Why Bitcoin is the Hardest Money We Ever Had, Saifedean Ammous, "The Bitcoin Standard"

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers this episode has support from no official sponsor but from my very own the blockchain and us newsletter get an email from me every two weeks with a very short summary of new podcast episodes so you can immediately pick those interviews you'd like to listen to to stay up-to-date just visit w-w-w dot the blockchain and ascom and sign up today my guest today is sayfudine a moose safe is an academic economist

living and teaching in beirut as an assistant professor of economics at the lebanese american university he was previously a member of the center for capitalism and society and holds a PhD in sustainable development from Columbia University in New York safes main interest is Austrian economics and Bitcoin and he wrote the book the Bitcoin standard published by Wiley and now to the interview hi safe many thanks for taking time today safe I've recently seen you present your new book Bitcoin standard and in a nutshell what's the book about the book describes

Bitcoin as the latest and most advanced technology for performing the function of money that we as humans have invented specifically how what we see right now is the big one is developing into something similar to the gold standard but the Internet's equivalent of the gold standard whereby Bitcoin transactions are becoming extremely valuable transactions and Bitcoin scaling is happening on the second layer or on second layer solutions through exchanges and websites that use Bitcoin beginning to process more and more of their own transactions on their own servers rather than putting them on the Bitcoin blockchain so what we are seeing is that

the Internet has developed its own central bank and because it's a viable alternative it seems because it's it can't be killed so far at least it seemed and it works very well it hasn't recorded the single failed or fraudulent transaction in nine years and it's decentralized nobody can control it and most importantly for me most interesting to me as an economist is the fact that it has hard money the money that it uses is the hardest money that we have after invented what's it mean hard money yes that's that's really maybe one of the most important concepts around which my book is built and the distinction is

between money that it's hard to make on money that is easy to make so easy money is money that is easy to increase the supply of so for instance if people choose copper or nickel or zinc or any of these metals as money it's quite easy for nickel and zinc and copper miners to increase the production of these things very substantially drinking the quantity on the market up drastically and bringing the price down so that anybody who used back easy money as a store of value and the losing this value so historically we've always seen that hard money kills easy money we see this over and over again and we see our world

began more and more connected towards the end of the 19th century the entire world was on a gold standard because gold is the hardest money that we have ever had or had ever had before become so by the end of the 19th century all of the world more or less was on a gold standard everybody he was gold as money before that many people had used all sorts of different things but there's a reason that all of these things lost their monetary role and only gold remain and that is because gold supply is the hardest to increase gold only increases every year around the 1.5 or 2% per year so this is why no matter what happens no matter what the government to do know all over the all profit gold cookie

needs to keep its monetary at all just because of the fact that nobody can print gold on demand and so nobody can expropriate the value of your code by printing it they can take the gold that's a different story but what made the gold money is that it was hard and so Bitcoin come gives that property of gold into the digital monetary system of the internet but it's even harder than gold because the supply of Bitcoin is check the cap at 21 million whereas the supply of gold is for all practical intents and purposes infinite because we keep increasing because we keep finding deeper mines today can we keep digging in new places and we keep digging more efficiently

gold is always increasing at one or two percent per year but bitcoin is going to stop increasing at all it'll be a prickly scared so that's an extremely interesting property which is accompanied again today we don't have a gold standard right so something happened between when you know hard money was valued by people and banks and now it's you know obviously something else is valued more so how does how do all these properties of Bitcoin you know how will they be able to replace our current monetary system well it's not entirely true that we don't have a gold standard because you know the money that we have is issued by central banks but you use anywhere in the world and these central

banks themselves will eat a very significant amount of gold in their reserves so coal has not been completely demonetized over spilling money it's there's money for central bank the central banks will keep it and engage in operations of buying it and selling it I don't think we can say that the gold has stopped being money but you know even if we look at different kinds of money within government money if you look at different types of government money we see the same story the better performing government money is the ones that are sought all over the world that the

dollar the Euro the Swiss franc of a British pound they have relatively low percentage increase conveyor supply whereas currency's is like citizen bubble in dollars the venezuelan bolivar and all these other currencies are continuously increasing in a much faster rate and as a result they lose value and their citizens one could drop them and their citizens look for alternatives in the form of the dollar in the euro so you still find this property to always be there and the hardware money is going to always be more desirable and it will hold value over time better and people who put their wealth and money

