← The Peter McCormack Show
The Peter McCormack Show
Beginner’s Guide #2: What Is Money with Parker Lewis - WBD183
01:24:56
Location: Skype Date: Monday, 6th January Project: Unchained Capital Role: Head of Business Development Welcome to The Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin Bitcoin can be intimidating for beginners. The protocol is complicated, the community can be aggressive...
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- [00:01]
Peter McCormack
Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast. Hello there. How are you all? Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast, which is brought to you by the mighty Kraken. The best place to buy, sell and trade bitcoin. I'm your host, Peter McCormack, and today I have part two of my beginner's Guide to Bitcoin, where I'll be talking to Parker Lewis from Unchained Capital to answer the question, what is money? But before that, I have a message from my show sponsors. So, first up today is Dropbit, my absolute favorite bitcoin wallet. Hopefully I'm going to be meeting up with the guys Q1 this year. We're going to be talking about all the cool things that they're going to be doing in 2020. I sent them some suggestions and I know they've got some ideas of their own. But why do I love the Drop Bit Wallet? Have you downloaded it yet? Well, listen, you should. And I'll tell you exactly why. Firstly, they delivered on their promise. When I first started working with them, they said they are the Venmo of bitcoin. They're going to make it easy to send and receive bitcoin. And first up, when I first started using the app, they had the ability to do the standard things like addresses and QR codes, but they also had this neat way that you could text bitcoin to people. But they've expanded it. You can now tweet bitcoin to your friends. You can now send and receive over the Lightning network. They added support for batch 32 addresses and you can now buy bitcoin directly in the app. 2020 is going to be a massive year for Drop it and I can't wait to see what they release next. Seriously, if you haven't tried the Drop Bit Wallet yet, wait, what are you doing with your life? It's available for the iPhone and Android. Just head over to Drop Bit app, which is D R O P B I T app. And next up we have my brand new sponsor, Kelman Law, or Kelman Law. One of the oldest names in Bitcoin and Fintech and one of the premier law firms in the space. Kelman Law is run by Bitcoin OGs based out of New York. And unlike a lot of those crypto lawyers you find online, these guys understand bitcoin and fintech. They were already operating in the space back in 2013 because they committed to the cause of bitcoin and what it means for the world. And of course, most importantly, they accept Bitcoin as payment. One of their partners, Zachary Kelman, is known for drafting a bill submitted to the US Congress in 2014 aimed at exempting on chain Bitcoin transactions from US regulations. The other founding partner, his brother Daniel Kalman, you might know that name. He was on the show as part of my Mt. Gox series, helping me understand some of the complexity around civil rehabilitation. The Kalman law team is staffed with lawyers with expertise in litigation, dispute resolution, anti money laundering, and US and international corporate structuring for fintech businesses or companies and individuals operating in the bitcoin space. So listen, if you have a fintech business or you've got a dispute with someone involved in bitcoin, maybe someone owes you some bitcoin or you need some legal advice related to bitcoin or fintech, open up your email and send a message to Infoelman Law. That's Kelman Law, which is K E L M A N Law, right onto the show. And today we have part two of my beginners a Guide to Bitcoin. Last week we kicked off with Andreas who explained the fundamentals of why we need bitcoin. And today I'm joined by Parker Lewis from Unchained Capital to answer the question what is money? So this is a really important subject to get in early on, I personally had never really thought too much about money. It was just this thing. I got paid at the end of each month and I spent during the month. I never really understood what hard money is, what sound money is, what are the characteristics of money. It's just something that never crossed my mind. You know, I had it, I saved it and I spent it. I'd never really thought about inflation was because you're always told inflation represents a thriving economy. But I'd never considered what inflation meant to what I held in my bank. It was only when I started looking into bitcoin and spoke to bitcoiners and read the bitcoin standard by Safety and Moose that it became a lot more important to me. So this is a really important episode for the Beginner's Guide. And while some of the points can get a little high level, understanding what money is is crucial for understanding why bitcoin is so important. So with Parker, we discuss the history and characteristics of money and how they are integral part of bitcoin. And it does get tricky a few moments. I did want to try and keep this as simple as possible, but Parker is a pretty smart dude. He gets pretty high level at some points. So there is a glossary for any newcomers who want to reference it. It's in the show notes. Go and check that out. But I hope you enjoyed the show. If you do have any questions you do want to reach out to email address is hello or what bitcoin did Calm. Parker, how are you doing?
- [04:30]
Parker Lewis
Well, thanks for having me on.
- [04:32]
Peter McCormack
Hey, thanks for coming on. So, as I mentioned to you, I'm building up this series, this beginner's guide to bitcoin. I want it to be a set of interviews and shows that I can send to somebody or you can send to somebody that says to them, look, if you want to learn about Bitcoin, give me 10 hours of your time, go through all these shows and that will be a good start. So I've done episode one. I did one with Andreas about why we need bitcoin. You know, we're going to overlap with some of this, but today I want to go in a bit more detail about the nature of money, what it is. Cool with that.
- [05:02]
Parker Lewis
Sounds good. Let's. Let's dive into it.
- [05:05]
Peter McCormack
Okay. So one of the reasons I want to do this is that I would say myself even, even two and a half, three years ago, I never really thought about what money is, so. And it might be similar for you, Parker, but for me, money was like this thing I used, right? I went to work, I got paid, I saved a little bit, I spent most of it, and that was it. And there's all these other things going on, like inflation, and I'm not really thinking about it. I've never really thought about it. And then I've gone into this world of bitcoin and I'm being forced to really think about money, think about its properties, think about how the government manages it. And so I think this is going to be a really useful lesson for people who want to get into bitcoin. I'm guessing you had a similar experience.
- [05:51]
Parker Lewis
Yeah, and I. I do think that that may be the singular most important thing about bitcoin, is that it. It forces people to ask that question. And it's a very difficult question both to ask and to answer that, that question of what is money? And really before the rabbit hole that is bitcoin, that's a whole separate rabbit hole that people generally have to go down before they can come to any understanding of bitcoin, whether it be economically or technically, just that very base and root problem of what money is. Because similar to you, before I came to bitcoin, and it was actually one step short of coming to bitcoin, there was an interim step. But. But five years ago, I had never asked that question myself, just as many people haven't. And then I actually had the fortune of meeting, say, Fideen Amus when I was going to due diligence on a gold company based up in Canada. And it was really through those conversations where I first stopped and asked the question. And I think that's the first step of getting into Bitcoin, because it is a separate question. The question of why. Why is the dollar in my pocket money? And why, when I walk around the streets, does everybody accept this piece of paper, the digital representation, as money in exchange for goods and services? So I do think it is a very important question. I'm happy to explain some of my early processes to coming to those answers. And then we can dig into what makes something a better form of money or worse, if that makes sense.
- [07:32]
Peter McCormack
No, it does. And also one of the interesting things is traveling around the world meeting different people. I'm starting to realize this question of what is money? And the understanding of money. It differs where you go. So you and I have the luxury of living in a country with a fairly stable currency. You know, in the uk, the only real red flag I've ever remembered with regards to money was during the financial crisis where there was a time where you couldn't access money in certain bank accounts. And I was like, okay, that's a bit weird, but. But I didn't really think about it too much. I've just been out to Argentina and Uruguay, and I've spent time with people from Argentina who talk about the correlator, about the government seizure, about inflation. And for them, they think about this a lot more. And Bitcoin for them is a lot easier concept to understand because they're from places with a less stable currency. So I think. I think that's one of the things to recognize up front is that depending on where you are in the world, depending on what kind of governments of regimes you've lived under, you might not have much as much of a awareness of how unstable currencies can be.
