What Is Institutional Economics? With Dr. Murray Rudd

Dr. Murray Rudd is an environmental economics and policy researcher who has written extensively on the impact of proof of work and Bitcoin, including writing academic papers with Satoshi Action Education. We talk about institutional economics and transaction cost economics as well as other things that Murray is working on.

Dr. Murray Rudd - https://x.com/drmurrayrudd

Satoshi Action Education - https://www.satoshiaction.org/

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The goal the goal of institutional economics is to
understand how the social context and the rules that
govern behaviour in society affect the transaction cost
economics and the outcomes that we see in the real world.
Hello, I am Cody Allingham, and this is the transformation of
Value, a place for thinkers and builders where we ask questions

(00:21):
about freedom, Bitcoin and creativity.
My guest today is Doctor Murray Rudd, an environmental economics
and policy researcher who has written extensively on the
impact of proof of work and Bitcoin, including writing
academic papers with Satoshi Action Education.
Murray, welcome back to the show.
Hey, Cody, thanks for having me back on.

(00:42):
It's great to be here. Oh well, you've been working.
Last time we spoke, you've been working on Satoshi action
education papers and research, and you've been doing this for a
while now. Have you got much to report on?
Like what? What sort of cut through have
you been getting with this research, Murray?
I'm just trying to think the last time we talked, I think we
were, that was AI don't think wepublished the methane mining

(01:05):
paper at that time if I recall. So we got that one out into a
journal. We've had a couple of other
things that have gone out as working papers right now.
I've had a couple of journal rejections too.
I have a project that looks at the 2024 Bitcoin social media

(01:29):
and parses that, takes it into pieces and identified really
what the big issues that were being spoken about across all,
pretty well all Bitcoin podcasts.
And I tried to get that summarized.
I've got a desk rejected a couple of Times Now, which means

(01:51):
that when you submit a journal article to a journal, first of
all, it goes to an editorial gatekeeper and it has to get
past that gatekeeper, that editor, before it's even sent
out to review. And sometimes what you'll get if
people don't like Bitcoin or if they, in my case, if they don't
like AI that was also used as part of the analysis, they might

(02:11):
reject it. So that's where we are with
that. So as an alternative I'm working
on actually a full length book project on that right now.
Yeah, I'm keen to dive into the book piece in a moment, but just
coming back to the the editors in these journals, I wanted to
talk a little bit about that because it seems to be an issue
and I've been trying to understand where where this

(02:32):
stems from. So I mean, is it, is it a
political thing? Do you think this is coming down
to individuals who maybe just have a a bias against Bitcoin
or? Yeah, sometimes.
So if you're if you're a. So there's a couple of different
types of editors diving into thedetails.
There's an editor in chief who usually makes that initial

(02:53):
decision about whether it goes out to a what's called a
handling editor editor or an associate editor.
And then the associate editor will actually recruit the
reviewer. So there's a three-step process
in there for most journals. And in the case of the Bitcoin
papers, the the editors in chiefare in the business of trying to

(03:17):
maximize visibility in citationsfor their journals.
And there's, there's obviously there's a few people that just
don't like Bitcoin and they see a Bitcoin paper and they don't
understand it and they just tossit out right away and reject it.
There is other journals where you might get an editorial desk

(03:37):
rejection that's actually quite legitimate.
Like sometimes if I send something out to a, a journal, I
don't know the energy journals that well.
It's not my, my historically, it's not my main field.
So I don't know the editors and what their particular
perspectives are. So it's a little bit hit and
miss sometimes going out to themand sometimes the journals, you

(03:58):
know, they just a Bitcoin paper might not fit in with what they
they are are really trying to do.
So there, there's a number of different factors, but certainly
I had one death rejection from one of the one of the academics.
It's a top Bitcoin publisher. He publishes in the finance
realm for some reason. He's a an associate editor on an

(04:23):
environmental journal. And he actually rejected the
methane paper I mentioned before, gave it a death
rejection, which there was like no need for at all.
And I'm pretty sure that was just a sort of his view on
Bitcoin was very quite skeptical.
And I think that's just what it was in in that particular case.

(04:43):
Yeah. What I mean, what was your high,
what was your high level takeaways on that methane pace
like? Did you have some good
conclusions come out of that or?Yeah.
I mean, my, my view is that the the methane mining was pretty
economically marginal. And what I mean by that is that

(05:08):
it it looks to me that it would typically take US 4 1/2 cent per
kWh electricity. That would be the cost that they
could generate electricity, say at a smaller US landfill.
And four and a half cents is going to be economical, but
there's also some risk associated with that when hash
price is low. And so when I looked at my

(05:32):
perspective on the methane mining from landfills, at least
in the US context, is that you can't look at it.
You're never going to get industrial scale miners that are
going in and mining it profitably.
But it's great for smaller scaleminers and for any landfills
that are just looking to replenish or recoup some of

(05:54):
their operational costs and reduce the local tax burden.
I think it's absolutely awesome.And I don't understand and
really why a lot more landfills haven't taken it up so far.
Well, that's interesting. I mean, the hash price is is a
major, major issue right now fora lot of miners.
And I guess the, this idea, I mean, there's something I want

(06:15):
to posit to you, but coming backto Satoshi Action Education on
the website, it does say, you know, you're doing this.
Satoshi Action Education is doing this work, academic and
scholarly to provide credible evidence backed research.
So the public understands the truth about the positive impacts
of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining for our economy, environment,

(06:36):
etcetera. And I just wondered for me that
felt like a bit of a loaded mission in the sense that you,
you, you, it talks about the truth about the positive
impacts. And I wonder, I mean, happy to
talk about this openly in terms of what, what does that mean?
Because there may be situations where it doesn't actually make
sense economically, or it doesn't make sense for another
variety of reasons. And is it able to be looked at

(06:59):
with unbiased lens? Yeah, I, I mean, certainly for
myself coming in that's, that's always a condition that if I go
through and do some modelling ordo a review that like I'll make
sure that it's as neutral as possible in scope.
That's probably just the positioning on Satoshi action.