that is not hard will just with lose its value over time but currently what's happening i mean it seems to me people just prefer the harder money then they're weak alternative so they don't necessarily go for the hardest money even today gold you know has many drawbacks so what's in between you know that decision to say well i may not need the hardest available money to bitcoin being the de facto standard well I mean you know I'm not trying to convince people that they should use it and I'm not trying to sell Bitcoin that you know this is not the point of my book I'm just describing economic reality in the

sense of that you know whatever your choice is the likely outcome of the fact that people can use different options now and one of these options is strictly scarce the supply of which is never going to go beyond 21 million it's just going to mean that in the long run more and more the people who store their wealth in that thing will grow what would witness their wealth to grow more and more so I mean I think the hardness of the money itself is not CD optional that's not so you know if you don't like it and you're immune from it because if you don't like it others can use it and then if others can use it they will witness their wealth appreciate while

yours remains Fagin and so in real terms you know they'll be able to purchase more things they'll be able to save more for the future and invest more in the future and so that becomes a disadvantage for those who don't use it the important thing I mean it might well be the case that Bitcoin does not take off in popularity that is remain the friends and it out you might absorb quite a nice thing from where it goes right now but I think the interesting thing is if you keep a very long term perspective on this you know 10 years from now 50 years from now 100 years from now most likely the Bitcoin network is going to continue to be

operating exactly as it is operating right now and it would have built a track record of 10 20 50 100 whatever years of operating continuously and so you know when you think about how much more accessible it could become to people how many more people would have heard about it just because of the fact that it has survived for longer and longer periods it makes it likely that it just goes to continue to play an increasing role over time in the indie con on the other hand you know this is this is the economic aspect of the hard money which I think is this is you can think of it as an economic reality that will impose itself so for instance there were countries towards the end of the

19th century that tried to stay on a silver standard it was suicide to do that because the value of silver just dropped and the value of gold kept on rising compared to silver and so these countries were and publishing themselves by holding on to a currency that was depreciating like that so this is the reality of the way the system the way monetary competition works but I think the other thing that Bitcoin has going for it and that it's not just an alternative to central banks in terms of its monetary policy it's also a third central bank in the ability to process international payments and this is this is this is really the operational strength of Bitcoin which you know is

kind of ignored by people in a sort of lost sometimes when people need to think about many of the other buzzwords than - is associated with Bitcoin but really fundamentally what Bitcoin does if you know if you want to send money today from the United States to China your options are limited to a few currencies and one single international central banking system that's it you know no matter which bank you choose it's going to go through your central bank and the other country central bank and it's one system that practically functions under the command of the US central bank so

you know this is the only option that we have for sending money internationally well I guess it could you know send it to his people or send on donkey but you know if he wanted to use any sort of institutions that utilize something from 19th century technology onwards you have to go through the government banking monopoly central bank so now we have an alternative where you can send money across the world online without having to without having to go through the central banking system and it's it's it's an incredibly secure system it's a system that you know within one hour you'll be able to get around six

confirmations and with six confirmations you can be more certain or the finality of a transaction pretty much any payment system or the current payment system will offer you a month of clearance so within an hour you can perform the sort of actions that today take financial institutions days and maybe weeks to complete that's what Bitcoin allows and so we're seeing that effectively a a new one a new economy is growing around this monetary system an economy based around Bitcoin it's just quite marginal it's still very small its little you know if

you want to measure the value of all the bitcoins outstanding three around 0.1% of all the value of all the money other kinds of money office they're quite tiny but still it's quite interesting that it is able to this way where people are able to send things to one another all around the world the monetary supply has proven itself to be very predictable very reliably predictable predictable we're not going to get a lot of changes in it and the system works in terms of its security nobody has been able to work this is no security to pass through transactions that don't work and every

day that goes by when bitcoins monetary policy is still functioning and they'll able to process payments there's another day that it continues to prove itself in this regard so it is emerging as an imperative and you know my book is not making predictions about whether it's going to win or not or how the two are going to grow but I think it's quite amazing to witness this hard money economy emerged online and how it's a central bank is going to compete well it's definitely something very new in the history of money I mean I may read many comments