- [08:36]
Parker Lewis
I think that's exactly right, because it is something that for most of us, whether it's in the United States or Europe, it's something that we've always taken as a given. And it's a problem that we've never been forced to ask because it has never risen to be such an acute problem as it may be during capital controls in Argentina or. Or during a hyperinflationary event in Venezuela. And so because the problem isn't acute in the time and place and where we are, then the need to come to ask the question and then come up with a solution or an answer to the question just becomes less of a pressing matter. And so when you ask somebody in the United States, well, what is money? They don't seem to be motivated to ask that question because the dollar's always been money and they go to Whole Foods and there are a million things on the shelves. So why do I need to ask what do I need a better form of money for? I have a perfectly good form of money. And at the end of the day, even though the issues in Argentina or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or Turkey may be more acute and maybe more of a necessity to be asking those questions now, the reality is, and I think what has drawn so many of us to Bitco, is that once you start to understand money at a first principle level, and then you start to understand what is happening both in the United States with the Fed, the Eurozone with the ecb, the bank of Japan, and then you start to look at it on a first principles basis, you begin to realize that the things that have happened in Argentina or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or Turkey have the exact same underpinning of the developed world that have more stable currencies, and that it's not just that one's been managed better than the other. They have, but that the underlying principle of all fiat currencies is the same and the root of all money is the same. And so you do need those baselines to then be able to think about how do I evaluate money in the first place.
- [10:46]
Peter McCormack
I think Venezuela is a great example as well. As you said, you always had the dollar, I've always had the pound. I've never had to consider any other form of money. I can pretty much buy tomorrow what I could buy yesterday with the same amount of money. Inflation and the debasements a lot slower. But when you talk to people in Venezuela, I had Jill Carlson on the show, and she was actually on the ground. They actually have currency competition there because the Bolivar is so unstable because of the rate of hyperinflation, as most people know, it's losing the majority of its value, you know, from month to month. Therefore, they have a necessity to find better forms of money. That's why, you know, they need that. They have to use the Bolivar, but they also want to access the dollar. They also want to access Bitcoin, So they have a need to actually find a better form of currency. We've never had that need.
- [11:33]
Parker Lewis
Yes, it becomes a Survival instinct, right? And I like to say it becomes an AB test where we can sit. And for people that have the luxury of being able to, you know, in a comfortable setting, to be able to think critically about it, we can, we can. Which we will talk about here, kind of what are the characteristics that make something a better form of money. But in a real world application, it becomes a survival instinct. What does money look like? Well, you know it when you see it. And when you, when you think about it as an ab test, you can look at the Bolivar and say, okay, this is losing its value every single day. And this other thing, you know, whether it's the dollar relative to the bolivar or Bitcoin relative to the dollar, or Bitcoin relative to, to the Bolivar, that they don't need to understand how Bitcoin works. They see that it's holding value relative to their other options and they will, as that survival instinct gravitate or converge on the thing that they know just on an eye test, looks the most like money and rely upon that to facilitate exchange. And one of the things that in my own experience, which I think is helpful to bring up, is that, say, five years ago I was one of those people who looked at gold and said, gold is just a barbaric relic. If I ever need gold, I would rather have owning physical cows or owning guns, because what do I need gold for? If we go back to a world where gold is money, What I came to realize is that money exists as a tool that man created or humans created to essentially advance civilization, to advance the ability to facilitate trade and to benefit from the gains of specialization and trade and such, that it's actually money that prevents things like in situations like Venezuela from breaking down, where the social fabric starts to break down once today I walk to Whole Foods and everything's on the shelf. I go to the gas station and there's gas at the gas station. I don't need to cause violence to get my very basic necessities fulfilled on a daily basis throughout the day. And money is really the good that allows for the social coordination for everybody to focus on where it is in the value chain and where within the economic system that they want to contribute and that the aggregate, some of that is we can all go about our lives more peacefully. And that if you don't have a reliable form of money, then those very basic necessities can't be met on a day to day basis. And the result of that is not only social fabric breaking down, but then actual violence. Because you Know if you don't know where your, where your next meal is coming from, or you don't have a roof over your head or clean water, then your ability to cooperate with people around you deteriorates significantly.
- [14:34]
Peter McCormack
So there are people who listen to this podcast all over the world and there'll be people in a number of countries where ones we've already listed and it could be Argentina, it could be Turkey, but a number of countries where this will make more sense than straight away and media. But also the majority of my lessons are in the US like 50%, like 10% UK, 5% Canada. So a number of listeners in countries with a stable currency, but I still want them to understand why it's important. So before we get into the details, and I'll probably explain why I'm in Bitcoin because I don't need it because it's a better day to day currency. I don't need it as a hedge against hyperinflation. But my view on it is, what I have is I have something that can't be seized in the event of some catastrophic breakdown in the financial markets and a run on the banks. I also have something that can't be essentially debased by the government. But most of all, if this is a better form of money, over a long enough time frame, it should prove to be a worthy investment, something that's worth investing in, especially if there is an uptake across the world. So the reasons I have it is a small amount of it is a hedge against some kind of catastrophic event. But mainly it's a bet that this will be a better form of money for enough people around the world that it will increase in value.
- [15:52]
Parker Lewis
Yeah. So I think that's right. I think I would caveat one thing that is we sit in, whether it's the United States or the UK and we know that the forms of money that the Fed runs or the ECB runs or the bank of England or the bank of Japan run are designed to target 1 to 2% inflation. And that I think one of the problems there and I think one of the, you know, whether it's the, you know, a situation like Venezuela or a developed world where instability has not yet come, it is that we have all been lulled to sleep by this idea that 2% inflation is normal and that we, as a result of that, kind of explain away, oh, 2% this year, no big deal. But when you add that up, like multiply that by a decade and multiply that by two decades, if you have 2% inflation, then your money is losing its purchasing power by 20% over a decade and 40% over two decades. And the analogy that I like to think about, that is 2%. And that slow degradation seems fine, but when you multiply it over a decade or decades, what it essentially equates to having to recreate your monetary savings, 20 to 40% of it, and what you end up doing as a result of that is saving less and going and trying to run faster on a treadmill. You're basically on a hamster wheel. You're recreating 20% and 40% of your monetary savings just to stay in place. And what happens when you do that is there's a lot of mal investment that occurs. People, rather than having a stable form of money that shouldn't be losing its value, they're making investments to try to grow their money, rather than just finding a stable form of money that holds its value. Second piece that I would touch on is that once you understand that fiat currencies are all the same and that the dollar and the euro and the pound and the yen are just at a different point of the curve that the bolivar and the peso are on, then you realize that just because the central banks have been able to create general stability in the sense that they've been able to manage the devaluation over a long period of time, it would be flawed to assume that at some point there's not a hyperinflationary event as it relates to those currencies. And I really view that the end game of all fiat currencies is hyperinflation rather than simply monetary mismanagement. So even though we've been lulled to sleep to the idea of 2% inflation and accept it as a social norm, I don't think that that is a norm that even a person in the United States or the UK or Western Europe would accept if they knew that there was a better form of money that they could opt into. And so when I think about Bitcoin relative to the dollar, the euro, the yen, it is my form of money will not lose value. It will likely appreciate in value. I know why it will do that, because it people will gravitate to, in an AB test, a form of money that performs its function better than its lesser competitor. And so while bitcoin can be considered an investment, I think at the end of the day, I think it would be wrong to say it's an inflation hedge. It's just a better form of money that has more stronger foundational principles that will allow it to fulfill the role of money better than the dollar, the euro, the yen. And so I think people often have this mistaken idea that, oh, well, it's needed in Venezuela more today, so people in Venezuela will logically adopt it faster than people in the United States. I think from a more practical perspective, if you look at the economies that are the largest in the world, they have the most to lose from economic instability. And economic instability is driven by the deterioration money. And so when you combine those two ideas, that all fiat currencies are at different points on the same curve, and then realize that the role that money's supposed to fulfill, that if you have a good form of money and if you've identified a sound form of money that it won't lose value, you will increasingly opt into that better form of money. And at the end of the day, the dollar, I believe, and I'm not somebody who thinks very negatively around it, and I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it, that at some point time the dollar becomes unstable, as does the euro, as does the yen. And people will all, at some point in time be forced on the bitcoin.
