Comments
Transcript
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MBbbb
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JSif we go back to the gold standard, what is to prevent governments from doing the exact same thing that got us into this fiat mess?
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SLOnce the dust settles over this presidential cycle, regardless of who is inaugurated, the attention of the masses in the US will inevitably be drawn to Bitcoin. I argue that the 'bubble' in crypto in 2017-18 was driven by the lemming-effect: millions of neophytes causing unsustainable growth in an unknown asset. Now, however, the current surge in Bitcoin is fueled by both a deeper understanding of what Bitcoin is, and the realization that global Covid stimulus is unsustainable. I have tried to encourage all of my friends and family to get a little Bitcoin, but I'm almost always met with skepticism, even after I have carefully explained to them the benefits of holding the coin. This last 'land-grab' has the potential of lifting millions of people out of poverty, or it could simply be another play-ground for the uber-wealthy to gobble up, and then parse out to the dirty masses at exorbitant prices. I hope for the former, but the time for entry is rapidly coming to an end.
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TSI voted thumbs down on a great discussion. My vote is based on the future and narrative of bitcoin. If bitcoin's greatest purpose is to enforce sound money policies than I'd rather keep my 10K and put it in gold. Great depth but the arguments pro vs con tended to net out con. Personally, I'm not planning on sending large amounts of money to China and that one example became tired. Now I am picking nits but cest la vie. ;-)
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NVOne global currency? I don’t think it’s possible with multiple fiscal unions. Look at the imbalances it’s causing in Europe.
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CSBeing American it is easy to say that sooner or later all countries will use Dollars. This experiment that is happening in Europe called Euro is causing big problems, as economies in countries like Greece, Spain or Italy are totally different than in Germany, France or Belgium for instance. The tension in the system is leading to a lot of pressure for the weak economies in the south. This is why currency exchanges are helpful.
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NRThere is an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies. There is an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies. There is an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies. There is an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies. There is an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies. There is an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies.
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JHRenewable energy advancements will dramatically reduce and eventually eliminate costs associated with powering bitcoins network.
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JL"We're going to get to a point where there's going to be 21 million bitcoin and that's it and there's nothing else anybody can produce... This makes it more of a gold than gold." - This statement seems so simplistically wrong. There are an infinite number of Bitcoin-like currencies that are creatable, this is already true now, but even more so as we reach the limit of the total number of Bitcoins, the pressure and incentive for both miners and transactors to move to Bitcoin-2 or Bitcoin-3 or Bitcoin-n is going to build and build. There will always only be one element that has the properties of gold, and it's supply grows inline with technology and the human economy.
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SSExceptional! Ammous is very insightful.
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MGThis guy is awesome! Even if you hate bitcoin, his framework for thinking through the monetary basis of our global economy is impressive. His book is equally thought provoking. Highly recommended it.
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SGlast 30-40 seconds of every video is an add!!! was Realvision secretly highjacked by google ads or some other marketing machine? Very annoying!
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JFThe Bitcoin Standard. BTC/USD -500.55 -6.29% Oct 23/19. HODL, LOL.
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CHHaving read his book and now watched this I think he's very good at pointing out the numerous problems with fiat which we'd probably all agree with but it's not clear why bitcoin is the answer indeed the last minutes are telling where he admits that his real objective is providing competition to fiat to make central banks and governments more honest. This could be done with any crypto or gold.
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TSGreat interview - one I really enjoyed. Thanks to the RV team. Money and time well spent.
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JLAn interesting conversation but I feel you got the money supply argument backwards. The reason gold acts as a store of value over very long time horizons is precisely the fact that the supply is not limited and more can and will be created if it becomes too valuable relative to the labour and energy that go into mining it. If gold triples you can bet the supply increase won't remain at the 2-3% number (think about why silver miners didn't really have a stellar performance when the metal was trading at 50$, the forward prices were probably never going to remain at those levels). Reliable store of value means purchasing power is maintained over time, not increased. A purely fixed money supply eliminates the supply response and is likely to cause price instability. In this regard bitcoin is certainly not the better gold. That said everytime there is financial turmoil or capital controls are introduced over the next few decades I do believe some of the cryptos should outperform as they are HUGELY more practical than physical gold, and at this point BTC is the king of crypto. Whether it is a MySpace or the real thing only time will tell!