about your book where people said it's the history of money and then there's an added chapter about how Bitcoin continues that history and extrapolates it into the future I also saw that in an interview where you said and I quote here the most important thing that Bitcoin offers is a new form of sound money outside the control of any authority or government in the world and that is something very very important for the world economy and before you talked about you know the aspects of a hard money or or sound money versus you know money that's easy to inflate you talked about some of the convenience but what can it really do for the world economy as a whole

okay so this is obviously a huge question three chapters in my book are about this and those are really my three favorite chapters which explain what in my opinion are the three main benefits of having sound hard money having easy funny money so okay so first of all the the one that I find the most interesting and this is really the root of my fascination with Bitcoin is the relationship between the kind of money and the time preference of society and of individuals so the way that I see it well not the way that I see it a lot of

other economists have written and spoken about this book time preference is is a measure for how much people discount the future compared to the present so everybody prefers consumption or gratification in the present over the future there's no question about it and if I told you would you rather consume an apple today or in a year you definitely choose it today or if I offered you a sum of money when I offered you a house given the exact same reward between today and one year from now everybody would rather droll with the reward today sure but because fundamentally when it comes down to it that's we are not in living infancy on the first we could die

within this year and you know our time is finance we want to get the enjoyment as much enjoyment into this time as we can so it's completely normal and rational for everybody to have a positive time preference meaning the time preference was greater than zero that you do have a preference for the present over the future however how much that preference varies is what we describe as high time preference over all time pressures so if you have a high time preference that means you you savor the future less now your favor the present a lot more if you have a low time preference than the degree by which your favor the present is a little bit less and so in other words it the nomenclature can be a little bit

confusing people always have to miss stuff at the at the beginning but the way to think of it is low time preference is future orientation you think about the future a lot high time preference is present orientation you think about the present more so in you know the factors that affect time preference for me is one of the most important economic concepts in fact I would say the most important economic concepts for any individual to learn if I could teach my students one thing I always make sure to always beat them time preference in any class that I teach because I think it's really the most important thing they could learn because you know in economics we teach them what macroeconomics and dealings with governments and individuals and we talk about micro economic decisions between

individuals but the most important decision the most important paid that you will ever perform with anybody is the trade you will perform with your future self you know you through the rest of the world what five times a day ten times a day 20 times a day but you take with your future self infinite numbers of time neutral number of times per day you know if you decide to work today you're working for your future self if you decide to enjoy yourself you're enjoying yourself today and not working for your future sons own but every decision you take you're always weighing the future versus the present so the the ability of people to understand the long-term consequences of

their actions comes from this process of beginning to appreciate time persons and an economist called Hanselman hopper calls time preference the lowering of time preference he called what initiates the process of civilization and I think it's an excellent way of understanding it because what really allows us to the vibration is when we as human beings stop thinking about our immediate needs and stop thinking of what is better for us in the long run yeah when we start saving right as opposed to consuming everything immediately so you don't just look hungry and go on hunt and eat no before you get hungry you have the foresight to think I'm gonna get hungry so let me first build something to hunt with and

then that'll start something with the higher productivity you then build something more advanced so you keep accumulating capital and that's really the process of human civilization its capital accumulation and technological advancement which go together but necessary for them to happen is the lowering of some profits mm-hmm so interesting yeah so for me I think the concept based on preference is highly related to the kind of money that the society have in society had hard money and we have many examples of societies that had hard money then generally these are called the golden eras golden periods it's no coincidence that you find the gold standard in more schools that are known as the golden era because under that kind of monetary system money

appreciates in value every year a tiny little bit it's not gonna get you rich by just holding money but it's enough for you to be able to save for your future from your work today well at least you don't lose it right when you have high inflation you lose money without doing anything so you have a higher reward to actually just spend it immediately and buy something that has a worth as opposed to just being it you know worthless paper somewhere precisely so if you imagine if you lived in a society where the value of money appreciated every year by 3% in 25 years the money that you put in today will double in 25 years if it drops by 3 percent every year in 25 years it'll drop by half mm-hm so you start working