- [20:40]
Peter McCormack
Okay? So I think we need to, therefore we need to go through a logical path for this. And we've jumped in with quite a bit intro, But I think let's take a step back. You've gone down more of a rabbit hole than on this subject than me. I think you've covered both the history and the economic side. Let's start with the history and start with, you know, we don't need to go into too much detail, but let's just ask a question, Parker, like, what is money?
- [21:04]
Parker Lewis
So I would start answering that question by answering what it is not, or at least touching on the ideas that some people espouse as to explanations for what money is and why it has value. And I think a few of those. If you just asked somebody and gave them 30 seconds to respond or five minutes to respond, the general answers are either that money is a collective hallucination, which it is not, money is a belief system, which it is not, or that there's a state theory of money, that governments are essentially how money derives its value, or that there's a credit theory of money, that money emerged always as a form of debt. And I think that all of those are wrong, but that what money is, is a tool that man created to facilitate a very specific task, and that was trade. And that kind of, if you just think logically back to the point in time where Modern monies didn't exist. There were barter systems and, and there's the idea of the double coincidence of wants, that if I produce chickens and I want your pig, how many chickens represent one pig? Well, in a barter system and in a very small economy, people would figure that out, but that over time, as economies began to scale from a barter system, that people identified what was a better way to trade. Because what you have and what I have aren't necessarily what you want and what I want. And that certain economic goods, it didn't just go from zero to gold to the dollar to Bitcoin, that certain goods started to emerge that specifically fulfilled the function of trade better than merely me taking whatever goods that you had on you and you taking mine, and then you going and finding the person that actually wanted the goods that I had and in exchange for future goods. And so ultimately, the way that money emerged was that people recognized that they had needs and that there were benefits to gain from trade. And then over time, very organically started out in smaller communities. And then as people looked and started to identify the properties of certain early form of monies to figure out what may serve that function better, then generally over time, as civilization advanced, certain goods would emerge and demonetize previous monies that were used ultimately to come to the present, where I guess most recently the most recent form of money that emerged on the free market were base metals, silver, and then gold, which ultimately demonetized silver. And so when you think about first the role, what is money? Money is a tool that humans created very organically to facilitate one purpose. It was trade. Why and how did they come to converge on specific goods? It was because in facilitating the activity of trade, there were natural properties that would make something better or worse than another good to facilitate as an intermediary. And so one example that, and this is one of the things that I had the benefit of experiencing when I was going through this process myself. I think of it as I went from zero, thinking gold was a bar break relic, to gold to Bitcoin very quickly. But it took me a while to get to both gold and bitcoin. And just to use an example, because it was something that I experienced in real time. I had the benefit of when I was working for a hedge fund in Dallas, the guy who I worked for had a 10 kilogram gold coin. And that 10 kilogram gold coin was worth about $500,000. And you could hold the value of a nice home in the United States in your palm. It was heavy and it had real weight. But then what he then showed me was he had a million dollars worth of nickels, and a million dollars worth of nickels are 20 million nickels. And as a thought exercise, when you see that you can hold a million dollars in your hand or that there must have been 500 pallets of nickels, that what would facilitate trade better, the thing that was smaller and denser, that had value, or the thing that took up, I don't know if it was 500 pallets, but maybe it was at minimum 200 pallets. That if I wanted to, to move the gold and transfer it to somebody would be a lot easier to do. And so when you start to, and this isn't how money didn't necessarily have all of these properties at once, but when we think about beyond the question of what is money, it's a tool to facilitate trade. Well, when humans start looking around for, well, what are the tools that will help me do this and ultimately help me measure value over time, there were certain properties that needed to exist in a form of money that would be better than others. And those are scarcity, durability, fungibility, or uniformness, which then allowed things to be subdivided and aggregated such that if you needed more of it or less of it to trade for something that had lesser perceived value, you could. And then also the ability to transport. So in the example of my gold versus nickels, the ability to be able to walk over with a million dollars worth of gold in my hand versus if I wanted to move a million dollars worth of nickels, I would have needed some heavy machinery that those were just all of the. Gradually over time, people would converge on better and better medium that would facilitate the exact same purpose, which was trade. So I know that was a little long winded, but.
- [27:15]
Peter McCormack
No, but you're right because. And then you can lead on to the next stage with bitcoin. And you know, a lot of people question, well, why is bitcoin a better form of money? When you talk about the million dollars worth of gold or the million dollars worth of nickels, if you advance to say bitcoin, if we've seen it this year, we've seen two or three examples where a significant amount of gold has been moved from, from one country to another. And we had the, we had the example of the plane where the gold was falling out the back of it. But with bitcoin, the property has, it's better, is that you can transfer it easier. So what I think might be useful now is, is if we go through these various properties, we explain what they are, because there's a lot of people who've never thought about money in this level of detail, why it's important. And then I think we can probably talk about it in terms of kind of gold, fiat and bitcoin so people can understand the differences and why there is a preference. So I think a really important part is scarcity. We'll start with scarcity because again, this was something I'd never considered before Bitcoin, I had never even thought about it in terms of gold, I'd never considered. That's why gold had value in my mind. Gold had value because it was jewelry. That's why it was jewelry. I got my chicken and egg the wrong way around. But actually it came down to scarcity. And I guess that relays your point with regards to the nickels, right? But talk about scarcity and why scarcity is important.
