been possible in the history of the world.
Never been possible to do this, which is to transfer value between two distant people without requiring a trusted intermediary.
And this invention has profound implications for global trade, for governments, for nation states, for how we save.
And the way I like to describe Bitcoin is it's like gold with teleportation built in.
Gold has this problem that if I have a bar of gold, it's actually quite difficult for me to send it to you on the other side of the country.
But Bitcoin I can send to you as easily as I can send an email.
And so you and I, who may not be introduced or know about each other, can conduct trade with each other without requiring a trusted intermediary such as a bank or a government.
This is an incredibly important invention, and we're only just now starting to understand the implications of how important this is.
I think that the consequences will be understood better in a few decades.
Just as you know, the first decade of the internet, not many people really understood, is this a big deal?
Is this bigger than the fax machine?
Like Paul Krugman said, this is not going to be bigger than the fax machine, but clearly it's one of the most important inventions of human history.
A decade into the internet was 2003. We didn't have Facebook.
We didn't have smartphones.
We didn't have Google Maps.
We didn't have all these things that have changed our life.
And it only became clear a decade later.
So Bitcoin has existed for one decade.
It's been around since 2009, 2010. I think it's going to take about another decade before we fully understand the ramifications of this technology and what it's going to do for global trade, what it's going to do for monetary policy, and how it's going to affect Yeah, I mean, say more about that.
You know, you have views on this, so let's just go there.
I mean, I hear a lot of Bitcoiners painting that vision, but why don't you just make it a little bit more explicit?
How is it going to change the relationship between United States citizens amongst one another and also with other nation states?
I think the most important thing, especially for those of us who value human liberty, is it's going to provide a greater level of freedom to people around the world.
It allows you to save in something that you can easily transmit and that cannot be debased.
Those are the two pillars of Bitcoin's value proposition.
And that enables people's freedom in that they cannot have their savings confiscated or debased through inflation.
And it's especially important in countries Kleptocracies and dictatorships where people are trying to flee with their savings.
I like to give an example of World War II where the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was fleeing just ahead of the Nazis and he managed to escape, but he managed to get to America.
He didn't have any of his savings.
He was living a fairly upper middle class life in Europe, in Switzerland.
When he gets to America, he has nothing but the shirt on his back and he has to settle for A job at a university which isn't one of the most prestigious universities.
If he had had his savings, he could have re-established his life.
And so for people who are living in these situations around the world today, it gives them the ability to put their savings into something and cross the border without anyone knowing that they have those savings on them.
So that's one implication.
The other is for monetary policy, because it gives people an escape hatch.
If you feel dissatisfied with the monetary policy of your nation, or that it's going down a bad path that's going to destroy your savings, you can jump into Bitcoin.
You can put your savings into Bitcoin and escape that.
So this is going to have an impact on monetary policy going forward where central banks will look at this and say, we have to be much more prudent.
Otherwise, people are going to move their savings into Bitcoin.
In the past, they sort of did this with gold.
Alan Greenspan famously talked about watching the price of gold, and that's how he set monetary policy.
This, I think, is going to be the role that Bitcoin takes on in the future.
What gold has is history.
It has 5,000 years of history being used as money and savings.
But Bitcoin excels on the attributes that make for good money, even more so than gold.
So I think over time, it's going to win demand at the margin from other forms of money, such as fiat money, gold, government bonds and real estate.
Those savings are going to flow into Bitcoin as people begin to realize this is the greatest form of savings that's ever existed.
So let me bring it back into sort of my world and back into your world a little bit here and where they interface with one another.
I'm also drawn to the intellectual elegance of what Bitcoin offers and it's different from other cryptocurrencies in that it's actually the scarcity factor Makes a big difference.
Tell me if I'm misunderstanding that or misstating that, but the scarcity, the fact that there's a finite number of potentially even discoverable Bitcoin is part of what differentiates it from many other forms of cryptocurrency.
Is that a fair characterization?
I think that's a fair characterization, but I would clarify a little bit.
A lot of cryptocurrencies will advertise themselves as being scarce.
Scarcity has no meaning unless you can trust the scarcity.
The reason you can trust gold is because we know you can't print it.