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RSi m not sure i agree with the view that households in developed economies are spending more and not saving.. probably the opposite is taking place given they see yields on "risk free" assets dropping further lower, so they save more and hence dont spend that much...
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RSwhen talking about the cost do you take into account energy cost ?
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AWBeing popular for a couple years does not create money, nor scarcity, nor a moat, nor a store of value, nor anything compelling. Any large transnational could launch a marketing campaign for its new cryptocurrency and replace the popularity, network size, technology, everything about bitcoin, within a few months.
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CTAwesome. Bitcoin/BTC truly is the new gold. With plenty of advantages. The next decade is going to be spectacular for it. Finance will be turned upside down. You'll see.
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RHCan I stuff my mattress with Bitcoin?
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SPJust when you think you've heard every perspective on a given topic, someone like Saifedean Ammous comes along to make you completely rethink your position! It was really thought provoking when he said that we may simply have a soft transition to hard money in the way that he explained by collapsing the debt by reducing the demand for existing currency (I hope I got that right!). There were so many interesting investing insights in this video I'll have to watch it again and take down notes. This was a great interview.
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PJBitcoin is currently a financial /technology construct created by financial technologists to circumvent fiat currency and political interference. Gold has been adopted by the market as true money because it was “accepted” and understood to be money by “everyone” for millennia, that is from the ordinary peasant to a king. It therefore has the confidence and trust of the people as the primary store of value and that is why it has and IMO will continue to be primary money now and in the future. Bitcoin has yet to get anywhere near any sort of acceptance by the ordinary joe in the street / the true market. Can it get there, possibly, but it is going to need to get the man in the streets acceptance, otherwise it will remain a niche player in the Finance realm and widespread acceptance will continue to be an out of reach aspiration.
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AWBitcoin supply isn't fixed. There are hundreds of other cryptocurrencies with the exact same features, and better ones are created every day. Infinite supply.
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RSTerrific line of argumentation. Absolutely worth seeing. I love the concept behind bitcoin, but with seven transactions per second it will be hard to pay for your cappuccino. Unless of course you’re one of the few that is paying for a cappuccino right now. But things will improve with Hedera Hbar using the Hashgraph technology.
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JPWhile he is accurately describing BTC he did not describe Bitcoin. Bitcoin was defined in a white paper which described “Nodes” as mining nodes (Section 5) and not as Ammous described as passive observers of the network and BTC has so few true nodes that it is not decentralized at all. BTC could be taken out easily so it was amazing that Ammous claimed that “decentralization” is a key feature of Bitcoin and yet that word or concept is not to be found in the white paper. And Bitcoin IS electronic cash in every sense including paying for your coffee and this is done by scaling the blocks which is made possible with Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) also mentioned in the white paper; Ammous described this incorrectly when he claimed that Bitcoin could not be used for everyday transactions. Ammous also claimed that no one can change the protocol but the BTC developers have made all sorts of changes including adding Segwit, RBF, stripping out the op codes, adding layers etc. Fortunately the original protocol is being restored and all of the benefits that he described and many more are possible with Bitcoin (BSV), the original protocol.
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AWAbsolutely fascinating, thanks.
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RIEffectively! Lol
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JBLets see if BTC continues to be priced in US dollar and the sellers stores those dollar some where. Is that one big central vault that becomes a security risk. Or are the sellers also your buyers when you want to go back to dollars? Or will they not be convertible some day? Otherwise the US dollar still needs to be available so all the new BTC can be purchased, all the way to 2145?
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JSBut if our central banks used Bitcoin as a way to resolve payments and imbalances between countries.... how would we deleverage our economy in debt crises? I can’t imagine that Bitcoin, alone, would be the panacea for solving deficit spending, current account deficits, or wars. It seems like all debt crises may resolve in debasement/inflation vs Bitcoin.
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SBAs an ex utility (power grid) executive I would add one comment about Btc. Btc relies on the internet and the internet relies on the power grid. Over the last one hundred years we have been seduced into believing that the power will always be there (bar a few, short term emergencies). What is often not pointed out, however, is: (i) with the replacement of traditional, large, base load, coal and nuclear plants with (intermittent) renewables the grid is far less robust than it used to be; (ii) criticise old fashioned power utilities for inefficiency if you like but the one think they did well was to keep the lights on; (iii) the risk of a (natural) solar CME (as occurred in 1859) or (man made) EMP event has been consistently understated. Should such an event occur, the grid could be down for years, not days, as it would require the remanufacture (and transportation across the world) of large power grid transformers. Btc will surely find its natural long term role but there is nothing quite like gold for long term security.