- [28:32]
Parker Lewis
So one thing I would note about scarcity is that scarcity alone is not sufficient to make something money, right? So I'm trying to think of a really bad example of something that's scarce and not highly valuable as money. But I think the single thing that I come up with is say, like Mount Rushmore, there's one Mount Rushmore, there's not two Mount Rushmores in the world. Very scarce, terrible form of money. When we think about scarcity in the concept or relative to why something scarce may make a better form of money, it is that when combined with other properties and when we think about the specific property purpose that in the, in the specific reason why we need the tool that is money and it's to facilitate trade, that a key, a key aspect of that is the ability to transfer. And so, you know, starting, you know, we'll get into scarcity specifically. But I do want to bring that up because when you, when you start to think about the goods that have this unique set of properties, and I will apply it to gold because, and I did write about this in one of my articles, it was. Did gold emerge as money because it was physical or because it had all these other transcendent properties that when combined together, it made it a really good form of money and made it something that was very effective at measuring other things because not only was it scarce, it was difficult to produce? And so when we think about the, the single property of scarcity, it's not just that it's scarce, right? If I said there's 21 million Bitcoin or there's 84 million Bitcoin, 21 million is a small number, 84 million is four times as large. But it's ultimately the rate of change. How expensive is it and how possible or how difficult is it to create more of this? So scarcity is both an absolute idea and then it's also a relative idea. And just as the absolute is important, the rate of changes. And so when, when we're thinking about, you know, what makes something effective in, in facilitating trade, it is ultimately I'm measuring something against the medium that I'm using as this tool to be an intermediary in trade. And if the thing that is both scarce, transferable, which is a very unique combination of properties, generally scarce things aren't easily transferable, that the tool becomes a better source of measurement if the rate of change is lowest. And that's one of the reasons that gold emerges money is because not only is it scarce as a matter of, you know, the actual element in the earth, but that the ability to go get more of it is very difficult. Such that the rate of change of gold, and this is a concept that safe talks quite a bit about, which is stock to flow. And thinking about all the above ground gold or gold that's involved relative to gold production on annual basis and the amount of gold that is created on an annual basis relative to the gold that's already been mined and not consumed. And industrial production is somewhere between one and a half percent. And if the price rises, that the supply can't keep up with the price because not only is it inherently scarce, it's difficult to go get more out of the ground. And then what does that mean? It means that if I have oil in terms of things that are less scarce or that are produced at a more variable rate, then I'm measuring all of those other goods that are more abundant and that have greater rates of change against the good that has the lowest rate of change and the greatest absolute scarcity. So there are a couple different functions to think about scarcity. It's not just an absolute number, but it's also the rate of change. Because you're essentially, and this is when we think about changes in price, it is, we're measuring things that are more variable against something that is less variable. And that the role of money or the role of gold or the role of Bitcoin is not just to stare at a shiny object or to store something digitally. It is to communicate the relative value between two other goods that are ultimately more valuable than the underlying unit of measure, which is money.
- [33:15]
Peter McCormack
And somebody compared it to, for me, very early on, they said with copper, they said, look, if the price of copper was to double, the copper is quite easy to produce, so the rate of production would increase very rapidly and, and very quickly the price would come down. They said, this can't happen with gold. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at gold, it's very, very difficult to increase the rate of production. And they said this is why bitcoin is so important, is that you cannot increase the rate of production. So gold, you can do it slightly, but you can't even increase the rate of production with bitcoin at all.
- [33:46]
Parker Lewis
Correct. And that is something that, when I think about Bitcoin relative to gold or relative to any money, it is why I believe that, that bitcoin is the end game. And if we think about the evolution of history and we think about, we can go through and talk about other individual properties in terms of scarcity, durability, fungibility, the ability to transfer, the ability to divide, that those are things that now, looking back on history, we have identified in a descriptive way and they make logical sense as to what are the things that would best facilitate trade, but that over time, the earliest form of money wasn't all of those things. The form of money that ultimately demonetized the earlier form of money did not have all of those things, but that over time, as individuals recognize that there is a benefit to having money and that the function is to specifically facilitate trade and to evaluate relative value of two other goods, that we've essentially been perfecting money over time. And then there was this short period where money had been being perfected from salt and yap stones, or sorry, yap stones, to salts, to glass beads, to base metals. Each one of those times somebody figured out a property that would make trade more reliable and be more effective. And ultimately, up to the 20th century, people had converged on gold. And then we have the small blip in history where, and this is something that I think is a less common view, but I literally believe that gold failed as money and that the personification of that is the dollar system. So we went from this period of overtime all converging on a better, better, better form of money, until we ultimately got to maybe the worst money of all time, which is essentially paper or a digital representation that's inherently infinite. But if we ignore that small blip in history, that is fiat, that's not actually reserve backed, and we just look at gold relative to Bitcoin, it is that in gold we found the good that had all of those characteristics that would facilitate trade. And it had the lowest rate of new production or lowest rate of supply. And as a result, because of that low rate of inflation, it more effectively measured the exchange ratio between other goods. Well, what do we have in Bitcoin? We have the good that has the optimal money, money supply and monetary policy. Not because it's, you know, if gold's growing by 1% at the end of the day, where it's, where we're at Today, it's approximately 3 to 3.5%. When the halvening occurs in May, it will drop to around the inflation rate of gold. But at the end state, the rate of inflation is zero. And one of the things that we should talk about, because we've talked about it in terms of the function of money is to facilitate trade. But ultimately, what money allows to emerge as a function of that trade is a pricing system. And in Bitcoin, because it has a fixed supply, you can't have a more optimal money supply. Some people who are crazy in the cryptocurrency world will say, oh well, I'll do you one better. I'll get a form of money that actually declines in supply and that is worse than a neutral rate. So the ideal form of money, because it fulfills the function of determining relative value between other consumption and production goods, is you just want the thing not to change. And so a zero rate of inflation is actually the optimal form of, or the optimal monetary policy and the ultimate optimal money supply. And so we've gone from this progression of, through the ages of constantly perfected it, and now we've arrived at money that in Bitcoin can't have actually better supply. So could something ultimately replace it? I, you know, I can't imagine it, but that is, I think, the right way to think about it. And then the next extension of there, which we can, we can dive into where you, where you want to is this whole idea of price, the pricing system is because money exists. There wouldn't be a pricing system if money didn't exist. And the idea that a money could have a fixed supply and not change at all will be a more perfect pricing mechanism than if the thing that everything was priced in was changing even 1% or 11 1/2 percent, such that you're eliminating all of the impact of the change in the money supply when all you're really trying to get to in the tool that is money is what is the value of the apple relative to the grapefruit? Or what is the value of the TV relative to the refrigerator or the iPhone? How many iPhones do you know I have to give up in order to get the car? That is the source of information that we are all looking for through the form of money. And it wouldn't be possible if the pricing system didn't exist. And the pricing system wouldn't exist if people didn't converge on a single money. And zero money supply equals the form of money that has the least amount of noise in it.
- [39:21]
Peter McCormack
Next up I talked to Parker more about what money is. But before that I have a message from my amazing sponsors. So first up we have the mighty Kraken. The best place to buy, sell and trade bitcoin. But why? I say this every week, but why is Kraken the best? Well firstly they are the most secure exchange out there where safeguarding your funds and your privacy is their number one objective. They also offer an additional layer of near real time hyper personalized support through their Kraken account management program. And they also have an unrivaled suite of products for you traders out there. So let's go through it. They got kraken.com, the best place to buy, sell and trade Bitcoin. You can supercharge your trades with up to 5x leverage. You can access up to the second pricing data with cryptocurrency indices powered by CF benchmarks. They have next level trading with Bitcoin futures. Their OTC desk offers deep liquidity and private more personalized services. With cryptowatch you can access multiple markets across multiple exchanges at a glance. And with Kraken Pro, their beautiful mobile first app, you can trade Kraken wherever you are. There is no better place to trade Bitcoin. Find out more by heading over to kraken.com or download the app which is available for the iPhone and Android. Just search for Kraken Pro which is K R A K E N P R O And next up we have the amazing Blockfi. Yes, the future of bitcoin and financial services. And there is no better place to cook off than their announced plans for 2020. BlockFi is going to be launching a BTC rewards credit card where you can earn Bitcoin cash back. I cannot wait to get this. I literally cannot wait to get this. There is no product I'm more excited about coming up this year. They also have got a mobile app coming. They're also going to be adding support for USDC and Litecoin and this is on top of all their market leading products, their crypto backed loans, their interest accounts for your Bitcoin, ether or GUSD 2020 is going to be massive for BlockFi. They're gonna smash it and I cannot wait to work with them throughout the whole year. If you are interested in checking out Blockfi, do your own research and then head over to blockfi.com which is B L O C K F I dot com. So an area I think important for us to focus on here is you've talked about gold being a very good form of money and then we move to fiat, which is cash. People might not even heard the term fiat, but to cash. And that is probably one of the worst forms of money. But that's what people, most people are going to know. That's what most people will understand. And now we're trying to say to them to get away to that, to get into bitcoin. So I think one of the things to talk about is that why did we go from gold to cash and what were the temporary benefits that were there? For me it's, you know, you talk about money to facilitate trade. The digitization of the fiat money enable probably made life a lot easier, made it a lot easier to facilitate trade, certainly globally, certainly with our cash cards. So that was probably one of the initial factors that made fiat money better. But ultimately it became the worst kind of money because it became, it didn't have any scarcity. Governments can print as much as they wanted, which, which inflated it. So can you talk to me, just explain where you see why fiat money took off as a better form of money than gold temporarily, but now is ultimately the worst.