when you're 20 years old and it makes a difference if you start saving and you're losing 3 percent per year you know why save for so that in 25 years you'll have half of it left that makes no sense whereas if you're going to be in a place where appreciate by 3 percent per year you say because in 25 years it'll be double the amount so people are more likely to save when they have hard money they save and so they have their wealth stored then they have some wealth stored with money and that appreciates over time and that act of the person's safety nest if you want that's there that's the money that they know they always have a case of a crisis or a problem and then

you know with that continuously appreciating over time and they are able to work more and produce more they start accumulating capital for investments you know other than the money that they have which is enough to let's say last them through six months if they weren't able to work through six months or something like that or one year or whatever emergency expenses they might imagine beyond that and once your savings are appreciated by Rama you start taking risks with your capital so in a cell money economy there's a separation between the function of serving and the functional risk taking and investment and that's a healthy thing you know you need your savings to be the thing that you can be safe and in which you can safely store value most people they

don't really have because you have to gamble with everything and you never know what thing might blow up and what you know they told you houses are not a good store of value but then they might drop or whatever so money is the thing that just acts as the store of value that is predictable that contains the least risk and also offers the least award investment then allow you to take more risk and more reward yeah and I think you know that sort of skewing of people decision-making towards consumption and towards you that's one's present orientation obviously the first effect of it is that people move away from saving so then they start consuming more and more and economically this is

quite destructive because this is operative for the process so location what you're doing is you're destroying camp them and you see other than how everybody today isn't that you know individuals governments organizations everybody is in debt everybody is in debt because it makes more sense to take on debt then to accumulate saving and I think it also affects the culture of the society and I think it also affects the innovativeness of a society and if you look at the 19th century on to the gold standard I I provide some evidence of how there were more innovations around that time than now but also I think also what you

think about art that's a very interesting your way of comparing it you know today in the 20th century we find that the art the dispute has no conception of beauty and very little craft or work or effort goes into it artists don't have the time preference that is necessary to spend that years working on learning their craft and then working on perfecting their masterpieces so she look at some of the most well known on pictures of the 20th century you know you see things that a 16 year old could pull off you know he did a terrific read over through this and in about a day's work he could pull it off with no training no particularly good important good training in art if

you look at the time of the gold standard you know and you look at some of the best artwork that was to use there you could not find the 15 year old anywhere who could produce it in a day I mean I I quote Michelangelo were in a poem he wrote about what he had to endure in order to complete the chapel they spent four years hanging from the ceiling of the Chapel of drawing it and had an enormous amount of health problems and dating problems because of it but that's what it takes to create something that would last for hundreds of years it takes years of effort of the vacation and then more and more hard and worked but that's what the thing requires a little time pressures mm-hmm

it's it's not entirely coincidental that we like these things today it's interesting that you bring up Michelangelo just today I read somewhere that Michelangelo was actually the richest artists of the Renaissance and that would totally match with what you're saying right I mean yeah he obviously had his savings so he could focus on the long game I understand how how it makes sense that if somebody has savings if somebody knows that they will be secure in the

future that they can invest more let's say in themselves today what are other things that enable this more positive time preference security is another major one so if you live in a place where you are highly secure in your life and property you're highly likely it would have become more present fortunately than CT oriented violence increases around you become more you develop a higher time preference I mean any anything that would tend towards increasing cooperation between his games and

increasing capital accumulation would lead to a lower client preference in turn lower client preference would meet to those things that would help those things about you're an Austrian economist what does that have to do with the book what happens in economics and then discovery Bitcoin and the try and apply what you learn to reading those old mastering books to this new crazy technology let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors this episode has support from no official sponsor but from my very own the blockchain and us newsletter get an email from me every

two weeks with a very short summary of new podcast episodes so you can immediately pick those interviews you'd like to listen to to stay up-to-date just visit w-w-w and the scomp and sign up today Austrian economics and Bitcoin often go together but what are the most maybe the overlapping concepts why why that is so also economics is sort of philosophical of treatment of how human beings act it's the study of human action it's the study of how human beings act with respect to material resources and decisions are they taken with the