So people trust that the supply is limited.
The reason that you can trust the scarcity of Bitcoin is because the system is truly There is no single point of control with Bitcoin, which means that if a company comes along and says, well, you know, this isn't good for us, we want to increase the supply, and they begin lobbying for that, there's no way to do that.
And actually, in 2017, there was a concerted effort by the largest companies In the Bitcoin space, not to increase the supply, but to increase another parameter of the Bitcoin network called the block size.
And they failed in doing this.
And that was actually a great moment for Bitcoin because what it proved was that this is a network that has immutability.
It can't be changed.
It can't be changed by the most powerful companies in the space.
It can't be changed by nation states.
That is the reason that you can trust the fact that its supply is limited.
If I created cryptocurrency Vivek and it's just me controlling it, and I say the supply is limited and there's only, you know, a million of them, you'll say, well, it seems like you're in control of it.
So maybe you'll change your mind.
Bitcoin is unique.
It is the only cryptocurrency that's truly decentralized and there's no single point of failure and no one who has enough power or any group who has enough power to change that supply schedule.
The unique feature of Bitcoin, I think, is what makes it feel more like gold than a different form of Blockchain-based cryptocurrency necessarily.
I want to bring that back into my world here.
The case I made for Federal Reserve reform is in part that we need a stable dollar as a precondition for GDP growth in America.
So the analogy I used is that if the number of minutes in an hour were volatile, it's a slightly different lens here.
So we're Talking about a different subject, we're going to back back into the relationship to Bitcoin.
But if the number of minutes in an hour were volatile, then you and I probably wouldn't be having this conversation at the same time.
You'd show up at one time, I'd show up at another.
That's the analogy that I often offer as it relates to capital allocation in an economy because dollars don't track the most high or highest returning projects when They're volatile.
That's the same kind of volatility in the minutes of an hour when the dollar stops being a unit of measurement.
That's necessarily a cause of inefficient capital allocation in the economy and inefficient capital allocation is itself an impediment to GDP growth.
Now, one of the things I've said then is we need to stabilize the dollar.
How do we go about doing that?
I've suggested pegging it to a broad basket of We used to be on the gold standard.
America actually had its greatest GDP growth stretch over the longest portion of its history when we were pegged to the gold standard.
Now, we still grew at three plus percent GDP growth from 1980 to 2000. After we were off the gold standard, but when the Federal Reserve's focus was still on stabilizing the US dollar.
But ever since then, as long as we've had a volatile dollar in this century, it's been, you know, largely on average, one point something percent GDP growth.
So the question I have for you is in the mechanics of, if you're looking at a plan for the radical reform of the Federal Reserve and the way I'm looking at it, and you're pegging the dollar to something, What would be your perspective on the characterization of Bitcoin as Part of what fits into that basket of commodities,
as opposed to, I've said, we don't want a basket of currencies, we want something that has fixed value, like gold, like agricultural commodities, et cetera, that have real value to human beings.
Gold, you could debate as an input, it's a hard substance, but baskets of farm-like commodities have real consumable value.
That's the direction I've been heading, is peg the dollar to a basket of what you would call standard commodities.
What's your perspective as to whether Bitcoin fits the description of what would fit into that commodity basket versus is it better thought of as fitting into a currency basket, which is a totally different equation because that then becomes circular as a reference point if I'm talking about stabilizing the dollar with respect to a basket of currencies that themselves are Subject to the same volatility, you're recreating a new problem that you don't with the basket of commodities.
Where do you think Bitcoin fits on that side of the line, looking at it through the lens I am as running for being our next president?
I think Bitcoin is certainly ideal as something that would back a nation-state's currency like the dollar.
If you look at American history, for the majority of American history, the dollar was backed by gold.
A $20 bill was redeemable for a gold coin, a one-ounce gold coin, and it actually said that.
It says, redeemable for gold.
I actually view the period that we're in between the gold standard and what I think will be a Bitcoin standard.
I call it the fiat money interregnum.
It's actually an anomaly of history for us to be living in this period of fiat money.
Fiat money throughout all history, whenever it's been tried, has ended in gigantic failure.