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BBWith all the Bitcoin debates and limited supply - I have yet to hear the defence against quantum computing. I am not educated enough on quantum computing to argue one way or another. But that is the 1 noticable element lacking in these debates. Why supply of Bitcoin is limited forever. Is that premise irrefutable and super robust? Would like to know one way or the other. Because the stock flow ratio central argument is based on exactly that premise that there is negative dilution.
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TSNo matter what video you listen to about gold or bitcoin, the word 'dollar' will always be mentioned. This has an implication for those who understand who rules the world and has the final say on which currency/money should lead the world.
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RPThis was one of the interviews i really wanted to see and it didn't disappoint! If this didnt make you stop and think, you are impervious...
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HSCan we have a follow up of Saifedean (Austrian) with another economist Steve Keen (Complex Systems Theory). The reason is they both come from different economic perspectives and disagree with each others positions but do agree that MMT (modern monetary theory) is destroying the world
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TSThe 2nd half was much better than the 1st
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PNI enjoyed this a lot but I find I have several issues with the bitcoin as free money argument. The first is the relationship with government. If bitcoin is money you can be sure every government is going to regulate it and they are going to use tech companies to do so. There will be no freely moving a billion in bitcoin in or out of China. The next is that government will passively allow bitcoins to take over. Several governments shut down a child porn hub this week and one of the announcements was that bitcoin was used to fund it. If bitcoin becomes a threat to central banks you can be sure it and its owners will be smeared hard. I have other problems with bitcoin as money, I am under the impression that almost all bitcoins are owned by less than 100 people. That doesn't seem like the basis to start a currency, conversely everyone has at least a little gold. Even if it is only rings, chains or teeth. What happens if the really big bitcoin holders suddenly need money, how low does the price go if the Winklevoss brothers suddenly have to liquidate a significant part of their holdings? Bitcoin has never been through an economic downturn. It could weather it fine but until it does we don't know what it will do. Lastly is the argument the supply is fixed so it is hard money, I'm not sure that fixing the supply of Brazilian Pesos will make it the number one money in the world in a few decades. While the supply of bitcoin is fixed the number of new "coins" is infinite. All that said I enjoyed Mr. Ammous knowledgeable commentary. He makes a good case for bitcoin even if I disagree with him about it.
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GNAwesome interview, freaks!
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CBBitcoin as money has multiple issues and simply stating that it is "better" than gold or something else while having multiple inefficiencies is not a valid argument. 1) Environmental impact - Takes more energy than many countries to keep it going and to state that it takes less than the current banking system is not an excuse to facilitate it more so since there are MANY more efficient crypto platforms and systems available. 2) Political interference - To state that control/prevention of transaction and transmission of BTC within and between countries is not possible by Governments is laughable. The tech is there to monitor and stop this traffic should the need arise. 3) BTC is the betamax of crypto and very well may not stand up to future tech advances in computing. 4) Ability of very few individuals who hold large sums of BTC to wash trade the value up or crash the system 5) The irrefutable fact that the majority of mining/computing power for BTC is held within China. What western country would allow the Chinese to have that level of control over their finances? 6) My personal view is that BTC is bigger fool theory at it's best. buy it and hope the next fool pays you more for it. At the end of the day i am not arguing for gold either but the inherent issues of transport of gold/precious metals is not an argument for BTC.