implications on our and so once you look into these things and study them well you get to do really appreciate understand that the individualist and liberal perspective in the classical sense of the word liberal which is that the only way that an individual can you know secure was best for them is if they have the freedom to choose make their own choices and that there's no chance that an outsider could impose restrictions on you that will improve your choices or make your make your economic reality better and that's why it's in general against any kind of

government intervention in the economy and that's why it's you know people like to think of Australians as being ideological and you know for us it's been more ideological there's no reason why I should and get the ability to put a gun to your head and tell you don't do this to do that and there's no reason why you should have this the Austrians recognize that and recognize that you know the best outcome for you and me is if we both did intervene the sense of you conduct one of your market dealings as you please and I could get that on my mark edenian as I clean so so far so from this perspective any kind of government intervention and money is also destructive encounter with so their

definition of sound money is money that is chosen freely on the market they generally almost always refer to sound money as gold and go to some money and that's that's understandable because for the 150 year period from about 1860 until 2010 really was the only sound money of the only motorists of the market mmm but the reason there's not because it's just gold or that it has to be gold you know and many other times it was silver it could be any other kind of money as long as it has chosen freely on the market the distinction is that it is money

whose value is determined on the market because people voluntarily pay for what what they value it has as opposed to unsound money or easy money which is money that has to have coercion involved in getting it accepted you know somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you you have to use this that's bad money and then when bad money is utilized all sorts of economic problems happened so bitcoin really comes from that kind of perspective in a sense of the money supply is built to be completely hard and the fact that bitcoin have gained any kind of economic value that people are willing to pay money for that is really the most astonishing thing about it mmm and for me has an Austrian economist it's the

thing that I thought would be the hardest at this point that I would think I mean I only knew about this point after was already trading but I mean in retrospect this would be the hardest thing I could have imagined somebody had built it but to get to a point that somebody pays for it hanging off with money for it to have a market value is really the most astonishing achievement I think of Bitcoin Spillers why is that so hard to pull off because you know it's still zeros on water at the end of the day and I mean I I only heard about this point from the perspective of somebody who was already interested in hard money so coming at it from that perspective it really was very hard to

convince me that you could build something digital that it have the same reliable scarcity that gold has or that is even better than that because you know what if it gets half what if somebody changes the supply what if the government wants the people behind it what if what if what if there are a million different scenarios you could think of for wire would have worked everybody quickly he is even after it's worth took me years to come around to the idea that yeah maybe it does work maybe good words and if it amazes me that it happened it doesn't you know you you no matter how much time you spend trying to study how it works it still it took you years to to actually be on board with Bitcoin what

was there one specific argument that won you over because no Bitcoin doesn't argue it just is almost there maybe an experience you know with that that tipped it for you I mean if you think about it just the insanity of it is that this thing is just doing the same thing that it has been doing from day one hand people are just freaking out about it and changing their mind about it and it just doesn't even have any conception of what they want but it's doing because of the rational thing to keep winning people over but for me the first thing was okay I've heard about it I can't

even remember when I first heard of it since I was 9 or 2010 and I thought okay interesting they're trying to make something like gold I don't think it'll work and you know just dismissed it let me keep hearing about it kind of keep you know the more you hear about it the more you start thinking for why it won't work eventually I just I thought you know it's never going to catch on in terms of value or if it does government will shut it down or will even if there's nobody to shut down then they'll just pick a bunch of people anywhere who are high-profile and associated with it and then throw them in jail which has happened with some of the early entrepreneurs in the space exactly so this really was the wake-up moment for me or the incident

was when these things started to happen more and more and yet Bitcoin continued to grow in spite of all these things that was really the hmm so you know I thought there's no way it's going to get to $1 each you know there's no way that each one of these things would get to $1 but I saw it get to $1 and I thought ok you know it's a crazy bubble there is enjoy enjoy enjoy and then the second thing that I had was there's no way this would be any more than just either is going to be used for drugs and then once they start cramping down on these people then that'll kill it so when the Silk Road website got busted or supposing this was the guy who supposedly ran the Silk Road website got busted and the number of transactions on

the network did not collapse and the number of and the price in fact are rallying as the usage of the network that's when I realized okay now this thing is more serious than I give it credit for do you think the fact that nobody was able to kill Bitcoin do you think that has to do with the strength of the protocol or maybe just with those people who could have stopped it under estimating its power if you have a few computers maybe you could have taken the