And I think whether it happens next year or whether it happens in a decade or two decades, it's going to eventually lead to failure because it politicizes money.
That's the fundamental problem.
The way you describe it, I think, is a great analogy.
Money is...
The fundamental building block for economic coordination.
You need that standard of measure for entrepreneurs to perform economic calculation.
If they don't have that building block, if it's constantly shifting under them, it's really hard to perform economic calculation.
And in the limit, what you see is when you get more and more inflation, You get a breakdown in the division of labor.
You look at countries like Argentina today, or you look at historical examples like the Weimar Republic, as inflation gets out of control, people can't do business anymore.
They can't calculate profits because they don't know if their profits are real profits or they're just being completely inflated away.
So that's a big problem.
I would say one thing, I humbly push back a little bit on the idea of a basket of commodities.
The reason why we have money, why we have a unique commodity is because supply does not change in regards to demand, which is different to every other commodity.
Oil, if there's more demand, the price goes up and then miners will produce more of it.
Same with wheat, same with pork belly, same with all of these other commodities.
This is why human societies have always chosen a single form of money.
Because it's stable.
They choose something which has a limited supply and has stability.
The US dollar was backed by gold for this entire period that you mentioned and had, just as you said, the greatest period of economic growth in the history of the world.
The US went from a poor agricultural backwater clinging to the east coast of the United States to the most powerful industrialized economy in the world on a gold standard.
So this idea that we need Credit money, as we have now, which is not backed by anything except the full faith and promise of the US government, is not true.
And the framers of this country understood this.
They understood it very well.
They knew where these experiments lead.
We're actually in, I think, the last phase of the experiment since the 1970s.
Gold was confiscated in the 30s, but the dollar was really de-pegged in the early 70s by Richard Nixon.
And you can see that credit expansion in the US has gone exponential.
I think we're in the last phase of this experiment, and there's going to be a bubble that pops.
Either the next one or the one after that, and it's going to be so big that it's not going to be containable.
And that's what I worry about.
And I think we need to be thinking about solutions, just as you're talking about, before that happens.
How can we stabilize the US dollar?
How can we back it by something that is fixed, that cannot be debased, that people trust?
I actually think Bitcoin is inevitable in the sense that its properties make people want to own it.
And I think it's going to be monetized just for that sake.
I think we speak from really similar motivations and an analysis of the problem.
I think realistically, in the year 2024, I say a basket of broad commodities because we don't want to Native human instinct of having seen this, you know, what you would call this anomalous era of fiat money in between a period when actually a $20 bill was redeemable for gold for most of our national history.
I agree with you.
That's been actually an undesirable anomaly.
But the last thing we should want is to pick the wrong horse as opposed to taking a basket of Real commodities, even if some of those commodities, you know, silver, nickel, gold, those supply can increase.
Yes, others may be responsive to demand, but there are still constraints with which that supply can still respond to that demand as part of a basket still has a stabilizing effect on the dollar.
That's why I've been looking at it the way I've been looking at it realistically.
I'm not in this to run some academic thought experiment.
I'm running for President of the United States.
This is a top priority of mine, restoring the stability of the US dollar.
And there's a lot that we need to do to put our fiscal house in order, but as it relates to monetary policy and as it relates to the currency, we'll literally, this is a seismic shock for a lot of people, literally peg the US dollar to a basket of currencies, fire over 90% of the people of the Federal Reserve, and put them in their place to just literally stabilize the dollar against that basket.
I think that's a quantum leap in the right direction.
We can decide what the specifics of that basket are.
You're making a case for Bitcoin being, potentially over the fullness of time, that standard.
I'd ask you to maybe respond to the number one counterargument that certainly I hear in conversations, and I would ask as a fair question, that sheer volatility of Bitcoin itself Just empirically,
not in first principles, because in first principles, you made an interesting and compelling first principles-based argument, but just on the facts, as they have existed over the last number of years, probably the last, ever since Bitcoin was invented, You may know the numbers better than I,
but if you looked at the vol on Bitcoin, it probably is more volatile than most other currencies and certainly more volatile than would cause a currency to be more volatile if pegged to that than to a broad basket of real currencies.