(07:19):
We're we're debating, there's some debate going on right now
whether we should maybe like merge the two organizations,
like not not technically merge them, but sort of from a
forward, outward facing perspective, have things a
little bit more integrated. So, yeah, I think that's
probably just early wording thatwas put up on the Satoshi Action

(07:43):
web page a couple of years ago that really doesn't reflect sort
of the actual practicality of going through and doing academic
research. We're obviously we're interested
in in cases and documenting cases and doing modeling where
there is is potential where we see potential for, for example,

(08:05):
for methane mining really to contribute positively.
But like in this case, in the inthe landfill case where we
weren't like raving that this isgoing to be profitable and it
was just going to be a great business all the time.
Some of the people in industry have said that they can.
The landfills can generate electricity at two cents US per

(08:30):
kWh, in which case virtually everything's going to be
profitable. In the landfill case, we also
covered a little bit that when you get to when a landfill, say
a larger landfill where you're producing gas at scale, landfill
gas at scale and you have are able to go in and put in bigger
generators and maybe you have local customers for the

(08:53):
electricity, the the grid or local industrial customers.
Then it becomes much more, you know, economically marginal for
Bitcoin mining to to go in. But at the same time, Bitcoin
mining, even in those situationscan offer the same sort of, you
know, response programs and SOP up that extra energy when the

(09:15):
market demand from the other sources is quite soft.
So I think there's always a rolein the the noodle guys that we
co-authored with in the landfillpaper.
They do this down at their Utah site.
They they're directly switched in or hooked into the grid so
they can transmit electrons to the to the Utah grid when the
price is right or they can use it for Bitcoin mining when the

(09:39):
market price isn't all that great.
So there's a lot of subtlety anda lot of individual situations.
We had just a couple of weeks ago, we had an interesting talk
with people up in Alaska and thelandfill operators up there and
sort of getting a feel for what goes on in some of these more
remote landfills and what their issues were.

(10:02):
And I don't know if anything will eventually come out of it,
but there was some interest up there in just just learning
about Bitcoin mining. So obviously part of what we do
is is really try to educate users.
Yeah, Well, it's interesting because there's sort of, again,
maybe this copy comes from an early version of the website.

(10:24):
But I mean, I think it's kind oftrue in a sense that the
organization is here in a sense to push Bitcoin forward and
Bitcoin mining and then the benefits.
And then it just so happens thatthere maybe needs to be a
neutral approach with academic research that comes out.
But I, I guess from this lens ofdoing research and doing
engagement with journals, it, itseems like there might, there

(10:47):
might be other cases where an organization is, is funding
research and they may have a, a mission in mind, But the
research of course, needs to be neutral.
And I just wonder, we're in thiskind of interesting place where
it's one part think tank, kind of visionary sci-fi, like what
is possible with Bitcoin mining.One part of it's also commercial
where it's like, well, what are the economics of it?

(11:08):
I mean, how do you see all thosepieces working together?
And then also that bigger visionof what, you know, pushing
Bitcoin forward and then also kind of the neutral aspect of
research. Yeah.
Well, I think for us that starting with the bigger vision
like what I would love to see isto get methane mitigation
through Bitcoin mining up onto the radar screen for some of the

(11:29):
international organizations. So methane in general right now
the, the, the international problem with it and related to
climate change is that methane'sso potent, it's fixing or
reducing methane emissions is the number one easiest way to
reduce overall carbon dioxide equivalent emissions globally by

(11:53):
because you're reducing the output of gas that's like up to
87 times more potent than carbondioxide alone.
And I think that we've seen a little bit of this
internationally. Some of the international
organizations have cited the Crusoe research and the Crusoe
mining example. So there's a little bit of

(12:15):
awareness. But in general, you know, you go
to the like anybody that goes tothe big methane conferences and,
or that deals in the UN or some of the international initiatives
to control methane emissions. Bitcoin mining isn't on the
radar screen at all. So part of what, what we want to

(12:35):
do is to do case studies like wedid with the, the people from
nodal energy and just demonstrate that, yes, this is
what, what the economics, what the models tell us.
And the way I, I do modelling isthere's a, there's a lot of
uncertainty in the models that Iincorporate.

(12:56):
So it's almost like a, you know,eventually we could be in a
position where we could say put a modeling platform online,
something that we just have sliders for all your different
assumptions, everything from your minor the rig type through
to the your electricity cost locally, whether or not your

(13:19):
landfill site also got carbon, carbon credits or if there was
competitive products. So I think that's quite
possible. I've been thinking about that.
We haven't got, we haven't got to that yet.
I, I use a proprietary software called Analytica, which is
really, really good. But I've been using it like for
25 years and I know that I should go to Python And like,

(13:43):
you know, use AI and help me code up things in Python.
So it could be an open source model that could go out that
eventually, if I can do that, that would probably bring some
more attention, might help some of the people that have
different situations that, you know, maybe are on the fringes
of economic profitability. But if the business arrangements
are right, if you're dealing with municipalities or cities

(14:05):
that are taxing local citizens to operate a waste treatment
plant or a landfill and they canrecover 2030% of their costs at
the same time, that's that's allgood.
That helps out all the way around.
The other thing I think that hassome potential that we haven't
really got into yet. It's just, it's crossed my mind

(14:27):
is that there's a lot of these landfills, they're never going
to be commercially profitable from a Bitcoin mining
perspective. But if they were to cooperate
and have some sort of like nonprofit or coordinated
organization that could help educate individual landfills
about Bitcoin mining and also maybe provide, you know, a range

(14:48):
for services like, say, computercompares across different sites
that it might help landfills come on board that are only
recovering part of their cost ofproduction for the electricity.
Well, just on that note, so I was watching another video, I
was talking about some of the ideology behind something like

(15:11):
driverless cars. And yeah, there is no consumer
demand for that product. It's been pushed sort of top
down and it's sort of has tailings of ideology and, and
kind of, you know, technology 1st and, and kind of there's,
there's, there's assumptions within this kind of push for
this kind of technology. And I just wonder coming back

(15:32):
again to the structure of what you're doing here, like, you
know, there is a market aspect, you know, it can be profitable
and it can be good to do it in terms of, you know, raw
economics. But it seems like there isn't an
ideological piece that is reallyquite important here.
And if it gets embraced by, you know, let's let's be real, you
know, the state regulators as a solution that's within their,

(15:55):
their, it's on their radar. As you say, that can maybe lead
to a new kind of a new pathway that is maybe hard to see from a
purely commercial perspective, right?
Because it is marginal. And it might be that.
And we'll get to this in a moment, maybe when we talk about
transaction cost economics. But you know, maybe it's just
easier to not think about it because it's too much hassle

(16:15):
when they'd rather just do what they're doing at the moment.
And I just wonder if you have any commentary on that kind of
the beyond the economics, but actually the ideology, the the
the bigger vision behind Bitcoinmining as a solution?
Yeah, I, I, I mean, I don't viewit from an ideological
perspective myself. I know some people do.
I, I'm, I'm totally an economist.