original chain and created many many kinds of double spending just 1% attack for relatively cheap prices were thirty two thousand nine ten eleven even twelve it was still largely 2013 is when that's another thing that really when I talk about why I started taking bit my seriously the drug bust and also in the explosion of the explosion of the house rate in 2013 and 14 and just how much more costly attack that's what became once these things was a strictly they increased so much as this now it's now

very very hard to imagine somebody attacking it not just because the cost is high but because you know the cost is not even theoretically think of because if somebody wanted to start producing miners manipulate the hash rate you know there's nothing stopping others from producing more miners mm-hmm and finding success rate that they go along as well so it's it's like chasing you know chasing the 51% of Bitcoin has trick I think is just becoming increasingly impossible with every day so yeah it could have been tough but I think it's it's interesting this being is that all of the people who heard

about it at the Nervii stage were inclined to use it and benefit from it rather than attack cool are there Austrians in your circles or peers of yours that think bitcoin is a bad idea [Music] so first peter schiff is a famous he's not he's not very keen on Bitcoin he's keen on gold I think so the hard money argument still holds there but yeah I don't think it's a Bitcoin fan but maybe

more in academia you know because you're also professor sometimes I'm sure you go to conferences and you know people may say well we saw you wrote this Bitcoin book but they come up with all kinds of arguments why that may be a bad idea I mean what are they you know I'm a bit of an outcast within the profession because I can't just go to these conferences and there's no corners and they're kind of researching back in our stuff that they do is completely uninteresting to me to be honest most of it that was working it so generally you know the economists

that I deal with are quite open-minded bye-bye you know I wouldn't say everybody's crazy about this coin but some are true some are indifferent some are interested but don't know enough and I think that the majority of the people that I know they're interested in finding out about but they just don't know enough because it takes years to be able to read understand what's going on with this point it's not only the thing let's say let's say a student or somebody else who's interested in learning more about what bitcoin can do how should they go about exactly that about understanding its implications well obviously I'm going to suggest that they read my book hopefully they will

but besides that yeah which I begins the social nakamoto's a white paper yeah it's you know it's my no means a religious text it's by no means infallible in fact a guy called David Harding has written an entire article about mistakes that are in now the white paper it's it's not an infallible holiday document and we shouldn't eat the bat but if a great place to start because it's a great place to get your mind into the right strain of understanding what was going on what was the problem that he was tackling why did he trying to do it one was the design of

this mean if you don't understand the computer science but it there you know at least to start understanding what terms you need to understand so from then on I recommend just digging into the Bitcoin wiki is a very good resource and trying to understand the technical aspect of it you know the how the Agra fee works the hashing the distributed networks and you know I think obviously from my perspective the economics is where I would offer the where I think is the why of economics the why of the coin is economics of and that for that you

know you could see my book in my talks and I also recommend very strongly the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute they have all of the pushes right things as well as a lot of writings that are quite relevant to I think if you read their articles very good idea of what's going on cool and we can put all these links in the industry notes of this some of this episode I've seen there is this graph with gold on one side all the gold in the world and then on the other side very small all the bitcoins in the world and that somehow implies that at some point

Bitcoin could maybe you know grab a lot of that market share if not replace gold as the de facto standard for hard money in your view what would need to happen for Bitcoin to replace all the gold in the world well completely replace the gold or I don't know is a very big board but you know gold gold economic value is not just monetary but also gold monetary value is strongly culturally almost psychologically linked to it's it's it's it's ornamental role as jewelry so you

know people want to wear gold and people want to give gold as dowry all over the world the tradition continues to persist it's not easy to get people to get over hundreds of thousands of years of culture and accumulated wealth in it so I think gold is going to continue to remain valuable but whether it could be and you know the fact that you can wear it and show it off I think white people keep it's Michael can you tell but keep it's multi-role but gold versus Bitcoin because it's maybe golden Bitcoin has the hardest to money versus the other kinds of money that we have in the world

so I wouldn't really know what how to think of that but I would say you know Bitcoin just could need to effectively continue to survive and that bitcoin is around ten years from now and nothing drastic has happened unchanged with it that's just going to make it ten times as attractive as a store of value as it is now and if it's around to another 50 years better another is a different story yeah interesting let's assume we'd have a Bitcoin standard at some point what is maybe one result of this that is hard to understand for people currently finding