And so I wanted to give you a chance to make the case against the backdrop of those empirics.
Where's the disconnect between that and the principle?
I have a hypothesis on what your answer is going to be, but I thought I might as well hear it directly from you.
What's your response?
That's a good question.
It's a totally, it's a fair question as well.
And empirically, you're absolutely correct.
Bitcoin has been historically very volatile.
But what we're seeing here is the monetization of a new economic good in real time.
We've never seen this before.
You have to understand the process of gold becoming money and being used at the grocery store, say in the 19th century, that took thousands of years.
And so that volatility was spread out of that, sorry, spread over that time.
In our digital age, the monetization of a good can happen incredibly rapidly.
And it's a fallacy to think something can go from no value to being worth trillions of dollars with no sort of bumps along the way.
Eventually, what's going to happen is...
Let me explain where the volatility is coming from.
I think that's an important point.
The volatility is coming from the fact that Bitcoin is a fixed supply monetary good and the demand for it is growing exponentially.
And what happens when you have people pouring their savings into it, the price goes up very rapidly.
Then you reach the cohort of people who are interested in it in that phase and then you get a crash.
And then you get a new group of people who get interested and they come in and it goes up exponentially again.
Eventually, everyone on Earth is going to have some of their savings in Bitcoin, and its market cap is going to be enormously larger than it is now.
It's going to surpass gold.
Bitcoin now has a market cap of, I think, somewhere in the order of $400 or $500 billion.
And gold has a market cap of $10 trillion.
When Bitcoin gets to the same market capitalization as gold...
Can you give me those numbers again?
Sorry, Bitcoin's market cap versus gold.
Bitcoin is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and gold is $10 trillion.
So, Bitcoin is still a very small percentage of the market capitalization of gold.
When Bitcoin's capitalization approaches the same level as gold, its volatility is going to decrease commensurately because what that means is that much more of the world's population will have savings in it and they won't have extra savings to allocate to it.
What you're seeing, the volatility is just a function of people's savings moving into Bitcoin.
When Bitcoin surpasses gold and moves into what I believe eventually will be tens of trillions of dollars of value, the volatility is going to be much, much lower.
And that's when it's going to be suitable to use as a currency as you think of it in the standard sense as a medium of exchange where you go to the grocery store and you buy things.
It's not there yet.
And this is the evolution of money as it's always happened.
Money always starts off as a store of value, eventually becomes a medium of exchange, and then it becomes a unit of account.
People look at Bitcoin and say, it's not a medium of exchange yet.
It's not a medium of exchange.
That's putting the cart before the horse.
It has to go through the process of monetization becoming a deeply established store of value like gold.
Then it will be suitable as money as we commonly understand it.
And, you know, let me just – we're getting close to the end of the conversation here, but we've gotten pretty far in a short amount of time here, so let's get a little further, which is – To your point about there'll be bumps along the way, I think the real question, just from any first personal perspective of people who are really thinking through this is, how long are those bumps relative to what is fixed?
Which is, roughly speaking, at least fixed, which is human lifespan.
I mean, maybe we're going to make changes that blow the top off of the fact that human beings can live hundreds of years instead of 80 years on average.
But we're not there yet, and there's no indication that we're going to have a quantum leap there.
So there's this finite human lifespan relative to, as you said, the thousands of years it took for gold to reach that level of stability.
So as it pragmatically relates to decision-making today, I find the first principles argument alluring.
And I'm not off-put by the empirics of it, but as a pragmatic matter, If I'm looking at being the next US president, I'm focused on stabilizing the US dollar against that broad basket.
The ability to make that case versus Bitcoin on first principles when we're arguing that the historical volatility measured in months, years, or even a decade is still small on the long arc of history measured in millennia.
I could get there based on first principles.
But as a percentage of human life, That's still a relatively long time horizon, which is what I think prevents the migration to an all Bitcoin world.
I assume you are sympathetic to that argument and acknowledge it as somebody coming from someone who's actually quite sympathetic to the things you're saying about Bitcoin as I am.
I just wanted to air that perspective and maybe give you a chance to respond to that.
Yeah, that's a fair perspective.