(16:38):
I view it from, I don't, I don'twant to get into jargon, but
there's this thing called marginal abatement costs.
And in an ideal world, you know,we could look at the methane
situation and we could say that we have, you know, 10 different
technologies and each of them has the potential to mitigate

(16:59):
methane and each of them has a certain cost associated with
mitigating methane. And where I would like to get
with get to with methane, Bitcoin methane mining is well,
what are the actual mitigation costs?
And if we can ever figure that out, then that is something that
naturally slots into the bigger picture.

(17:21):
So for me, that's not an ideological thing at all.
That's just like sensible climate policy in action and
it's bringing potentially a new technology to this very big
challenge that we have globally.Now do we want to go out and put
put Bitcoin miners on absolutelyeverything?

(17:41):
Well, in some cases it's not going to make any sense.
But that depends a little bit onsort of what the the social
situation is and what the alternative uses for that energy
are and whether there or not there's industrial waste heat
applications. And there is, there's a lot of
different things that go on. And for instance, like many of

(18:02):
the wastewater treatment plants could conceivably, well, they do
produce methane and that could be used for Bitcoin mining.
But right now most of those are urban.
And it doesn't really make senseto go in and put Bitcoin miners
into an urban area really per SE.
It's just, I don't. But again, for me, that's an

(18:23):
economics question. That's not a ideological
question. And we also have agriculture
facilities that are sort of the same thing.
Some are rural, they're quite remote.
Cost recovery is really important.
Maybe they know their food processing plants are quite
industrial. They're they have other their
waste products can be valorized in different ways.

(18:45):
Yeah, I guess what I'm getting at is when I talk about the
ideology is again, these disk rejections, the conversations
I've had with people where you know, anything but Bitcoin
mining, whether it's pumping water to the top of a hill or
or, you know, some some crazy rude Goldberg machine
contraption to to capture this, this wasted energy is better

(19:07):
than Bitcoin for them because ofthe negative political
ideological connotations. And that's why I guess I wonder
whether there isn't an ideological piece to this where
it's kind of normalizing even and and kind of developing a
conversation around Bitcoin thatgives Bitcoin value.
Because ultimately, in my experience, economics is
important. But if people really hate it and

(19:29):
they don't understand that it's actually important and valuable,
they really struggle to even look at the numbers with.
Clear eyes and that's absolutelytrue.
And but you know what you said, it is actually at the core of it
that they don't understand it. So a lot of it is just under
understanding. A lot of people are going by,
you know, the Alex Devries research, the Digi economist,

(19:52):
and there's just a whole slew ofpapers out there that have used
some fairly flawed assumptions over time and those have really
stuck. So what one of the other papers
that that I did know, this was abit longer.
We might have talked about this one before, but I did a a
shorter paper, an opinion piece called Bitcoin is Full of

(20:14):
Surprises and it sort of was a mix of pragmatist philosophy
thinking and Bitcoin mining and so.
And why, you know, for the for the traditional left, left side
of the political spectrum, there's a lot of potential

(20:34):
benefits, financial inclusion, there's climate mitigation
possibilities, things that are important to the left-leaning
constituency. And yet there's this this been
such negativity that it never has reached the even gotten into

(20:56):
the conversation so far. So part of the reason that I
wrote that article that that's not something that was really
for public or general consumption.
It was almost more of an education piece for academics.
And so a lot of the writing thatI do actually is, if that's what
my my target audience is actually academics, it's like,

(21:17):
OK, actually consider this. So what does it take?
You know, you have to be surprised at something before
you really investigate it. But if you blow it off, you're
not investigating, you know, So you, you have to, there's some
effort that has to go into it and you go down this this bit of
a rabbit hole until you come up with some sort of personal
conclusion that provides you a level of confidence.

(21:41):
And like how you do that for people that just, you know,
ignore things and don't really think things through.
And especially in academia wherethat's supposed to be what
you're doing is always a bit of a strange, strange thing to deal
with. But it's very common in
academia. I mean academia, you know, going
back to your original question about editors, editors a lot of

(22:03):
times have a particular field ora journal has a particular group
that sponsors it. And so you have to be working
with their methodology and sort of adhering to their
philosophical basis to be able to publish in that journal.
So it's not like academics is not some like neutral, let's
find the truth space. It's like everybody in it, it

(22:26):
has vested interests. And whether those vested
interests are advancing individual careers or a
particular epistemic community, like a group of researchers that
share common ideas about methodology and epistemology,
the. Yeah, it's a little bit of a
minefield. And then once you know a lot of
academic researchers, once you have success in one area, you

(22:49):
try to continue that on. And Alex Devries is a really
good example of this. He had success before.
Well, he still doesn't have a PhD, but he had success in his
original opinion pieces on, on Bitcoin and those have just kept
perpetrating on and on. And that's probably a result of
the Cell Press, the journal thatpublishes most of his work,

(23:14):
being able to garner a lot of citations off of his work.
So it's good for them because the journals like citations.
It's good for Alex Devries because he gets more
publications, he gets to all these opportunities to sort of
spew out his, his side of the, the argument.
And then he's able also to sort of parlay that Bitcoin

(23:36):
experience. And now he's been working on AI
more generally. And so sort of bringing some of
the arguments that he developed in the Bitcoin space and taking
them out and applying them in AIspace.
So he is doing a PhD or he was the last I heard he was part
time PhD in one of the Dutch universities.
And so if if he is aiming for anacademic career or it's just

(23:58):
ideal because like, you know, itdoesn't matter whether you're
people that cite you hate you orlove you, like it's still
citations and that's what countsin academia.
Yes, that's fascinating, isn't it?
These. It is.
It's a it's a real snake pit sometimes.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I mean, my, my, my concluding remarks on that would
be I just, I, I do think there is, as you say, I mean, there's

(24:20):
a, there's a number of layers toit.
And I think there's a sort of a real politic, an approach that
can be effective where you kind of have to play the game a
little bit. And I think certainly putting
research out there to counter some of this stuff, trying to
get it into the mainstream, trying to get headlines as well.
This is all very important because you know, people don't

(24:43):
read stuff anymore. They, they take the bait, they
take the names and kind of counter countering that.
It's it's just a lot of effort, but I I think it is ultimately A
worthwhile endeavour to get the message out.
I'll add one more point on that quickly if, if I could too.
You know, I mean, some of the people that you you interview

(25:04):
and are friends with are involved in sort of countering
some of this on a more informal basis.
And I mean, if for Satoshi action, we we did a piece on
there was a what was it that wasa dreadful piece out of the out
of the European Central Bank. And so we had Freddie New and

(25:32):
Ellen Farrington, I think it wasthat were co-authors on that.
And the reason that we went ahead with a counter paper or
counter opinion on that paper was we knew it was still out in
review. So we wanted to get something
out. Well, potentially it affected
reviewers. There was another paper just
published last week and it had actually had was based on

(25:54):
Gabriel Dances data that he collected for his New York Times
article. And so it was another, I
wouldn't call it a hit piece, but like just some of their
assumptions were quite flawed. And I saw that back in November
as a working paper. And we didn't bother like trying
to comment on that because we knew it was already in review.
It was at one of the Nature journals and it was just kind of

(26:17):
pointless to do that. So for for me, we don't spend
much time countering, like providing counter arguments or
blogs or things like that. I try to focus mainly on getting
the actual academic papers out, even if their perspective or
opinion pieces. I think they're more valuable
than strictly something that is either a comment to the journal

(26:40):
that this this, this particular paper is trashy or there's
something wrong with it. Yeah, understood.
And I mean, there's also that classic political idea that if
you're explaining, you're losingand it's hard, man, because
there's a lot of noise out there.
There's a lot of noise distraction.
And yeah, well, I do want to move on to talking about your.
You mentioned in passing a book project.

(27:02):
And I know we've been chatting over e-mail, Murray, just around
potentially Bitcoin oriented institutional, institutional
economics as as a book topic. So maybe tell me a little bit
more about what your thinking iswith that please.
Yeah, well, I've actually got two things I'm thinking of for
the book. 1 is the research, thehorizon scan thing.
And then, yeah, I've sort of sketched out ideas for an

(27:25):
institutional economics book too.
And yeah, yeah, I mean, so many people in the Bitcoin space are
identify as Austrian economist or like they adhere to the
Austrian Economic School. And I don't I, I'm an
institutional economist by training.

(27:46):
So my not so much of my master'sdegree, but my PhD was very
institutional. I actually studied at Indiana
University under a woman called Eleanor Ostrom, who won a Nobel
Prize for her work on common property and self governance.
And that that was something thathas been my whole career.

(28:08):
I've been institutionally oriented and there's some pretty
key differences between institutional economics and
Austrian economics. But at the same time, there's
also some commonalities in termsof self governance as a, an
aspiration for society and you know, the role of individuals in

(28:30):
society. So what I'm thinking about, and
it's still very early, so I'm not organized at all on this
yet. In fact, I, I, I'll, I'll tell
you that I actually print went back and reviewed a whole bunch
of my like notes that I'd made earlier using AI and got myself
some speaking points along the way.
Just so I tried to read them this afternoon just to try to

(28:53):
refresh where I was myself. I get can, you know, after a
while without without working ona project, it sort of fades from
the memory a little bit. So yeah.
But generally it's what I want to do is articulate what an
institutional economics approachmeans for Bitcoin and how that

(29:13):
what the different implications might be that flow from that
versus, you know, the standard Austrian perspective.
Yeah. So diving into that, I, I, you
gave me some bread crumbs to to follow.
And I, I, I dived into it myselfand I found transaction cost
economics to be highly fascinating.
I dived into Ronald Kohs, who I think actually came up with the

(29:37):
idea originally in the 1930s, which is really this idea of the
transaction costs associated with doing business lead to the
development of firms. Because it's cheaper and more
efficient to work within the company and, and divide labor
and, and, and do everything within your company.
Then to have it fully decentralized and just have this

(30:00):
nebula of workers who are doing the work on a market, right?
Which I guess is that sort of where you see the difference
with Austrian economics that it sees the market ultimately as
this perfect decentralized tool versus formations of these these
firms. Yeah.
That that that's, that's certainly part of it.
The I, I mean Austrian economicsgenerally the, the view is that

(30:23):
the individual makes decisions. Prices are signals that convey
information about relative preferences.
And I, I, I, I don't know if I'mqualified to really talk more
about that, but the Austrian economics does seem to, from an

(30:44):
institutional economics perspective, make assumptions
about property rights that don'treally align with what we view
as reality. And so there's some
commonalities and Austrian takesthe, the bigger picture.
Austrian economics is generally very qualitative and they tend

(31:05):
to use a lot of deductive logic.Institutional economists, at
least modern institutional economists, the new
institutional economists, are very quantitative, very
empirical and look at the issuesof if within companies, though,
so do we call companies, do companies contract out for
certain services or do they carry them out internally?

(31:28):
And Oliver Williams and another institutional economist won a
Nobel Prize that he shared with Eleanor Ostrom on that, on that
research of his. And so there's it was the the
economics of the firm that really got institutional

(31:48):
economics and transaction cost economics in particular really
into the mainstream, even thoughtheir origins go back to John
Commons and Ronald Kos and well,not so much all over North, but
those earlier 1930s to 1950s when were when the ideas
developed and Oliver Williamson really picked them up and

(32:10):
extended them. So Williamson had all these,
these, these conditions or his idea, he has this thing called
discriminating an alignment hypothesis.
And basically the idea is that you need, you have certain
problems are defined by certain features.
And in business that might be stickiness of prices, for

(32:32):
example, you know, some, some businesses, they work in a
really competitive market. Everything swings up and down
very quickly. Other businesses, maybe there's
some friction, whether it's supply chain or on the demand
side. And so businesses face
different, different challenges and as a result the business
governance, whether they vertically integrate or

(32:55):
horizontally like spread out, take the whole supply chain in
or contract things out, those all are reflections of the type
of problem that they face. So decentralization on a
business isn't a decision like the business doesn't go out and
say like maybe we tend to do in the Bitcoin space.
A business doesn't say, oh, we're going to decentralize as

(33:16):
much as possible. It's a for them, it's a business
decision. It's an economic decision that
they and Williamson said that they naturally gravitate or
evolve to the situation where they minimize their transaction
costs. They set up their businesses to
minimize transaction costs and so that that's really, that's A

(33:39):
and that's a huge difference from Austrian economics.
Austrian economics doesn't get into that at all, as far as I'm
aware of. OK, that, you know, that's
fascinating. I mean, there's this question,
why do firms exist at all if themarket is perfectly efficient
and a question or the answer is,you know, the market isn't
perfectly efficient and firms arise when internal coordination

(34:00):
is cheaper than transacting through the market.
And this is, I mean, you could see this quite easily.
I mean, it's, it's going to be cheaper to hire somebody that is
an employee then as a freelancer, generally speaking.
And so a freelancer will have a higher rate because of
uncertainty. There's, you know, different
expectations maybe, but there's,there's, there's always this
kind of trade-offs. And I found that really

(34:21):
interesting because we do see inthe world today, there's, you
know, quite a lot of centralization happening with
large tech companies. The world is in the hands of a
few people and the sort of at the moment in time we're in
another episode, I talked to somebody about how in a sense,
you know, base layer reality is owned by a very small number of

(34:43):
people in terms of raw materialsand these kinds of things.
And and Bitcoin kind of again, on an ideological level is kind
of going the other way where it says, well, everyone, you know,
you know, we should decentralize.
It's, it's an important thing touphold as a value, you know,
even if it's uneconomic, you know, you should be running your
own Lightning node, you should be doing everything yourself.

(35:04):
But the market is also pushing towards people using custodians
and using Lightning accounts. It's not actually a, a wallet,
stuff like this. So I mean maybe looping that
back to Bitcoin, I mean how do you see transactional
transaction cost economics applying to the say what we're
seeing with the Bitcoin world? Well, I, I, I, I think there's
just so much potential for it to, to be applied.

(35:27):
I mean, you look into the miningindustry, for example, and these
questions about geographic placement.
And so how does a company decidewhere to locate?
And that's energy cost to some extent, but there's also
transaction cost. I guess it should also specify
transaction costs for, for your listeners.
Transactions costs are, are the things that aren't like really

(35:48):
part of the cost of doing business.
It can be things like strategic behavior and litigation and
negotiation. There's all of these things that
that fall in, in the context of the, it's the environment that
your your business actually operates in.
And so there's, there's different ways that those larger

(36:10):
scale costs can be minimized along the way.
So from a, from a transaction cost perspective, think of
Bitcoin mining and you know, theintegration with AI and high
performance computing, what's going on, the different options
for custine rigs versus owning all your own rigs.

(36:31):
That's a classic transaction cost economics problem right
there. So there's a lot going on there.
You can look also to the whole of custody and ETF sphere.
There's there's different transaction cost economics
arguments there. One of the things that I think
is also interesting and, and important to differentiate is
that Bitcoin is a decentralized technology, a fully

(36:54):
decentralized technology that can be recentralized in some
ways. But, you know, just because
Bitcoin is inherently decentralized doesn't
necessarily mean that the business businesses and firms
that, you know, use Bitcoin follow the same logic.

(37:15):
And so there's this multi level institutional or transaction
cost thing going on. So it's going to vary like
according, you know, what's the problem that the firm is trying
to deal with? Well, if you're trying to ensure
institutional adoption, you haveto have all these other rules
and regulations and assurances in place that you don't have as

(37:37):
an individual when you're just basically have your, your
Bitcoin and cold storage. So there's, there's interesting
variations within that. And so part of the thing that
I'm thinking for this book is that within institutional
economics, and this goes to LynnOstrom's work, there is you can

(38:00):
classify rules. So we have rules about like who
can participate in, in a particular activity and when and
how and where and what are the outputs and what sort of
outcomes or impacts might those have.
And so we have all these different levers from a, from a
policy perspective that we can take to sort of change the the

(38:22):
rules of the game. We can also invest in different
areas and different types of capital assets that we have.
And so how Bitcoin fits into this, what I would see is that
like each segment of the Bitcoinspace and, and the marketplace
and the systems that that make Bitcoin function in the world,
these are all different institutionally.

(38:43):
And so we have this like these nested like systems within
systems within systems, but eachone of them in theory can be
described very, quite precisely by the different rules, you
know? And at the base layer, Bitcoins
rules are very transparent for the most part.
We have some social norms that come in, as we've seen with the
OP return controversy over the last little while.

(39:07):
But for the most part, Bitcoins rules were set by Satoshi or
they're set by developers since then.
And those should be fairly easy to describe from an
institutional perspective, from a rules and social norms
perspective. When we get out to the, you
know, the, the coin basis of theworld, then that's like a whole
different thing. I mean, there are rules there,

(39:29):
but they're multi tiered and there's political, political
engagement and there's lobbying and there's resource allocations
that flow through like quite obscure channels sometimes.
And understanding this, you know, that's the goal.
The goal of institutional economics is to understand how

(39:50):
the social context and the rulesthat govern behavior in society
affect the transaction cost economics and the outcomes that
we see in the real world. So that's why it's empirical.
And in some cases, we're going to be in situations where maybe
a degree of centralization is. Is acceptable or necessary for

(40:12):
some use cases. And in other cases we might be
pairing things down to absolute minimal local, you know, local
management by individuals or shared community within a very
tight geographic space. As we see, you know, in most of
my work was in fisheries, so I always tend to use fisheries
examples. But you know, in Japan, all the

(40:33):
prefectures that have local fisheries management
organizations to be functioning for centuries, people know each
other. The social norms are quite are
quite standardized. It's a fairly local resource.
You know, maybe in a circular economy, a smaller circular
economy and Bitcoin world, we see the same sort of things
emerge over time. Yeah, it's fascinating.

(40:54):
I think. I mean, this is, I mean, this is
a new topic for me, but I do seesome insights here that are
going to be that are very valuable.
And it's sort of, as you say, the Austrian economics approach.
I think there's obviously a lot that's valuable there, but also
taking a long hard look at reality and the way that firms

(41:15):
and organizations and blocks emerge.
You know, the, the, despite our best efforts to tell people to,
to self custody their Bitcoin, alot of people still use
Coinbase. And I see just the other day
there was a big data breach or a, a data breach of Coinbase.
And it's kind of like, well, when do people learn?

(41:36):
And this is a really interestingplace because I don't know if
we've had the opportunity to have something as decentralized
as Bitcoin ever in the past. And so it's sort of this new
function and, and people are still trying to apply, you know,
this kind of logic of, of firms and markets to it.
And then on the other side of that, there is an ideologically
driven push to decentralize no matter what, even if it's not

(41:59):
economical for you, because it, it isn't really that economic
to, to do some of the stuff we do in Bitcoin.
Like, you know, the cost associated with, you know, the
risk and the cost associated with running something like a
lightning channel, your own lightning node.
You know, that that could be a significant investment.
And you know, the, the, I guess the externality or the, the

(42:20):
actual risk there is that you get rugged by using someone
else's node, someone else's setup.
But it's sort of putting all of that into the mix, you know,
and, and, and thinking from the perspective of, you know, the
people out there in the world who maybe don't have the
ideological leanings, you know, what, what, what are they doing?
You know, we can see sort of trends and the ETF's are a

(42:41):
fascinating example of this where in some cases or, and,
and, and the Bitcoin strategic reserves that these companies
are developing where actually the, the, it's at a premium.
You know, you're paying more to give this stuff then they would
if they just brought Bitcoin. But there's something about it
that leads to people doing that just because of the regulatory
structures, the the ease of access or whatever.

(43:05):
And I'll just find that fascinating.
And I mean, we do have to look at that reality, right to to
make sense of things. Well, it's interesting for
strategy. I mean, it could keep a whole
PhD program like busy looking atthe transaction costs economics,
because those are entirely new products and companies that
micro strategy is is spinning off and like nobody in the

(43:27):
financial world has seen stuff like this before.
So I, I, you know, my bet, this sort of goes back to the big
picture of what we talked about at the beginning.
But sort of my vision, like whatI think is going to happen is
that Bitcoin is going to get so big that there will be academic
research programs focusing on Bitcoin, not just a Bitcoin is

(43:52):
one piece of a, a bigger program.
I think what we'll see over timeis that we'll, we'll see
increasingly departments and universities.
Finally a clue in that bitcoins are really important new
technology that has implicationsacross all these spaces that
we've just talked about and thatthose need need to be studied

(44:12):
and researched. And yeah, I mean, the, the way
that MicroStrategy and now 21 and and all the corporate
treasuries are going like that, yeah, that could keep, that
could keep like a full economicsor Commerce Department going
steadily. Like I could see the, especially
once you get into a larger university that has the, the

(44:34):
sort of the critical mass in a particular field.
I've only had that once in my career actually.
And I, I went to York and England and my first day on the
job, we were at a retreat where there was like 150 researchers
in one hall. And our VP for research at the
university was saying, well, I think we finally hit critical

(44:55):
mass. And like I, I'm going like I
thought 5 people's critical massearlier on, but I could, I could
definitely see like large Bitcoin research consortiums or
organizations start that really focus in on the finance aspects,

(45:15):
the transaction cost economics aspects, the rules.
And that's never like, never mind the basic cryptography and,
and everything that sort of goesalong with with Bitcoin itself.
And then you look into the impacts, like how do you assess
impacts? We've seen a lot of papers, I

(45:36):
mean, Simon Collins and I have tried to get a paper out on
adaptation, haven't been successful yet, but there could
be like an entire department of marketing, I'm sure that could
put pH DS to work on on studies that looked at the actual what
are the determinants of Bitcoin adoption over time.
So lots of potential out there and I think we're going to see a

(45:58):
real change over the next five years or so in the academic
space as they realize that how far behind they are on Bitcoin
knowledge and what's needed to really provide policy relevant
information in the future. Yeah, Well, you know, something
that I find very interesting is,you know, in our, I guess our

(46:20):
sphere and you know, the people,a lot of people I talk with, you
know, my friends, you know, we have this kind of this lens on
Bitcoin that's very close to that.
You know, we, we run nodes. We, you know, we, we know the
jargon, we, we understand the core principles.
But when I go a little bit further afield, Murray and I
meet people who own Bitcoin via an ETF or they, you know, sort

(46:42):
of read a headline and I'm like,man, there's billions of people
out there like that and there's AI think a realization that the
market or, you know, the people are doing things and, and
there's outputs and there's, youknow, real world effect.
You know, the price is going up,number goes up and we think we
have a hold on what it is. But man, I don't, I don't

(47:03):
sometimes I don't know. I think, you know, it's just,
it's doing its thing. And it's important that we keep
asking questions and, and comingback to some of these core
assumptions. And this was an issue that you
mentioned with with the mining side, right?
Like people have the maybe the wrong objectively wrong
assumptions about what what we're looking at when we talk
about Bitcoin mining. And I also wonder when it comes

(47:24):
to talk about money, the economy, institutional
economics, transaction cost economics, like what are the
assumptions that they're talkingabout And what, you know, what,
what is the, the way things are talked about?
Because I feel like we're in a transition period at the moment
where clearly something's happening, but still a lot of
people refuse to see it. And that's, that's a lot of
opportunity in that moment, though to, to, you know, for,

(47:46):
for personal success, but also for, I mean, societally, society
generally to, to look at this new thing with clear eyes,
right? Yeah.
And the challenge of course is with the speed that technology
is changing generally, how do welook at any new thing with, you
know, in in a time frame and keep pace with it.
It's just so difficult right now.

(48:08):
And you know, if you take the say, take the perspective of
your some sort of finance advisor or strategic analyst for
a company that doesn't isn't involved in Bitcoin and you're
trying to catch up on it right now, like good luck with that.
Like, I mean, people in the Bitcoin space can't keep up with
it most of the time. And trying to look, it's a

(48:31):
fairly steep learning curve. And so I don't, I don't like,
I'm not sure like what what the base knowledge is that people
are going to all those people that don't understand Bitcoin
right now, how long is it going to take and what can be done to
facilitate that transition? I'm not entirely sure about

(48:52):
that. Well, I also come back to some
more fundamental questions around society and kind of the,
the constitution of, you know, the way nations and, and, and
societies work. Because I mean, there's this can
lean in towards a sort of sovereign individual mindset.
But I do wonder whether there's going to be a great reckoning of
the way society actually works at a high level where maybe

(49:16):
those who get it and those who don't get it end up in these
kind of two strata and the the myth of, you know, nation state
democracy and, and this kind of stuff maybe starts to fade.
And I already wonder whether we're in that mode where you've
got these procurate gig workers and kind of the the laptop class
and these kinds of strata the same, you know, actually quite

(49:38):
archaic. But you know, that is the
reality that we've come into. And you know, what does that
mean? You know, is it folly to search
for some Great Society wide solution when actually you
either get it or you have fun staying poor as the main goes,
which is not necessarily a positive thing from a human
perspective. But man, I don't know.
I don't know. Yeah, it's a it's a difficult

(49:59):
one to even think about sometimes.
One thing that that strikes me from both Austrian and
institutional economics perspectives is that it's it's
they're both focused in the bottom up.
So Eleanor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom were husband and wife

(50:19):
pair at Indiana University whereI studied.
I was there one, one year full time in my PhD and they were
very much they look back to the Tocqueville, his research in the
United States very early on and the importance of community
meetings and sort of like, yeah,town level round tables and

(50:47):
forms for debating issues. And there's a whole movement on
the again, not necessarily politically left, but it tends
to be picked up more that that on that side about deliberative
democracy and the importance of deliberative democracy.
And Vincent Oosterman particular, he was the Lynn was
the micro person. He was the macro person in the

(51:09):
in the pair and he was like super adamant that democracy
with something that evolved and was crafted and you should view
it as artisans keeping a democracy together.
And that it was a lot of hard work.
And one of the things with our society right now is that nobody

(51:30):
seems to have any time to spare to do anything.
And that, and I think probably Austrians and institutional
economists, everybody in the space just about would agree
that, well, that's a function, that's a, that's a problem, you
know, fix the money, fix the world.
And that's, that's part of it. And so we're in this this age
right now where nobody has time,nobody has the inclination to

(51:55):
engage in learning about Bitcoin, never mind deliberative
democracy that requires engagement in all these
different fields that are important in the places where
they live. So Vincent was very big.
You know, the place where you live is where the problems
reside. And the way that you solve that

(52:18):
is through deliberation and contestation.
He wasn't like about everybody living happily, you know, ever
after. He was very much, he was an
American federalist. He viewed the federal system and
it's multi, you know, it's as they call it in Indiana,
polycentric governance, many different spheres of governance,

(52:39):
always contesting each other, always experimenting.
So, you know, how do, how do we get this governance experiment,
experimentation going in a, in asociety that's too busy, that
can't afford it and that is pressed from a time horizon with
other advancing technologies. And so it's, it's a huge

(53:00):
problem. Maybe the new technologies,
maybe we'll be able to put AI onthis problem and help us, you
know, free up some time eventually, but that's not clear
right now either. Yeah, well, just pulling on that
thread if it's okay. I mean, because again, this is
quite fresh in my mind because as I said, I've just been
reading some stuff by Matthew Crawford, who's very interesting

(53:22):
talking about again this. He did a talk about these self
driving cars and just sort of how that's this top down kind of
nudge effectively anti human, which sees the humans as stupid,
obsolete, fragile, hateful, unable to really, you know,
drive a car. But actually that's a very
narrow lens that kind of equatesa human being with a computer.
And the computer's obviously going to win if you try and make

(53:44):
them, you know, in the same category.
But actually taking a sort of social angle that humans as a
social creature, actually, the reason why humans are actually
pretty good drivers in a lot of cases is because they make eye
contact and they're able to let someone, you know, they can
break a minor driving rule to let someone pass or whatever.
And, and, and sort of situationswhere a fully automatic system

(54:05):
wouldn't be able to really deal with their kind of chaos of
reality. And it's interesting this kind
of democracy, this contention, which we kind of saw with up
return, for better or for worse.I'm just kind of happy that
people were having a go at each other because, you know, like, I
don't know, I mean, there was some, I mean, I, I had my own
opinions on that whole thing. But it's like, well, at least

(54:26):
people got up and had had a go and, you know, a little bit
tribalistic, you know, maybe some misinformed opinions, but
that that for me is kind of positive.
And the alternative, as you say,you know, this kind of atomized
Society of, you know, not not really engaging politically, I
mean, that's actually quite dangerous because you
automatically leave a vacuum there for the technocracy to

(54:48):
come in and to sort of shape, you know, reality.
And, and, and kind of especiallywhen we look at these tech
companies. And, and so in that sense,
sorry, there's a lot, a lot of information.
But I, I wonder if there's a, a kind of a mode here where
Bitcoin, even though it is quiteself empowering, it also leads
to kind of these communities andkind of engagements happening

(55:09):
that maybe ripple out to society, which is for the most
part, kind of over politics. And especially in Japan, where I
live, it's post political man. Like no one cares.
No one cares. It's they live at the at the
pleasure of the state and that'ssort of frozen, ossified to use
Bitcoin terminology. And I don't know, man, I don't
know. It's like a kind of a neoliberal
dark dream where there is no political, it's just these

(55:31):
individual entities sort of doing their thing.
I don't know how positive that is long term for social animals
like humans. No, no, it doesn't sound very
positive. You know, there's always going
to be conflict and you know, there's, I mean, we see social
norms that conflict all the timeand how we end up resolving them

(55:52):
is, is something that, you know,I mean, that takes work.
I mean, there has to be there. There needs to be you.
You need to be able to monitor, which we can like it's humans,
like you said, driving. I mean, we're very, very good at
picking up social cues and driving social norms.
I found that out like personallydriving in Thailand one time for
like, I don't know, I had a rental vehicle for four months

(56:15):
there and you know, weekend onceI figured out how what the horn
horn honking meant, I was, you know, as chaotic as a Nate tie
driver. But at the same time, once you
learn what the rules rules of the game are, then everything
functions and back to the institutional economics.
Douglas N another one of the Nobel Prize winners in

(56:37):
institutional economics. He he focused more on melding
institutional economics and economic history, but he was the
one that defined institutions. Like, so institutions don't mean
organizations. Institutions are the rules of
the game. And, you know, the work that
Leno Ostrom did was, well, how do we differentiate?

(57:00):
How did we define the rules of the game?
And there's this difference between the formal rules of
government, which may be bitcoiners are dead set against,
you know, it's coercion or whatever the case is, you know,
whether it's financial sanctionsor, you know, physical
imprisonment, sanctions for different sorts of penalties.
But then at the same time, we have social norms that are in

(57:21):
place that are just as severe asthat, you know, try go in and
drop in being a lobster fisherman and drop your lobster
pots in up in New England and see what happens if you go into
somebody else's territory. And I, I'm sure there's examples
in Japan like similar to that where you don't, you don't cross
borders. And that gets back to the

(57:42):
transaction costs. And you know, the institution's
things work when they're, if youhave a community that is in a
physical place and there are fairly clear boundaries and
people have ways to monitor and there's some sort of graduated
like sanctions. This all comes from Lenos Ostrom

(58:03):
as well that all these conditions that she found by
studying water, like self governing water systems and
forestry and fisheries internationally.
There's a certain set of conditions that tends to
describe those places where selfgovernance can actually happen.
But even their self governance, if you have a a highly mobile

(58:27):
fishery, for example, the local governance doesn't work.
You need something. You need a strong governance
that pays attention to local knowledge.
Now, Bitcoin being completely global, both for mining and for
use, I'm not even, I haven't even sort of thought out what
the, you know, implications for that are.
But you know, it's a, it's a global international technology

(58:50):
with no limits on who participates that has some
really important transaction cost economics implications as
well that just like nobody's even begun to think about right
now. And I think we'll, as we go
along, we're going to see a lot of surprises along the way.
Yeah. Well, well, just a couple more
thoughts on that, Mario. Like I've just the other day

(59:12):
again, I was, I was reading another essay on on democracy
and sort of this idea that, you know, there's these formal
rules, but then there's the unspoken social rules that
actually rely on something deeper than the human psyche to
make it work. And there was actually a really
interesting essay by Brian Eno, who's, you know, a famous
musician who he came up with this new way of sort of writing

(59:33):
music, which instead of using the classic score and, you know,
the the objective notation of music, it was more of like a
description of how you do it in relation to other people.
And, you know, if someone's singing at this note, try and
sing one note higher. And it was this kind of
descriptive ways that basically rely on no formal training.
And actually, interestingly, thethe music kind of comes out

(59:55):
somewhat similar no matter who does it, because, you know,
people can follow these rules even if they couldn't read the
the note, the sheet. And it sort of posits.
Sorry. The vibe coding approach to
music. Yeah.
Or yeah, I mean, vibe coding's got its AI connotations, but
it's more like, well, if you putpeople in a room, generally
speaking, you can expect certainoutcomes.

(01:00:16):
You know, then it's not going toreally do something super crazy.
Whereas an AI can actually hallucinate something, you know,
super out there. And so I just sort of relies on
something kind of the firm, the OR the hardware of the human,
the firmware of the human and and social, you know, democracy
has a couple of rules that kind of lead that, but for the most
part it's relying on something nice and people.

(01:00:37):
And yeah, I think that's that's kind of interesting approach.
There's our little friends. Some somebody was like Pastor
Amy, so I had to bring him up for a bit.
What's his name, by the way? This is Doug.
Doug. Hey, Doug.
But anyway, man, it's all super interesting.
So I'm keen to just wrap up withthat then, Murray and sort of
look towards the future. You got this sort of this idea

(01:01:00):
for transaction cost economics as a book.
You got a few other things you're working on.
I mean, what's the rest of 2025 sort of hold and hold in store
for you? Get out the Horizon scan project
as quickly as possible, which I figure will be the draft will be
about another month. I'm not sure how we'll put it
out, whether it'll be like a sort of a Satoshi action

(01:01:21):
technical report or if we're actually go to try to put a like
a published book out on it. It's very, it's very much aimed
at academics and going through when I've got like 100
information gaps in the researchspace and you know, some, some
material on what type of research program could maybe

(01:01:42):
address these gaps. And that's what it is.
So it's, it's very much orientedtowards research funders and
donors, academics and not so much general readership.
So we'll we'll see about that. I've got, yeah, I'll probably
get back to the institutional piece after this.

(01:02:02):
We've also been doing like we'vealso on the financial side, we
had one journal article that waspublished on, I did a price
model for Bitcoin that was basedon fixed supply and demand.
So very microeconomic approach to putting values or projecting
price trajectories for the future for Bitcoin.

(01:02:25):
And then we also did some reports on state pension fund,
some counterfactuals and what would have happened if state
pensions. And this feeds into the Satoshi
Action Fund work that Eric Peterson and Dennis Porter are
doing. So we have probably a bit more

(01:02:45):
of that. I have some modifications to the
models, to the financial models that I need to get done, just a
couple of tweaks to account for Bitcoin coming back into the
system. The initial model, I assume that
every Bitcoin that went to an ETF would stay there, which
obviously that's not the case and it slows down that would

(01:03:07):
slow down the supply shock sometime some period into the
future. But what I'm interested in on
the economic modeling is when, when, when is the supply shock
likely? And how much of A supply shock
is that likely to be? And I think we're, you know, I'd
say I'm sort of like 75% of the way there with the 1st paper.

(01:03:28):
But again, like the methane modeling that I've done, I know
I should be doing this in Pythoninstead and make it, allowing
it, you know, putting it out open source model so people
could just tweak away and see what their own assumptions are.
And I just, so far I haven't hadtime to like sit down with the
AI and sort of work out what it would take to translate models

(01:03:53):
from this analytical code into into Python.
Yeah, understood that. You got a little bit on your
plate there then. But and that's that sounds all
really exciting and I guess I mean just I feel like we kind of
dived in pretty deep with the transaction cost economics.
But one final question for you, I mean, what what do you think

(01:04:14):
is the most important question we need to be thinking about
right now with with Bitcoin? The most important question, oh
man, that's a that's a nasty one.
Personally, I think it's what are, as we look to potential
large scale adoption worldwide, I, I'm really interested in

(01:04:36):
myself, what are the determinants of adoption?
So what do people have to know what sort of culture, what makes
people adopt Bitcoin and will itbe sticky over time?
And that sort of has a technicalback backdrop.
I mean, we're going to, there needs to be some improvements
maybe in Lightning or maybe it'll be liquid or another side

(01:04:58):
chain that becomes really important.
I mean, that's one of them. I also think that it's really
important that we start to thinkabout the sort of what the
future will look like under different, call it under
different Bitcoin, under different Bitcoin trajectories

(01:05:21):
that vary along key axis. So we can think institutional
versus personal adoption, you know, contestation with
governance versus governance or governments being on board.
There's a lot of different sort of axis we can cleave things
apart on. And a lot of those futures don't
look particularly bright if you start to think think out what

(01:05:44):
really, you know, what really isinvolved with them.
I mean, we get into these futures where you might have
sort of like a small scale Bitcoin systems operating,
operating regionally, but they don't integrate globally.
There's all sorts of questions about what's the what would be

(01:06:04):
the preferred outcome for Bitcoin on a global scale and
how do we shape the pathway there because there's many
different divergent pathways that go in different directions.
Yeah, that's fascinating. And I think it's important to be
asking these kinds of questions,Marie.
And your work research, doing academic study into this is very

(01:06:27):
important. So I appreciate your time.
Thanks for joining me again today.
And yeah, I hope we can keep in touch.
Yeah, sounds good. Thanks very much for having me.
Thank you for listening. I am Cody Allingham and that was
the transformation of value. If you would like to support
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(01:06:47):
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