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RRAgain, a great talk by an extremely knowledgeable guy. I am curious about the following though. My understanding of what currently EFFECTIVELY stops a 51% attack (the rewriting of the chain and who owns what) is that there is a constant stream of new transactions. That means the miners have transactions to mine and place in to Blocks. So a bad actor that starts recreating the chain from X number of blocks below the current one will never be able to ‘catch up’ to the ‘real blockchain’ height and force their chain to be the ‘new real chain’. As by the time they replace the X blocks there is already another 10X blocks on top of the original chain. (This assume they have about 10% of the hash power.) The miners do the mining, not because of their generous nature, but rather by and large because they will earn the “Block Reward”. The freshly minted blocks referred to as the ‘flow’ in the various RV talks. They also pick up any transaction fees that the buyers and sellers of BC add to the transaction. But these fees seem to be inconsequential currently. Taking the last block created when I wrote this (Block #599859) I can see that the Miner for their effort got a Block Reward of 12.5 freshly minted BCs and 0.05 BCs from transaction fees. So approximately USD$88,000 from the freshly minted and USD$400 from transaction fees. The above block contained 554 transactions. So that is a total cost per transaction of about USD$160. Let’s assume that the mining world is efficient (in an economic sense) and that USD$160 per transaction is fair. So what happens when the ‘flow’ of new blocks (Block Rewards) stops? Do the miners keep doing it for just the transaction fees or do they shut down? If they shutdown doesn’t that mean the bad guy’s 10% could potentially become 51%? Or do the Transaction Fees have to go up? And if they do go up does that stop the flow of transactions enough so that the honest miners either shut down or lay idle? So again the bad actor can pounce. (Sorry for the length, I am sure a smarter person could ask this in a lot less words)
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RWKudos. This is definitely one of the better videos in the series and a great talk about governments, banking and economics. RealVision is a fantastic source of views to think about on my favorite topics. I am curious if any viewers found themselves motivated to buy more bitcoin as a result of watching. Tonight, I added to my gold holdings as a result. Thank you! Please keep these coming!
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JSHow would have the Weimar Republic, the US in 1929? Or the globe in 2007 faired if they were on a bitcoin system (either directly or indirectly) How would this currency work if there was another large scale war? If we lost? And if we won? I don’t know the answer to these but just asking for a thought experiment.
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IKBeautiful episode. Unfortunately, they didn't touch on price stability when talking about BTC as payment. It currently would imply fiat on/off-ramps to transact in the real world. Until Bitcoin reaches price stability, around $10 trillion, stable coins would be a perfect addition to these series to draw a full picture of the digital monetary system as well as Internet 3.0, which is huge in terms of market size. a16z has good podcasts on it.
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SBQuite brilliant - one of RV's top ten of all time. I would disagree only on one point in that it should be self evident that Government's and CB's will not willingly give up the enormous power they gave accumulated during the 20th Century. A replacement for the US$ centric system will be needed, possibly quite soon, but I guarantee you they will promote a currency they can control. Carney's Jackson Hole speech (and Q&A) couldn't have been clearer. Not RMB. Not gold. Not Btc. But a new digital currency they issue and control.
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THHere's a thought experiment for anyone who believes, that there could be a Bitcoin standard for a legal tender. Assume, that the current fiat system collapses today, because the trust in central banks is completely gone, and the banking system will be closed for three weeks. (This is a completely plausible scenario.) What kind of monetary system will we have, when the banks open? My bet is on a gold-based system, because that's what central banks hold in their vaults today for exactly this scenario. Setting up a new system based on bitcoin would require, that the entity, that launches it, actually owns lots of bitcoin. No central bank owns any. They don't need to, because they own gold. It is also worth remembering, that the majority of bitcoin is in the hands of relatively few, mostly unknown individuals. It is somewhat impossible for such currency to become an officially approved legal tender at any significant scale. Money is power, and such power won't be allowed to be with someone, who was lucky/visionary enough to mine lots of bitcoin when mining was easy.
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DCOne of my favorite interviews this year!
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NF“Verse” != versus
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LGhttps://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/feds-bust-worlds-largest-dark-web-child-porn-marketplace-following-bitcoin-trail
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NII agree with 99.9% of what Saifedean said. He is clearly very knowledgable. Kudos to RV for having him on. I plan to read his book. He nailed it when he said that gold became money due to its unique properties (doesn't rust, doesn't corrode, scarce, etc.). I would also add that gold is inherently useful (dentistry, electronics, jewelry, etc) and we would all coat our bathroom fixtures with it if it wasn't so expensive. Perhaps debatable, but I believe that gold being useful also helped usher in its role as money. Now imagine that the periodic table had a hundred elements with the same properties as gold. Would it have become money? Doubtful I would say. That's the problem I see with bitcoin. While bitcoin itself has scarcity, crypto currencies do not. There are over 2000 of them today and new ones arriving frequently. Anyone can create a new crypto currency with many of the same, or perhaps even better, properties as bitcoin. That's the situation I would like someone to address. Why will other crypto currencies wither away and leave bitcoin as the last one standing and therefore make it a unique store of value?