And I actually conclude my book by saying I believe, and I genuinely believe this, that Bitcoin will become the world's reserve currency in 50 years.
That's what I see as a time horizon.
I think things are definitely accelerating much more because of the fact that we're so interconnected globally in a way that we weren't even, you know, 30 years ago.
And I think on a shorter time horizon, in the time horizon of 5 to 10 years, I expect Bitcoin to have a similar market capitalization as gold.
And that's the size at which it will start to affect monetary policy.
It's the size at which central banks will look at it.
And if the price starts rising, they will start worrying about their national currencies and people fleeing their national currencies into this alternate form of savings.
I think eventually there's an inevitability to Bitcoin because of the fact it's so ideal for savings.
Whether you choose it to back your currency or not, I think your hand will be forced eventually.
It's just whether or not you get ahead of the curve or you're behind the curve.
I would say about your idea of a basket of currencies, it's far superior as an idea to what we have now.
Backing the US dollar by something that can't be printed is a huge advance in what we have today.
Looking ahead, you would want the US to have some Bitcoin in reserve because if a currency becomes the reserve currency and your nation doesn't have any of that currency in reserve, you become poor.
You become impoverished.
If gold were to become the global reserve currency again, the US would be fine.
We have plenty of gold.
The US is the largest holder of gold on Earth.
But if Bitcoin were to become the world's next reserve currency, as they believe it will, it will be countries like El Salvador, which have already adopted a Bitcoin standard, who will enrich themselves.
Suddenly, they will have a large supply of the currency that's used to transact between businesses and nation states.
So, the idea of a basket is fine, but make sure the US has got some Bitcoin in that basket.
It does actually have Bitcoin, but unfortunately, the US government has accumulated a large supply of Bitcoin through these criminal investigations, shutting down Silk Road, which I don't want to take a perspective on whether it's right or wrong, but the US has Bitcoin.
The problem is it keeps selling it.
It's absolutely insane.
It's like the...
The British Exchequer, they sold all of their gold in 1999 at the absolute bottom of the market.
The US government is doing the same thing.
They've got Bitcoin- You're saying not build a new Fort Knox instead is what you would say.
Exactly.
Build a new Fort Knox, keep it in your basket of currencies or goods and make sure that if Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency, the US is not impoverished because of that because it's spurned Bitcoin and said, we don't We have no interest in this.
We don't believe in this.
We don't want to own any of it.
I think that's a huge mistake.
I appreciate that, man.
I've already learned a lot in this short conversation.
I'll tell you something about myself.
I'm not one of these people who tries to pretend something I'm not to satisfy or appease an audience.
I tend to find that I'm not Christian, but when I talk to a church, I don't pretend to be Christian, but actually it turns out we share things.
I kind of feel that way when I'm talking to Bitcoiners like yourself, which is that I'm not going to pretend to be something that I'm not, but it turns out that the nature of the concerns that motivate me about our financial system, about our monetary system, And that lead me to want to reform the Federal Reserve in the way that I'm planning to do as president are among the very same reasons that motivate you to get behind Bitcoin in the way that you have.
And I think we're allied in common cause that way.
And it turns out, the more I've learned about it, the more deeply sympathetic I am.
And I don't think your view of the world is crazy at all about, you know, we can debate the time horizon, but that there is some time horizon where You know, the world's, you know, various nations in the world resort to at least a currency that is actually scarce by definition in the way that it's actually constructed.
So I'm interested in that.
And I think that it's part of why we'll be soon.
I assume this will be well-received.
I think if we can work on the technical implementation of it, I'm writing my team about it.
Hopefully, by the time people hear this, we'll either be there or nearly there, ready to accept Bitcoin in campaign contributions.
We're working on that and I'll keep you apprised of whether that's something we're able to do or not, but every small step forward towards embracing innovative ways to check the failures of our existing monetary system, every little bit can make a difference.
We're working on that as we speak.
So I may ask for your help and advice on that if we run into any bumps in the road, to borrow our early expression.
But in the meantime, I just want to say thanks a lot for taking the time.
I learned a ton from you and I expect we're going to be, I can tell, I think we're going to be talking, Vijay, a lot more in the months and years to come about Bitcoin.