- [42:50]
Parker Lewis
So gold, I would say, or when we think about the origination of fiat money, it would be that fiat money arose to solve a problem that was inherent. So gold had been the best money up until the time, but there were certain limitations of gold, a few of those being that in order to secure gold, it was susceptible to centralization. And then while it is transportable, it is more difficult to transport large amounts of gold versus now. The digital representation of dollar is obviously much easier. But even back then, if you had what was a fractional representation of gold in terms of transferring pieces of paper rather than gold from vault to vault, I think a lot of people, not presuming that people who are listening to podcasts have heard the stories, but the process of, I think Germany getting its gold back was something, it was a several year, if not a decade affair and it cost millions of dollars. And so really the short answer is fiat currency emerged because of the limitations that existed in gold. It was the most effective form of money that man had converged on until that point in time. But the limitations were it was susceptible, it was difficult to transport. Even though it was transportable and more transportable than other forms of money, it was still difficult to transport, it was susceptible to centralization from a security perspective. And that ultimately, while gold is divisible, you can melt down gold and come up with smaller units of gold and mint smaller units of coins that in order to get precise change or to get smaller amounts of gold, from a practical perspective, while it was divisible, it wasn't as divisible as potentially the economy that it was trying to serve, needed. And so the dollar or banknotes, initially, and in part a combination of both, emerged as that fractional representation to really be a technological solution to the limitations of gold. And then over time, so the dollar, or any fiat currency, essentially emerged and leveraged the monetary properties of gold. It was a fractional representation to fulfill a function that it could do better than gold. And then over time, that system, which was a reserve backed system and a system that was based on trust, that said, hey, like I think in 1900, the, the gold convertibility to dollars was, was 20.67 to 1. And so when you recognize that it was always a system that was built on trust. I brought my gold to the bank vault, they gave me $20.67 and that in the future I could bring $20.67 and they would give me gold. Over time, as more and more people began to just trust that the gold was there, then dollar denominated debt started to emerge. Ultimately what happened was we went from a reserve backed currency, there was gold backing all the dollars, and dollars were a fractional representation of gold, to a slow evolution where that transferred and transitioned into a debt system that was actually denominated in dollars. And then eventually in the 1970s, once there was sufficient number of debt and dollars had become almost the singular form of currency, or the fiat counterparts in whatever country you may be, then the whole dollar convertibility to gold was eliminated by Nixon in 1971, at least in terms of central bank to central bank. And really at that end of the day, and the only reason that the dollar, or any fiat currency continues to hold value is because of that emergence of the debt backed system. And so the dollar has value today because there are far fewer dollars that exist in the world, that there is debt. And that the consequence of that, without going into too much detail, is why? Because the disproportional amount of debt relative to Dollars is both why the dollar has value or why any fiat currency has value. Because what that debt represents is actual claims on real assets. So it's dollar dollar debt convertibility into a house, a car, whatever it may be. And so there's a very high present demand for dollars. But that at the end of the day what happens is because there's too much debt, the Fed or the ECB or the BOJ has to constantly create more dollars. And so that when we then bring that back to think about, there are no inherent monetary properties of the dollar. That's how it transitioned. But that then when we take a step back and look at it relative to Bitcoin gold dollar, the dollar always leveraged the monetary properties of base metals and then it divorced entirely from those base metals as a function of the debt backed system that transitioned over a period of 100, 200 years. And that when we can take a very simple, forget all of that and then just look at the inherent properties it is, there is no potential cap on the supply of dollars. When the Fed creates dollars, it literally clicks a button on a computer screen and can generate $400 billion in a quarter. You can't do that with gold and you can't do that with Bitcoin. And the highest level statement about that is gold and Bitcoin had inherent properties or have inherent properties that make them a better form of money. The dollar does not. And that's why people will shift over time. You know, went from gold to dollars and now it will shift back and not go back to gold, but to Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin specifically improves on both. The, if we, if we think about the reason why the dollar emerged, it was because gold had certain limitations as money which the dollar attempted to solve. It did that for a period of time, but then when it divorced from gold, it, it lost all of the monetary properties that gold had. People often say that Bitcoin is digital gold. And what it really is is it's physical gold combined with the benefits of the digital dollar. In one, it's those two added together and that the dollar is the personification of gold's failure as money. And Bitcoin solves the limitation of both.
- [49:14]
Peter McCormack
Perfect. Okay, so add to that though, let's talk a little bit about examples of mismanagement of money. You know I'm actually going to, I'm going to quote you here, but you in your article and I'll share that out in the show notes because people might want to read this but Venezuela, Argentina and Turkey all have governments, militaries and authority to tax. Yet the currencies of each has deteriorated significantly over the last five years. What's the common pattern here? What can go wrong with fiat currency for this to happen in these countries? And what has been the impact?