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BVBrilliant guy, great interview. Indeed it is theoretically going to become the hardest money to ever exist and the first that was bred from free market interactions + fully digital. Therefore the divisibility problem is resolved and it is globally accessible in jurisdictions where it is impossible to safely store physical tangibles. It merits everybody to have exposure to Bitcoin, even just 1%. I think it is wrong to consider it a competitor to gold - it's a complement.
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MWDrink some whiskey guys....
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BBOr next best choice on Quantum computing issue: Is programs on quantum computing and perceptions on stock flow ratios and where quantum computing will disrupt in the future?
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RVIt’s a bit disingenuous to say bitcoin could be a standard for a few hundred dollars a month when it is powered into existence with monthly electricity costs of $444M. $5.336B annually with just electricity costs and that’s not factoring in equipment costs and labor. At today’s market cap it has a value decay of 3.6% annually when looking at only electricity costs. If the powering of the network stops, bitcoin stops existing.
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PGExcellent!
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WWPerhaps the most thought-provoking interview I have ever seen on RV. Loved the comment at the end about (paraphrasing) not caring whether it is Bitcoin or gold so long as we return to a hard money system.
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MJI've read the book, yet this interview was worth every minute. Indeed there is a case to be made that bitcoin is harder money than gold. Already in 200+ days bitcoin inflation will be on par with gold inflation, and will halve again in 2024. If the market were to shift from gold to bitcoin (in a similar way as silver was demonetized), we could see 100X returns. While that kind of shift is unlikely, the probability IMO is significantly higher than 1/100.
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JBCan someone provide a good reason to not put atleast 0.5% of your portfolio into Bitcoin? If anything, it would protect you from Bitcoin being a potential blind spot. You have to have some humility and accept the possibility that you're completely wrong about bitcoin, and bitcoiners do too.
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vmThank you for this conversation. It has been a lot time to hear someone with real logic in this world that we are living. The world we are leaving, has in Greek 10 year bond -0.02% interest rate. Great, i want it all, where can i buy more! These insane things bitcoin can at least fight.
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AKI would disagree with the marvelous Saifedean on a few points. First of all a Gold Standard would not solve 2 very important factors. Unconfiscability and uncensorability. Meaning that as long as you hold your own private key nobody can seize your Bitcoin, a digital certificate based on gold can easily be seized by the party controlling the ledger. Nobody can ban you from sending Bitcoin to an Iranian while once again the central controller of the ledger could ban your gold backed token transaction. Gold standard or non gold standard if you loose the decentralized proof of work you loose the aspect of free money and enter the realm of slave money. Gold as fantastic as it is, is not immune to this. So my point is that even if governments go back to a gold standard Bitcoin still has additional/different value propositions, that a lot of people will find beneficial.
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PTOne of the best bitcoin conversations I have come across ever!
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GEBest interview of series so far
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SDGreat interview and good to see Marty's face when used to his Pod @TFTC21 Only things that surprised me is the comment at the end between the superiority of public/private electric utility and the superiority of the later. The public utility EDF such but not as bad a most US private utilities.That last bt was a little libertarian cliché I guess. Anyway I'm going to listen ot it again :)
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AMExcellent content and terrific delivery. I'd guess that John "in the long run we are all dead" Maynard Keynes knew that his brand of economics was not genuine and came with a best before date. Because it seems the long run has arrived, and he IS dead. Mr. Ammous is arguing for the end of fractional reserve banking which is, by definition, a rather deflationary event. I cannot imagine this will be a smooth process.
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API'm not sure what all the argument is all about. If I told you about a 25 cent trade where you stood lose all 25 cents, but make $25...well...that is surely a nailed on no-brainer. All you have to decide is what your '25 cents'. Yes it very well could go to zero (and Ammous here makes one argument that I have never heard before - the possible emergence of sound central banking to compete with a bitcoin standard). But there are so many compelling reasons that it just might not. Buy the damn lottery ticket (or don't - fine by me).
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BPBitcoin, cryptos, blockchain whatever you want to call this scheme will end up being the most repressive monetary scheme ever!!!
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NBPrices when media declared bitcoin dead: Wired: $2 Forbes: $15 Bloomberg: $93 NY Mag: $105 Slate: $131 Biz Insider: $182 WaPo: $182 USA Today: $208 NY Times: $208 FT: $290 Guardian: $318 Reuters: $327 AOL: $332 CNN: $333 Yahoo: $479 The price when they criticized bitcoin: Peter Schiff - $17.50 Emin Gün Sirer - $214.13 Warren Buffett - $634.10 Nouriel Roubini - $637.38 Paul Krugman - $717.51 Jamie Dimon - $811.40 Ben Bernanke - $5,577
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TJSaifedean's views on money, economics and life make total sense and in a rational honest world we would still be on a gold standard. Sadly it is not a rational honest world, and the Keynesian banking elite have held sway ever since the introduction of the Federal Reserve by sleight of hand more than a hundred years ago. Will a bitcoin standard be permitted to succeed when millennia old sound money, namely gold, was ditched as it was a serious impediment to unlimited greed that only fiat currencies could facilitate? I doubt it, but I live in hope. Another exceptional interview. Thank you.
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SPThe Forex market and the existence of dozens upon dozens of national currencies is Barter. Brilliant.
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AWThis is epic!
SAIFEDEAN AMMOUS: We're going to get to a point where there's going to be 21 million bitcoins and that's it and there's nothing else that anybody can produce. This makes it more of a gold than gold.
Bitcoin improves on gold, Bitcoin's fixed supply means that it is the first liquid commodity or liquid asset ever invented that has a supply that is truly fixed. You can't make more of it. I think this is a point that is not emphasized enough about Bitcoin.
From an engineering perspective, it's decentralized and the fact that it exists as a neutral protocol that for all practical intents and purposes, nobody can really change.
MARTY BENT: I am Marty Bent, founder of tftc.io here for Real Vision today, sitting down with Saifedean Ammous, economist and author of "The Bitcoin Standard." Saife, how we're doing today.
SAIFEDEAN AMMOUS: Very good. Thank you so much for hosting me, Marty.
MARTY BENT: I'm very happy to be sitting down with you here today in a foreign land in Real Vision, but very excited about the conversation.
SAIFEDEAN AMMOUS: Likewise.
MARTY BENT: We're here to talk about the gold standard versus the Bitcoin standard. We've been having brief conversations about this leading up to this. I think the best way to start is to describe how the world came to a gold standard originally and how that got bastardized to an extent.
SAIFEDEAN AMMOUS: Yeah, I think the interesting thing I discussed in my book about the gold standard, my book is about the Bitcoin standard. However, about 70% of the book is dedicated toward discussing the monetary history and primarily, gold. I think learning about gold and the gold standard is extremely significant for Bitcoin for a couple of reasons we'll get into in a bit.
I think the interesting thing about gold is that it became a global monetary standard without anybody having to politically decide upon it. Governments recognized gold as money, but it was the market that chose it as money before governments recognize that and the choice of gold emerging as the global monetary standard was not a political decision. Political decisions recognize that the reality of the monetary choice.
The world previously had used copper, silver and gold but by the end of the 19th century, practically the entire planet was using gold as money and people who were still on silver had suffered enormously from the massive devaluation of silver. What we saw was the spontaneous market monetization of gold as a universal monetary medium used all over the world. That primarily in my mind goes back to the stock to flow ratio of gold, the fact that gold has the lowest percentage increase in its supply reliably year in year out.
This is how it has operated because of its chemical properties, which mean that its existing stockpiles don't rust, don't corrode. All of the gold that we've been piling up for thousands of years, all the gold that we've accumulated over thousands of years of gold production, all of that is sitting somewhere there. People hold it, and it's very valuable. They take care of it. Nothing can ruin it. It can't trust, it can't corrode, it can't evaporate. Therefore, the stockpiles of gold continue to increase every year.
Every year, we just add more gold to the stockpile that we have, and we don't consume any. The quantity of gold that exists is very larger. Every year as we're adding to it, the addition that we add every single year is small compared to the existing stockpile. That means that every year, the primary market for gold is made up of people who already own the existing supply, selling to people who want to buy some of that.
The market is made up of holders buying and selling, but there's very small section of the market that's made up of new supply of miners, providing new supply. This, I think is the key property that made gold a monetary standard and made the gold successful as money because it means that should its price rise, the only way for people to make more of it or is to bid up the price further and to buy more of it from people who hold it. Therefore, it's useful as a store of value because people