better than you link come out music give me yeah what's that have to do with it reference what else but maybe what what's the thing that you know will surprise people very much of course it would be very nice if we have much more better art better music yeah but what is maybe like a thing also in society in ways we interact initial question with chapter 5 but then there's chapter 7 on individual freedom I think if we if more and more of the world economy runs on money that is free of government control then I think we're going to increase the

ability of individuals to be free quite significant came all over the world under control of government overt economic activity and over personal decisions and personal rights I would see declining drastic ooh so that might be good news ok great I'm safe did you always want to be a professor Plan B was the professor is still pretty good how did you get into this into this field I mean let's say you weren't a professor let's say you

weren't in academia what would you like to be doing then I think I genuinely mean it football player I think I would have really enjoyed doing that at least for an early period of my life and then maybe moved on to something else it's I when I was young we lived for two years and rio de janeiro in brazil so a six to eight year old kid thousand playing football in Brazil and learning to love support for Brazilians thought cactus obsession the game the Brazilians have but from knowing is good a very unfortunately so I just watched maybe maybe another life who knows yeah if you

if you look back at you know decisions that you made maybe that led you to where you are today are there are certain things that you do differently well I used to always say that but I'm not that sort of person who likes to look back until I tried living without sugar and started seeing the effects that sugar has on my body had never realised ya know if I could I'd go back to the day that I was born would change the way that I've been eating all my life and I think my life would have been completely different mmm cool yeah I mean that's a whole other topic I mean many people said asked about diet so but if we did that I'm sure that would be another hour of

very interesting conversation what's next for you safe but it would be probably and more general economics textbook I'd like to write something like that that's really what I think I have in mind for the next couple years mmm-hmm more more general economics I mean what what would be the angle there a textbook I mean I would want to be a book that anybody can pick up and read and learn all the most important concepts in economics and also a book that could be taught at the university to teach two or three courses in economics cool there's one thing that I

wanted to ask earlier which which I didn't was in your view why would a Bitcoin standard be a bad idea you know some things are beyond good and bad it's not I'm not here trying to sell you something describing an economic phenomena that is amazing so you IIIi but still butter what are some of the counter-arguments you know - to the points that you're making if you if you put yourself in the shoes of somebody criticizing your book the good and the bad comes from the good and the bad it's not the technology the good only matters what people make of it so what we're seeing here is a new form of technology

emerging that's going to allow us to have our you know to do the job of a central bank online anybody can log online and replace their central bank effectively now whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is 3d an orthogonal question I think this is you know this is this is a this is a thing that I probably don't share with some of the we're with many people in the Bitcoin space which is you know I I'm not interested in evangelism and I don't want so we're trying to sell this to people because you know bad things can happen and you know people can lose their private keys and they could lose their money people couldn't you know

then there will be problems there the important thing is to just for me I was just to talk to discuss the economics of it and try and think about the economics of it so you know I'm not really sure what I could say but I guess that would that issue of the private key is one major one major problem in Java you know if it's not law and there's there's no way to bring it back that's a major issue with the bitcoins that people need to be aware of it's not like your local checking account where if you make a mistake in payment then you can just call them a little early and take it mm-hmm yeah definitely something for many people to get used to to be so much

in charge of of their money and their wealth yeah so so far what kind of reactions are you getting to the book range that you would expect from pending on people's perspectives on Bitcoin so I was asking him as a Bitcoin atactic about it but the no coin is are not very ecstatic about it but fundamentally it doesn't really matter I mean I don't really I don't base my happiness on the reactions of others the point of this book is so people can think about it then I'm not going to give too much thought to what people think initially now I'm hopeful that this book was found the test of time that's the real effect

a little too early to say it's been it's a good book or a bad book I think we'll hopefully five or ten years from now somebody laughing that question the fact that people's been talking about in five or ten years all of that I think matters cool thanks a lot for explaining your work and some of the key concepts of the book and for taking time today for this interview thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors isn't the show notes of this episode and on the podcast web site the blockchain and ask.com to help people find this podcast it's important that

you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening you [Music]