- [49:47]
Parker Lewis
So the source of all fiat hyperinflationary events is the fact that the cost to create money in a fiat system is marginally zero. And that if you have a system in which the money supply can be created by the Fed or printed by the treasury, in either one of those cases, there's no marginal cost to create money. And there's a. I wish I had it handy, but there's a great Alexander, I think it's Alexander Hamilton quote that basically identified when they were starting the first bank of the United States. He basically said, we can never go to a form of money that isn't backed by physical metal, because in a time of crisis, the incentive of whoever's in power to create more money will be too great than just taxing people for that money. And so it's this idea that if you have a form of money that has no marginal cost to produce, you will use that tool that is your printing press. Because in a. And this doesn't just apply to the United States, but if we take the concept of Venezuela, it is if you are Chavez or Maduro and you're promising, I'm going to give you guys all free health care or I'm going to manipulate the price of gasoline lower. How am I going to do that? Nobody's going to know about it over here, but I'm going to print more money. I'm going to start giving it to the people that I want. And what that ultimately causes is a distortion of the pricing mechanism. So once you start, and this comes back to Bitcoin, as to why a fixed supply is such a. Is the optimal. Is the optimal money supply? It is. Once you start manipulating the supply of money, you start sending false signals through the pricing mechanism. What happens when you do that? You ultimately get a distortion between the underlying and fundamental supply and demand structures of real economic activity. You've essentially started to send lies or to send false information to people, and then people have begun to react based on those false signals. And at the end of the day, the only way to sustain this, and this is something that Hayek talks about in the pretense of knowledge, the only way to sustain those imbalances is to continue to do what got you there, to continue to print money, to essentially plug gaps. And that ultimately what happens is that people, because the underlying fundamental supply and demand structures start to fracture, then the things that people actually need stop getting fulfilled. So first it may just be certain things at the grocery store don't appear. Then it may be that gasoline doesn't exist. And when we come back to that idea of scarcity, it's a two way function. You have monetary, not monetary mismanagement because it happens in every. Don't tell me that, oh well, Venezuela just did monetary management poorly. No, this is the end game of all fiat systems is that when you're increasing the supply of money and the marginal cost of that is zero, that process will be abused. But at the same time that you have the money supply increasing and money which is supposed to singularly be communicating the relative value of two other things to make sure that all the things that we want are fulfilled, that as that distorts the price systems, you actually get less and less of the goods that are actually demanded. And so when money is supposed to be scarce and it's supposed to have a low rate of change, and would have a low rate of change if left to market mechanisms, you have money supply increasing, while at the same time the supply of real goods decreasing. And then there becomes essentially, if we think about a bank run where everyone runs to the bank to get cash and there's no cash there, it's the same, but in the context of real goods, people start to have a run on the actual money. The goods that they need are becoming more and more scarce. If there's no gas station, if you ever think about a scenario where there's a hurricane and everyone lines up at the gas station, then suddenly the gas, there's no more gas at the gas station. And that's essentially what happens as a function of monetary debasement. But the transmission mechanism of that is the distortion of supply and demand. And so the function of money can no longer do what it was supposed to do because its relative scarcity to goods and services no longer exists. And so that is really the function by which something happens in Venezuela where there's a hyperinflationary event, Nobody has any value to money because there aren't real goods to buy. So as soon as anybody gets money because they know and it's become apparent to them that it is no longer scarce and is no longer fulfilling the function, they want to sell it as soon as they can and it creates a run of on all real goods and the cycle that allows for, and I always use the analogy of groceries on the shelves that say the Whole Foods. But it is one of those things that if somebody really distilled it, to bring it back to that first question of what is money? Walk into a modern grocery store and just step back and be at awe for a minute to think about all of the individual people that would have had to, to have some input in bringing in that range of choice. Because that is what money actually delivers. And when it is manipulated, the reverse of that becomes true. It's awe inspiring and it's actually fantastical. When you think about from the packagers to the technology providers, to the logistics networks to individual packaging of individual items. And then when you even go to the, the production side of each individual food item in the supply chain that exists within each of them, all of that coordination function within, in the economy was only made capable by convergence on a single medium of money. And that the Venezuelas of the world occur when money no longer fulfills the role that people transfer value into in the first place. So long as they believe that they will be able to, to get another good, they will continue to convert their goods and services into it. But once they figure out that it is not only apparent, but it's right before their eyes that the thing that they were using as a form of money no longer fulfills that function, they sell it immediately and hyperinflation occurs. So it's both on the supply and demand side of money, but the actual debasement of money causes the supply and demand structures of real goods to deteriorate.
- [56:54]
Peter McCormack
So the risk to people is, and the thing they need to be aware of is that it doesn't matter how hard they're working and how much they're saving. If we are heading towards a hyperinflationary event, or even any form of inflation is going to debase the value of their savings. But if we head to a hyperinflationary event, anything they own which has of value to them may decrease in value. So if the risk to us with fiat money is that it can be debased, it can be printed at the click of a button. What we're trying to say to people is there is an alternative form of money here. We do have something new. It's called Bitcoin. It is something that we can consider now. We are clearly not going to overnight have a switch to a world of everyone on Bitcoin. But this is a transitional period and we have an opportunity now for people to buy into this, to become part of this. So let's talk about the benefits of bitcoin let's talk about what's so good about bitcoin compared to theater and gold. Let's go through point by point on the key points. So we've already touched scarcity. There's 21 million. But let's just again repeat why this is important. Why is the 21 million bitcoins? And remember, some people listen to this. Parker might not know anything about bitcoin, so this might be their first time. Why is there 21 million? How many exist now? And why is this important?
- [58:10]
Parker Lewis
So there are about 18 or 18.1 million that exist today. There will only ever be 21 million. Bitcoin is mined on a practically fixed schedule. Bitcoin are mined every 10 minutes on average. And that approximately every four years, the rate of that issuance gets cut in half. So today 12.5 Bitcoin are issued every 10 minutes on average. In May of this year, that will cut down to 6.25. And that the result of that asymptotic supply schedule will result in, in a total supply at the end of the day that is just short of 21 million. And so that is, you know, we won't go into the explanations of how mining actually works, but I think the substance of the question that you're asking is why does that matter? And I think we've touched on it, so I won't elaborate too much. But it's that idea that money fulfills one role and it is to facilitate trade, that trade allows for specialization, specialization allows for more sophisticated supply chains and more sophisticated means of production so that we can get more advanced technology. And that the singular role that in trade or the ideal role in what money delivers is communicating information that allows for people to understand the relative value between two other goods. The intermediary good only exists for me to do economic calculation. And that pricing and the idea of pricing wouldn't exist with money. And that 21 million supply and the scarcity of it is so important because with a zero percent rate of change, it will communicate better information. The other thing to note though is scarcity, again is both a supply and demand function. If There were only 21 million Bitcoin and only one person could use that, that's not valuable and it wouldn't be scarce. And so it is actually two separate functions. People demand Bitcoin because they recognize at least those that are evaluating it critically, 21 million is more scarce and that the ultimate rate of change will be lower than any other form of money. And, and so that has value in and of itself. But then the demand for Bitcoin actually makes it more and more scarce. So if one person had bitcoin and there were 21 million of it, that's not scarce. People demand it because it is scarce. But then as more and more people demand it, actually as a function of that demand, it becomes that much more scarce. And as we reach a critical mass of people that are using it, ultimately all of those people become trading partners and we remove the intermediary that is converting dollars for. For Bitcoin. And then ultimately we're all just transferring all of our own goods and services for Bitcoin directly. And we can do so with the least amount of noise because it has a finite supply.
- [61:14]
Peter McCormack
Fantastic. And what about the other properties you've talked about? Durability? I mean, that's kind of obvious. That's why gold is so successful, because it's so durable. Whereas other metals, they can, they can break, they can rust. So gold is highly durable, Obviously, Bitcoin's highly durable. So that's kind of obvious divisibility.
- [61:36]
Parker Lewis
I would bring something up on durability, because I think it is something that we're still solving for, but it's also something that has evolved naturally that when people didn't realize that Bitcoin was valuable, there's stories about how a computer with 150,000 bitcoin on it got thrown in the dumpster that was in the uk. Yeah, sorry, chap. Essentially, durability in the idea of Bitcoin is that if holding Bitcoin and securing Bitcoin was too difficult for people, and if people were losing their Bitcoin left and right, and that if we haven't identified and that we don't continue to identify ways for people to more reliably secure their Bitcoin in ways that it's either not lost permanently or at least manageable for people to use, then that's kind of one of the ideas that I think about durability. Yes. Bitcoin can be. You can basically have your own private keys and you can make copies of those private keys and you can split those keys up to increase security. And that if you looked at over time, the amount of Bitcoin that were lost, the majority of Bitcoin that were lost were in the very early days. And certainly people lose access to Bitcoin today. But if that amount of people losing their access to their private keys that are ultimately the access to Bitcoin, if that weren't constantly trending closer and closer to zero, Bitcoin likely wouldn't be viable as a form of money, because that would be the representation of durability. As Bitcoin increases in value, we actually are naturally inclined and naturally gravitate toward, okay, we're going to go figure out the best way to store it. And so that's why solutions like multisig come up and we won't go into the details, but just ultimately deriving better and better ways to securing Bitcoin so that they're not lost. That's how I would think about durability in terms of fungibility. This is a hot topic within Bitcoin thinking about the idea of fungibility. It is because fungibility and divisibility are ultimately, while they're not a singular concept, they are related. And so when we think about fungibility is uniform. Something that is uniform such that if I've got a house and I wanted to cut it in half because you wanted to give me something that was worth half the value of my house, well, half my house may be way more valuable and have more valuable things in it than the other half of the house. And so the uniformity of something is generally another term that we could think about as. As what? Something that was fungible. That, that if I cut it into half or if I cut it into 10 units, that each resulting unit is actually one half or one tenth or one fifth of the value. And so, you know, on the one side, if some, you know, if something is fungible, then it can practically be divided and aggregated into smaller, larger units that can then facilitate trade. Because if the good that is money is ultimately fulfilling that function of trade, but things have different relative value. And that's another important thing to recognize that all value is subjective. And essentially money is the arbiter. And it can be because its rate of change is lower than all other things, that in order for something to be money, it must fulfill that function of recognizing that the problem statement in the first place is, well, if I need this thing to facilitate trade, surely I value different things more than less. And that core function of being able to divide and aggregate things is important to the function of money. I personally, just to make the statement Bitcoin is fungible because at a network level, the network views every Bitcoin as the same. If that weren't the case at a protocol level or at the network level, then Bitcoin would essentially, that would be demonstrating that Bitcoin is censorable. So that's another concept in Bitcoin that we talk about. That is something that, where A lot of people, myself included, view this as a measurable improvement over gold, that bitcoin is more censorship resistant than gold was. Gold was susceptible to centralization for its security. And as a result, the dollar system then emerged Bitcoin, because it is far more decentralized than gold is. And another thing to note is that bitcoin will become more. Is becoming more decentralized. And over time, because it has a fixed supply, it will only become more decentralized. That the result of that is as bitcoin decentralizes as more people hold it, there's an ever diminishing share that the average individual holds of Bitcoin, that that very function of having the network and the ownership of the network be more distributed and have those coins, if you thought about it as 21 million Bitcoin, if there are 21 million people on average, those people could have one Bitcoin. If there were 324 million, 25 million people in the United States, there's only, you know, the average person can only have 0.05 if you take that up to a billion. But the personification of that is that the more distributed bitcoin becomes, the more censorship resistant it is. And truly, at a network level, when I send a Bitcoin or when you send a bitcoin, and this is where fungibility comes in, the network evaluates bitcoin transactions against a common set of rules. Bitcoin addresses may have different numbers, but I can send a bitcoin to you and the net at the network level, the network looks at that as either a 1 or a 0. It's either valid or it isn't. And that's how I think about fungibility. If you know, another way to think about fungibility is the dollar. Bitcoin is, at least at the very minimum, as fungible as the dollar. There are certain dollars within the banking system, and then there's dollars that are in the black market outside of the banking system that people launder in. Well, that's a form of censorship that the US Banking system applies to certain illegal activities. If I'm a drug dealer and I want to go get my 100 million of cash that I've sold for drugs back into the banking system, I'm gonna have to find someone who's willing to launder those dollars. And that hundred million of dollars is actually probably worth 80 million, and I've got to pay somebody 20 million to take the risk of, of laundering those back in. So that's the form of censorship that comes into the dollar world. But at the end of the day, the fungibility is for Bitcoin, one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. And at a network level, I can send it across and the network will validate it if it's consistent with a set of rules. And then the extension of that fungibility is because Bitcoin is fungible. And this is another property of mine. The divisibility or the ability to divide or aggregate is because Bitcoin is fungible and because Bitcoin is designed to be divided up into 1,100 million units, so down to eight decimal places, that there is a fixed supply that is 21 million. But I can subdivide each unit of bitcoin down to 0.00000001. And so all of those properties in aggregate make Bitcoin such a, such a valuable and ideal form of money, because it is something that is finitely scarce, it is something that is durable in the sense that there are. We are increasingly finding better and better ways to secure Bitcoin. It is, it is fungible because at the network level, it's either a one or a zero. It either is a valid Bitcoin that hasn't previously been spent and arose from a valid Bitcoin block, or it wasn't. And then technologically, because it's so divisible that as more and more people adopt Bitcoin, that Bitcoin can just be divided into more and more units, smaller and smaller amounts per unit. And the end result of that function, because it all works together, as Bitcoin becomes more decentralized, it actually becomes more resistant to censorship and it's better than gold as a result.
- [69:51]
Peter McCormack
So what you're saying is on every single measure, Bitcoin is a better form of money than gold and fiat.
- [69:58]
Parker Lewis
Yeah. And I think that the hardest people, especially gold bugs who are out there, the hardest thing for them to divorce from. And I would not project this view onto any individual, but when I thought about the seat and I went from somebody that was zero to gold to Bitcoin very quickly, but it took me quite a bit of time to get to both gold and, and Bitcoin because of the fundamental concepts of money. You have to recognize that just as because it's oh well, bitcoin isn't physical, that there's something about the physicality of gold and the combination of those characteristics combined with its physicality that makes it money. And the way that I look at that problem is that of all the gold did not emerge as money. Because of its physicality, it emerged because of all of those other properties. Scarcity, the ability to transfer it, the durability, the divisibility. Even though there were limitations inherent in all of those, it wasn't its physicality, it was that those, that collective representation of all those transcendental properties. And that when you just look at the subject matter and the value of each property and you start to evaluate them and say, just ignore that gold is physical and that Bitcoin is not. And let me describe to you all of these properties. Which one is the better form of money? And people will say bitcoin not knowing that it's Bitcoin or gold. And I think in one of Satoshi's early emails, because he does reference this idea, he talks about, imagine there was a base metal, and I can't quote it specifically, imagine there was a base metal and that it wasn't shiny, you know, it wasn't, you know, particularly ductile, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't particularly strong, but it also wasn't weak. But that it had one magical property and that you could teleport it over a communications channel. And so that was really, you know, the ultimate design is how do I extract all of the. All of the properties that actually made gold valuable form of money and the most efficient form of money that had ever existed. But how do I strip away from that the limitations inherent in gold that caused it ultimately to fail as a form of money, even though most people don't recognize that to this point and the way that that was ultimately accomplished. And I guess the thing that we haven't talked about but this transferability, the idea that you can have something that is finitely scarce, that can, that is fungible, that is divisible, and that you can send it over the Internet, that's like the mic drop, you know, like gold. If you. The story about Germany reclaiming its gold and it taking decades, that you could send the same amount of value that Germany reclaims virtually instantly over the Internet. And that idea that scarcity has somehow been divorced from physicality. So.
- [73:18]
Peter McCormack
But that's a transition for the most of the evolution of technology of the last 10, 20 years. I mean, it took me a while to make the transition from buying CDs to go into MP3s. I couldn't justify in my head buying a digital version of the music. I had to have it. The concept of buying a CD now is ridiculous. The concept of buying a newspaper is now ridiculous. I think, go on. A generation gone to my Son's generation, everything's virtual. My daughter today, she wanted to buy a little pet for a game, Roblox on her phone. It was £20, like $25 in my head. I still couldn't get my head around that. But it's natural to live in this kind of digital world where there isn't this physical object for everyone. So I think we've probably just. This is a generational change where people won't care about that.
- [74:11]
Parker Lewis
And I think really there, because even though dollars for most purposes are digital, as are euros, as are yen, you.
- [74:25]
Peter McCormack
Know you can get them.
- [74:26]
Parker Lewis
Yeah, it's that that digital representation is far more intuitive than the digital representation of Bitcoin because one, the dollar's anchored in time. For most of us that are evaluating this question today, the dollar was always money. So we didn't question it at a root level. The first time that my dad told me to go do a chore and then he gave me dollars, it's money because it was always money and there was some physical representation of it. So when we evolve to the digital dollar, we're sending money over a communication channel, but we still have this anchor in the physical world and we have the benefit of time. The thing that is so difficult about Bitcoin is one I think to the point of this whole podcast, most people never ask the question what money is. So because they've never questioned the pre existing reality, they're now being forced to ask that question at the same time when the solution that we're presenting is something that is natively digital and that has only been around for 10 years. So the digital nature of that is far less intuitive. While there is finite scarcity in Bitcoin, while there are inherent monetary properties in Bitcoin and there are not in the dollar, that kind of prior physical representation plus the anchor in time contributes to this seemingly being different from a digital perspective than the digital dollar. And that's just that will be a function of time. Right? The more. And this is something else that I've personally experienced. But the first time that you buy Bitcoin, that is really your initial skin in the game to learn more. You can't understand Bitcoin until you've bought it. Almost by definition. I was somebody that held out for a long time and made sure that I didn't understand it 100%. I understand it far better today. And no one really understands exactly how this was possible. But when I look back on it is every single. When we talk about the number 21 million, it's not that at a future point in time that there will only ever be 21 million. It's that every single 10 minutes a Bitcoin block is solved on average or probabilistically. And that once you have Bitcoin, you start going down that rabbit hole. And as time passes, just by the mere instance of you having owned Bitcoin for a longer period of time and you definitionally learning more from that point in time, it becomes more and more intuitive. And you're seeing the monetary policy and the fact that there's a fixed supply, not having to trust in 2140 when we're all dead and gone unless Peter Thiel solves the death problem for us all. But it's that we can see that process working and the monetary policy hardens every 10 minutes. And then this is one of the things about, about the Bitcoin happening. It's not just that the rate of supply gets cut in half. It's that we can all experience that happening without any central coordination. And so it is a more important block because of that. But it's reinforcing the credibility of the ultimate number. And then the reinforcement of that credibility, the monetary policy actually hardens people's understanding of it. Bitcoin becomes more intuitive, the scarcity of it becomes more reliable, and it then becomes more scarce as a result of that as demand increases. So I think that the function of time and the realization that you can't understand it until you've actually experienced it and seen it work, that now when you look on your phone and you log into, you plug your trezor into a device or your cold card, that, that the money is there and it's always there and that if you secure it right, it will be there. And that over time in which, you know, the next layer down, not for this conversation, but it's like how, how does the 21 million actually work? So once, once you get beyond the first principles of money and you know, I say to people, just imagine it had 21 million and that that was fixed and that was good and that was reliable, would this be a good form of money? Like, don't take my word for it, but that is the mechanism on which you should evaluate this. The next layer down is getting some technical understanding for why that is. And that's when some of like the real mind blowing experiences start happening. But I really think that the majority of people, you know, I hope that more and more people, I fully expect that. While, you know, most people have never asked this question, I personally Never asked this question. It was because it was never taught to me. And I think that as we move through the future that it will become a more standard part of individuals education from a very young age of like, why something's money, what happened in the crazy period between 1971 and 2009. And that the end result of that is people having a much better grasp from a very early stage in that, you know, people don't need to understand computer science or the technical basis for bitcoin because while we're talking about all this here and certain people will have the benefit of spending an hour, an hour and a half listening to a podcast. And they have the true luxury of being able to, in general comfort, be able to evaluate this decision on the front end that at the end of the day people are just going to use Bitcoin coin because it's what everybody else has. And the path from zero to one of getting there is that people will converge on the good that is more reliably scarce and that can more functionally fulfill and more efficiently fulfill the function of exchange. And so people don't need to know the computer science to know which one's better, A or B, Venezuelan Bolivar or the thing that keeps going up in value, Argentine peso, everything else under the hood. Again, in order to ensure the viability and security over the long term. It's certainly better that people know it, but 99% of people don't know how the dollar works and 99% of people won't know how bitcoin works, but it just works better than the next form of money.
- [81:05]
Peter McCormack
I think that's a very, very good place to end. So hopefully people will listen to this and they'll go and buy their first bit of bitcoin. I mean, I agree with you. I think the real eureka moment not only was the first time I bought it, but the first time I actually transferred it. And somebody explained to me, said, nobody, no, there was no middleman making that happen for you. There was no one who could stop that. I think that was a real, that was a real kind of eureka moment for me. So, okay, well, listen, Parker, that's been a really great introduction to money. I've learned more, which is great if people want to learn more about money, if there is any kind of resources, you would send them to go and rescue read.
- [81:39]
Parker Lewis
So I would send them to Reed Hayek. So the Road to Serfdom, which is a, is a full book. And then there's, there's other essays at the pretense of knowledge and then the use of knowledge in society. So those three all Hayek sources of information, I think are phenomenal. The. The bitcoin standard shelling out by Nick Szabo or Bitcoin standard by safety and amus shelling out by Nick Szabo. And then also if you're then, you know, at the stage where you're looking to get into more bitcoin specific things, then the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute has a lot of writings on not only monetary principles, but then also as they applied to bitcoin. I have a series that again, I like to think of myself as just aggregating other people's ideas and then communicating them in ways as to how I logically process that information such that certain people will. Certain things will resonate the way that, you know, depending on the way that ideas are packaged. So my series is called Graduate. Then suddenly I was just recently both honored and humbled to have it included on Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. So you can access it there's or on our unchained-capital.com website on our blog.
- [83:05]
Peter McCormack
And I'll and I'll share it out in the show notes. So people got access to it. Okay. Well, look, Parker, appreciate this. Appreciate the use of your office. Every time I come to Austin to record interviews.
- [83:15]
Parker Lewis
You're always welcome here unchanged.
- [83:18]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. And it's been great getting to know you over the last year, having a few steaks with you, watching some football. But I appreciate you coming on and supporting this series.
- [83:25]
Parker Lewis
Well, we look forward to you moving to Austin soon.
- [83:32]
Peter McCormack
Okay. So what did you make of that? Did you enjoy that? Did you enjoy what park had to say? Is it making you want to think about money differently? I think Parker did a really great job of breaking down the aspects of sound money and why bitcoin is the next logical step from gold and the current broken fiat system. Also, Parker mentioned some terms that newcomers may not be familiar with. So we've written up a small glossary that can be found in the show notes. And towards the end of the show, he mentioned a few books and articles that may also be helpful. So if you are going down the monetary rabbit hole, if you want to find out more, you want to read a bunch more shit, then check out the show notes. There's a whole bunch of stuff that you can dig into there. As ever, if you've got any questions about the show, you want to reach out to me, hit me up on hello@whatbitcoindid.com and also finally, thank you to everyone who supports the show, whatever you do, whether you're sharing shows out, whether you leave me a review, whether you're sponsoring the show, whatever you do, it all helps. And listen, if you are a regular listener, even if you're a new listener, if you want to support the show, if you want to support what I'm doing, please head over to my website. It's what bitcoindid.com click on the support section. It will explain everything to you there. And onwards to Friday to part three of my Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin.