July 24, 2025 • 60 mins
🪙 It’s not just a coin — it’s a revolution.
In this cinematic-style episode, we explore how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are dismantling the financial system from the inside out. From the ruins of inflation, bank bailouts, and economic censorship, emerges a new power — decentralized, ungoverned, and unstoppable. 💥 Who’s really threatened by Bitcoin — governments or banks?
🧠How do blockchain and crypto wallets put control back in your hands?
⚠️ Is this the rise of financial freedom… or digital surveillance in disguise? This isn’t hype. It’s history in real time.
🎧 Download, subscribe, and plug in to the docu-style breakdown of how Bitcoin is ending money as we know it.
In this cinematic-style episode, we explore how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are dismantling the financial system from the inside out. From the ruins of inflation, bank bailouts, and economic censorship, emerges a new power — decentralized, ungoverned, and unstoppable. 💥 Who’s really threatened by Bitcoin — governments or banks?
🧠How do blockchain and crypto wallets put control back in your hands?
⚠️ Is this the rise of financial freedom… or digital surveillance in disguise? This isn’t hype. It’s history in real time.
🎧 Download, subscribe, and plug in to the docu-style breakdown of how Bitcoin is ending money as we know it.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Look closely, what do we all have in common? No
matter what corner of the world you live in, you
need food, water, shelter, and money. Half of every transaction
involves money in exchange for goods or services, stocks, a
(00:23):
loaf of bread, illegal drugs. You gotta pay for it.
We spend much of our lives chasing money to make
a living and accomplish our dreams. But it's also an
instrument of destruction, some might say evil, driving criminals to lie, steal,
and even murder.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The existing banking system extracts enormous value from society, and
it is parasitic in nature.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Money is a catalyst for the worst and the best
of human endeavor. Before civilization, we created currency, feel for war,
the path to power, champion and enemy of innovation. Money
is so integral to our society and our global economy
(01:12):
that its true nature remains a mystery to most. This
is the story of money, perhaps the end of money
as we know it. No matter how fat your bank
account or how thin your wallet, to us, it's all cold,
hard cash. There are some who want to kill it,
get rid of it. Burn your dollars, your euros, your yen,
(01:33):
and transform every penny you have into ones and zeros
digital currency. Entrust it to the web and computers spread
across the planet. Magic Internet money. It's called cryptocurrency. Bitcoin
invented in secret.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
It was a gift to the world.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
It's not just the currency bit, it's actually programmable money,
a potential curse on.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Bankers, and there's nothing that the big bank her politicians
can need to stop.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
It breaking every government's grip on money.
Speaker 6 (02:04):
Supply what the Internet did for information, bitcoin is doing
for money.
Speaker 7 (02:12):
Could it be the new gold? No, you have to
really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value
of bitcoin is.
Speaker 8 (02:23):
Regulators, the Federal Reserve of the banking system, please understand
this is a thing that they have to take seriously.
Speaker 9 (02:29):
This is going to change the economic culture.
Speaker 10 (02:31):
Bitcoin could be a micro economic miracle worker, and it
could be a macroeconomic wrecking bull.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Is bitcoin the currency of the future, a god send
for criminals? Or a recipe for a financial disaster? If
you trust your money just as it is. We have
a little story to share. Once upon a time, there
(03:13):
was a big party with everyone standing around the punch
bowl drunk. Politicians credited the strong economy to their wise decisions.
Businesses jumped into new profitable markets, ignoring risk. In fact,
the experts said there was no risk. Then troubling market
(03:35):
data from minor countries spooked the markets. Rumors spread, more
bad news rattled housing prices. At the heart of the
financial world, a major bank went insolvent. Investors and businesses
made a run on the other banks, demanding their cash deposits.
The largest financial institutions in the center of the modern
world were frozen. Assets were seized, banks foreclosed. A credit
(03:57):
crunch threatened the entire world economy. And then, finally, the
government stepped in the largest bank bailout ever. Swift action
by the head of state had saved the day. Remember that, no,
you don't. It happened two thousand years ago, Rome thirty
(04:20):
three AD ground zero for the first recorded liquidity crisis
and government bailout in history. The largest empire the world
had ever seen was brought to its knees by a
banking disaster. Emperor Tiberius used money from the national treasury
to bail out the country's troubled banks and companies. History
(04:41):
may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes badly. People
in power and their money have always been at the
very center of it. The story of money is as
(05:06):
old as civilization itself. When we lived in small tribes,
keeping track of debt was easy. You owed somebody a
load of firewood, a neighbor owed you a piece of meat.
Credits and debts were kept in your head. A mental ledger.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Currency is a language that allows us to express transactional
value between people. It's a technology that's older than the wheel.
It's as old as fire.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
When humans wanted to trade outside their tribe or village,
they needed something everyone could agree had value, something scalable.
Enter commodity monies. There were many kinds, but each had
to embody the same five characteristics. A commodity money is
relatively scarce, easily recognizable, can be cut into smaller pieces,
(06:01):
You can substitute one piece for another of equal value,
and you can carry it around without too much trouble.
In ancient Rome, it was soft. The Aztecs used coco beans.
It was whale teeth on Fiji, yack dung in Tibet,
shells in Africa and China, grains, metal, ivory, rare stones, leather, fish.
(06:26):
If it had the five characteristics of commodity money, someone
probably used it as currency, and.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Then you ask what value do these currencies have. If
you go into a primary school, you'll see children exchanging
rubber bands and tamagochi and Pokemon cards and baseball cards
and sweets and candy and any other form of currency.
People invent currency when they have no other currency, and
now they're going to invent digital currencies.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
But commodities that aren't durable are a lousy store of value,
a bad coco crop, or a huge new salt discovery
can throw your currency and economy into turmoil. A more
stable system was needed. About twenty five hundred years ago,
the first metal coins were minted in China and in
(07:14):
what is now Turkey. These coins shared the same five
characteristics with commodity money, but were also very durable. In
some cases, coins are the only thing left of entire civilizations.
Speaker 11 (07:31):
Money does not originate with governments. Money arises naturally as
markets begin to develop, and as people with a division
of labor realized that if I have eggs and you
have a cow, we may need some medium of exchange
in order for you to buy my eggs for me
to buy your cow.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Coins were an objective and universal unit of account, and
they allowed people to buy and sell goods over regions.
The market economy was born. Coins worked, but only if
people trusted that the king or emperor who issued them
wasn't cheating on the metal content. Using coins also meant
(08:13):
that an authority now controlled the supply of your currency.
Money and political power were inextricably linked. Centralized minting coins
in a steady and predictable manner allowed economic growth and stability.
The Wushue coin in China retained its value for five
(08:34):
hundred years. In Constantinople, the Soliders lasted for seven hundred years.
Speaker 12 (08:40):
But in those times coins didn't have the milled or
this sort of milled edge. They were flat, and what
used to happen was as coins for passing from to people,
people would cut little bits off, and in fact some
of the taxation that the kings woulding would actually be
taken one nighth of the coin off.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Taxes built castles and financed military campaigns expensive hobbies. Soon
royal mints were substituting cheaper metals for silver and gold.
This is called debasement, and Europe's kings made a habit
of it. The currency of France was debased every twenty
months for two hundred years. If no one can trust
(09:24):
the gold or silver content of your coins, how can
you trade with other countries? International merchants found a solution.
They recognized that one person's debt has value. It can
be traded or transferred. When those IOUs came from reputable sources,
(09:44):
they could be used as a form of money, paper money.
This money was not based on hard commodities or metal,
but instead on someone's promise to pay. Merchant families like
the Medici in fifteenth century Florence, acted as clearing ho
houses for these IOUs. It worked like liz An English
(10:04):
trader ordered a shipment of Italian cloth from the Medici
for one hundred gold coins. His promise to pay the
Medichi was.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Put on paper.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Meanwhile, the Medici owed one hundred gold coins to another
trading partner for delivery of wine from France. The parties
didn't go to the expense of transporting and exchanging gold coins. Instead,
the paper was transferred. Everyone agreed that the paper had
value one hundred gold coins, but only because everyone trusted
(10:33):
the Medici as solvent middlemen. They had created a paper
money machine. Within a few generations, they rose from low
crime to high finance. Their great wealth helped fuel the
Italian Renaissance and elevated the family to levels of enormous
political power, the power to marry in to royal families
(10:55):
and get elected as popes. The ties binding money to power,
politics and influence now ran through church and state. Merchants
had proven that creating paper currency could be wildly profitable.
Goldsmiths want it in on the action.
Speaker 13 (11:14):
Imagine it like this, if the goldsmith had seen over
a period of time that some of the coins he
was storing for people were gathering dust. The people who
owned them don't need them right now. So what if
I go and land them out into the community, and
I charge the interest on this loan. So he starts
out lending some of these gold coins, and then later
(11:35):
he realizes, actually people don't even want the gold coins.
They just want the piece of paper that says the
gold coins are in the bank and with the goldsmith.
So I can now make a loan with these pieces
of paper, and whatever I write on a piece of paper,
as long as people trust me, they'll trust the paper.
And effectively, the goldsmiths and the early day bankers, they
(11:57):
had literally acquired the power to money.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
More and more private paper money from merchants and banks
circulated and began to rival the crown's coins. The power
inherent in controlling and issuing money began slipping away from
the rulers. They couldn't tax or debase this new kind
of money, but they had bigger ambitions than ever, With
trading posts, colonies, and empires that now stretched across the globe.
(12:27):
For centuries, European countries would take turns, building massive fleets
and waging war on each other to rule the world.
Speaker 11 (12:40):
Government wanted to take the people's money in order to
finance its wars. That's essentially the history of money. Money
and warfare go together.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
War is expensive. One year's income taxes simply aren't enough.
Kings and queens had to borrow money against future tax
They needed a groundbreaking financial innovation, government bonds. The loans
came from rich merchant families and goldsmiths, who by now
had become powerful financiers and bankers. Sovereign debt and deficit
(13:15):
spending had been born. In sixteen ninety four, the Bank
of England was established to funder war against France. England's
(13:39):
central bank was privately owned and granted the monopoly to
issue banknotes paper that could be redeemed for an equal
amount of gold from the government coffers. The central bank
soon also managed the entire debt of the crown.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Money has been a tool of sovereignty for centuries. Being
able to issue currency gave you the power, but it
also gave the value to that monetary supply by backing
it with a force of state, with essentially the data state.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
When the US won independence from Britain, the first article
of the new constitution gave Congress the exclusive right to
coin money. This currency's value was tied to gold in
government vaults. From seventeen eighty one until the Panic of
nineteen oh seven, the financial system of the US was
an economic petri dish brief central banks, state banks, private banks,
(14:33):
private currency, government currency depressions, strong growth recessions, regular boom
and bus cycles.
Speaker 14 (14:41):
The long term, as far as capitalists concerned, people want predictability.
People want stability. From the back of that they can plan.
That's very hard to plan in the long term with
at such a level of holatility.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
In nineteen thirteen, bankers and politicians decided that it was
in the country's best interest and theirs to have a
permanent central bank, they created the Federal Reserve. Among its jobs,
expand or contract the supply of a single national currency,
the Federal Reserve Note. The dollar was tied to gold,
(15:16):
and strategic control of it would avoid booms that lead
to busts. At least that was the plan. Then came
nineteen twenty nine. The Great Depression would have a profound
effect on monetary policy worldwide.
Speaker 15 (15:40):
I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument
to meet.
Speaker 16 (15:44):
The prices broad execuative power.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Soon, the FED had printed nearly all the money it
legally could to pump life back into the economy. It
needed gold to fire up the mint, so in nineteen
thirty vere President Roosevelt issued a controversial executive order forcing
all US citizens to sell their gold to the Federal
Reserve at a fixed price or go to prison. The
(16:13):
FED offered far more cash to foreign governments for their gold.
Many jumped at the offer, Gold flowed in, and dollars
spread across the globe. World War II devastated nearly every
(16:35):
major economy except the United States. The military and industrial
Juggernaut emerged as the global financial superpower. The dollar had
become the world's most stable and trusted currency. Other countries
pegged their currency to the dollar, which could still be
(16:55):
redeemed for gold. In fact, the US owned more than
half of the world's gold reserves. In the next few decades,
more dollars flowed to foreign countries. Governments began debasing their
coins with cheaper metals and printing more of their own
currency than they had in gold. The bond between precious
(17:16):
metals and paper currency was cracking.
Speaker 12 (17:20):
This is a nineteen sixty six fifty cent pace. It
was the last coin in regular circulizing in Austria to
contain silver, and it contains eighty percent silver, so in nineteen.
Speaker 17 (17:31):
Sixty six this was fifty cents.
Speaker 12 (17:34):
Nowadays it's eight dollars roughly in silver alone.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
By nineteen sixty six, foreign nations had had enough of
the US collecting gold and printing cash, and they had
more value in dollars than the US had bullion in
its vaults. They demanded gold in return for their paper dollars.
Arguments about the value of the dollar versus their currency ensued.
In nineteen seventy one, President Nixon settled the matter. He
(18:02):
severed United States currents from the gold standards.
Speaker 15 (18:06):
I had directed Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility
of the dollar in the gold or other reserve assets,
except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the
interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Never again could anyone legally demand US government gold in
exchange for paper dollars. For better or worse, the dollar
was now backed solely by the full faith and credit
of the United States Government. The wealthiest nation the world
had ever known, would bet its future on a single
word trust.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
People have this mythology of money that is based on
very little fact. And one of the nice things about
bitcoin is that it forces people to start to ask
questions about the fundamentals of money.
Speaker 11 (18:57):
A bitcoin is an attempt to adopt the advanced computerized
system that we have the enginet to resurrecting what money
used to be all about.
Speaker 8 (19:21):
I think our dollar policies, our monetary policies, our fiscal
policies have absolutely created a nation of debtors, not just
personal debt, not just corporate debt, but government debt. And
you have to look at those all together as one
big thing. What is the wealth of the nation. Well,
the wealth of the nation is a gigantic hole of
money that we owe to the rest of the world
that is never going to be paid back.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Today, the United States pays more than four hundred billion
dollars in interest to its creditors every year. When a
government spends more money than it collects in taxes, it
simply borrows more or it creates more. At one time,
every pece of paper money was backed by gold. Remember,
(20:03):
for every twenty dollar bill, there was twenty dollars worth
of gold in a government vault. Not anymore. Today, governments
create currency by first creating bonds or treasury bills. These
bonds are sold in the market, generating funds for the
government that issued them. Large banks buy US bonds to
(20:26):
flip them, selling them to the Federal Reserve at a profit.
This is the magic money machine.
Speaker 18 (20:32):
You see.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
The FED is America's central bank, but it doesn't have
any money, no cash on its balance sheets. When a
bank buys a bond and takes it to the Federal Reserve,
the FED simply says, thank you, mister banker. Here's the principle,
and some profit. New money isn't exchanged. It simply appears
on the bank's accounts magic. For one hundred years in counting,
(20:55):
the precise mechanisms of these bond purchases have remained a secret.
Here's where it gets really interesting. The Federal Reserve is
not a government agency. It's a private entity, and its
shareholders are banks, which earn a dividend. As much as
eighty billion dollars per year total are paid out to
(21:17):
some of the very same banks that sell the government
debt to the FED, which banks don't even bother asking.
That's also a secret. In other words, the magic money
machine answers to no one. The FED also sets the
bar for how much interest you pay for a car, home,
(21:38):
or business loan.
Speaker 11 (21:40):
The Federal Reserve has been given the impossible task of
trying to run the credit and monetary system as though
we are the Soviet Union. It's the central planner for
the key aspect of capitalism, which is how money and
credit is allocated. The Federal Reserve, I'm balanced, does not
(22:02):
help the economy. I'm balanced. It hurts the economy, and
it's bound to make mistakes even with the best of intentions.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
The FED is also supposed to boost employment with low
interest rates, encouraging people and businesses to buy more goods
and services.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
Government's getting involved in money is a good thing, and
it's also a bad thing. It's a good thing because
money is.
Speaker 19 (22:30):
The arteries of the economy, the blood supply of the economy.
Markets are subject to bouts of euphoria and despair, and
it makes sense for governments to back currency and manipulate it.
Speaker 10 (22:47):
Moving the money supply up and down is the most
powerful way to sedate that boom and bust cycle.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Manipulating the supply of money has short term and long
term consequences. Central banks aim to create new money carefully, strategically,
(23:21):
and very very slowly. Releasing more money into the economy
causes prices to rise ideally by two percent every year.
That's supposed to foster economic growth, but two percent inflation
means the buying power of one cash dollar in your
pocket today will be ninety eight cents next year, and
(23:42):
less nearly every year to come.
Speaker 17 (23:46):
Since nineteen thirteen, when the Federal Reserve took over the
United States dollar, we've seen that the United State styar
has decreased in value. Ninety eight percent. Inflation is a
far high at tax because on your income you pay
it just once. If inflation is two percent, you're buying
a two percent tax on your net worth every single year,
your net worth held in currency.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
So what does that mean? If you earned a dollar
in nineteen thirteen, you could buy sixteen loaves of bread.
Today a dollar barely buys you one. That's not a
quaint notion of how cheap things used to be. It's
proof that the value of your cash is slowly withering away.
(24:31):
That one dollar invested at two percent in nineteen thirteen
would now be worth seven dollars and twenty four cents,
more than six hundred percent return versus a near total loss.
Speaker 9 (24:44):
The the US dollar has gone from being worth one dollar
to now being worth about four cents, So that's you know,
nine to six percent of it's original value. And that's
a direct result of government control.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Governments don't create money from thin air alone. You play
a key role in the magic money machine.
Speaker 13 (25:16):
It's not really the central banks out of the problem,
and they're part of the problem. But the real problem
is that we've given the panet to create money to
the same banks that cause the financial crisis.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
We put our paychecks and savings into a bank account
and draw from it as we need it. The banks
are custodians of our money, right wrong. It is now
the property of the bank on their balance sheets. They
can do just about anything they want with it, for example,
create new money. Here's how your bank account shows one
(25:49):
hundred dollars, but the bank only holds three and loans
ninety seven to Bob to buy something. In the bank's computers.
You still have one hundred dollars in your account, but
Bob now has ninety seven dollars of new virtual money
in his account, just digits on a computer screen. There's
no cash, no gold, or anything else backing up the
(26:11):
new numbers in Bob's account, just his promise to pay
it back. This is new money created as debt. When
those ninety seven dollars are spent, say in a shop,
the shop owner deposits into another bank, and it is
lent out again and again and again. And each of
(26:31):
these people have numbers in their accounts showing that they
own this money. So your original one hundred dollars has multiplied.
Now there are over three three hundred dollars in the system.
This process of loaning out far more money than a
bank actually has as cash. On hand is called fractional
reserve banking.
Speaker 13 (26:53):
In the UK, ninety seven percent of the money that
exists is just numbers in a computer system, and numbers
are created by the banks.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Banks earn untold billions in interest every year by creating
and lending virtual money. What's more, banks don't even need
your deposit to create new money. If they consider someone
credit worthy for a loan, they can put new magic
money into his or her account and start charging interest.
Speaker 13 (27:21):
So reports this talk about bit kindness as though it's
the first digital currency, but actually we use digital currency
every time you make a transaction through instant banking or
through your bank card. Actually it's not even just digital currency.
It's digital currency that is created by the banks.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Essentially, I have nothing. In other words, all new money
is debt. This is the part of money creation that
isn't taught in economics class. Money in paychecks, bank accounts
four oh one case that loan to Bob, credit card debt,
your home loan all began life as virtual money created
(27:59):
by the bank. The entire system is based on trust,
trust in the bank's solvency, trust in the debtor's ability
to repay their debt. If all bank customers demanded just
three percent of their deposits right now in cash. This
run on the banks would reveal the truth. Almost none
(28:21):
of that paper currency you think is in your bank
account exists. It never did, remember the drunken party. Our
financial crisis had everything to do with virtual dollars.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Too.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Many people with very little income borrowed a lot of
money they could never repay, But the banks didn't care.
They didn't have to. They quickly made and sold shaky
loans to someone else for a profit.
Speaker 4 (28:52):
And I got them all a currently way to apply now.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Selling bad loans was a good business until the whole
thing blew up in a global financial crisis. The magic
money machine destroyed thirty million real jobs. The United States
(29:17):
alone lost sixteen trillion dollars in household wealth, and the
banks foreclosed on more than one million homes. Selling subprime
(29:39):
loans and betting they will fail may not be sacred,
but it is lucrative. As much as one quarter of
our best and brightest are being lured by the siren
call of the money machine. Instead of science, engineering, or medicine,
they chose a career playing with betting with other people's
(30:00):
money to get rich. Quick, very rich, and sometimes they
take shortcuts by.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Say my ancestors in Greece talked about the corrupting influence
of power, and nothing has changed in these three thousand years.
When you give control over massive amounts of money to
a few individuals, they will take advantage of that control.
Speaker 18 (30:39):
Banks today are factoring in fines and money laundering and
all the rules that they break into their cost of
doing business. JP Morgan is today coming out and saying
that bitcoin is not a legitimate way of doing business.
Banks today are tied into a system that is completely
rigged to basically harvest money from the entire global economy
and pump it into the hands of very few.
Speaker 20 (31:01):
So get consumed.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
By the existing banking system is cozy, it's captured the regulators,
It extracts enormous value from society without delivering anything in return,
and it is parasitic in nature.
Speaker 14 (31:20):
The banks play a very pivotal role in an economy.
You look at any successful economy, it has successful banks.
There's a very close correlation with banking profits and the
economy as a whole.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
In medieval Europe, a banker who couldn't repay depositors was hanged.
Today that same banker would get bailed out, paid bonuses,
and enjoy some tax benefits too. To date, no senior
US banking executive has been charged for selling the bad
loans that fueled the Great Recession. In December twenty fourteen,
(31:58):
just six years after the last banking crisis brought the
world to its knees, a Congressman snuck a last minute
provision written by City Group into a crucial funding bill.
The provision allows the largest US banks to once again
make risky derivatives bets with bank deposits, but no need
(32:21):
to worry if the banks implode again. Loss deposits must
be paid back by US taxpayers. Today's financial innovators package
(32:52):
assets in ever more complex ways, slicing, dicing, securitizing, always
using someone else's money. They sell debt transfer risks, leverage bets.
That's what they call innovation.
Speaker 14 (33:08):
When you're talking about financial innovation. Bitcoin certainly is a
very good example of innovation, but there's also been other
innovations that people a bit closer to the world of
finance would cite as good examples. An example of that
would be the original swaps market. From then, moving on
to the credit of false one, it is an excellent
(33:28):
example of financial innovation, but also if it's used incorrectly,
it can create a lot of problems.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
As we've just seen, History teaches that the most revolutionary
and disruptive innovation nearly always comes from the fringe, not
from corporate cubucklers. True innovators see the world differently. They
see the big picture, creating new products and entire systems
that lead to new industries. Steve Jobs called them the
(33:56):
square cogs in round holes.
Speaker 20 (34:00):
It's unsurprising that new innovations always come from a niche
group of early adopters because it is inherently very hard
for many people to realize the benefits of new technologies.
In twenty eleven, most bitcoin community people were either people
from the technology space, the gigs and hackers, or people
(34:22):
from the traditional financial industry. There are even some bankers
and hedge fund traders using biconnica at that time as well,
which was really surprising to me.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
A radical new idea is often met with skepticism, ridicule,
even hostility from those who stand to lose the most
from its success. Case in point, the automobile in the
late nineteenth century. Carl Benz and others built the first cars,
(34:55):
contraptions that could threaten the stagecoach and railroad industries. These
self propelled vehicles or road trains would certainly scare horses,
injure people, and damage roads. Cars the railroad baron said
were just too dangerous, and to protect us, they used
their power to pass a law in eighteen sixty five
(35:17):
it required every automobile in England to observe a four
mile per hour speed limit and to be operated by
a crew of three, a driver, an engineer, and a flagman.
This heroic flagman walked in front of the car to
warn fellow citizens of the coming danger. The railroad tycoons,
(35:38):
the lawmakers, the self appointed gatekeepers used regulation to stifle innovation.
But they didn't invent the flagman. He's been around for
a long time. For centuries, very few could read. Books
were copied by hand. The people in control, political and
(35:59):
religious leaders, wanted to keep it that way, and they
greeted Johann Gutenberg's printing press with licensing laws, publishing bands, taxes.
In some parts of the world, printing was a crime
punishable by death. After all, they were just protecting us
from dangerous ideas. Before the printing press, there were an
(36:20):
estimated thirty thousand books in all of Europe. Fifty years
later there were ten million. As Gutenberg's invention flourished, the
dark ages withered. Progress couldn't be stopped, but the flagman
never stops trying. His masters set him loose on each
of these innovations because they threatened someone's profits, someone's control.
(36:47):
But remember this is a story about money. What if
a technological innovation allowed anyone in the world to be
their own bank, to create a currency free from taxes
and banking fees. The US Constitution forbid citizens from printing
(37:16):
or minting their own currency, competing with or undercutting reliance
on the US dollar. In nineteen ninety eight, Bernard von
Notthaus decided to test the resolve of the federal government.
Speaker 21 (37:31):
The Liberty Dollar was available in gold, silver, platinum, and copper.
It was available in three forms, both in specie in
other words, gold and silver, in paper as warehouse receipts,
and in digital form. Obviously, the government didn't like it.
They arrested me and convicted me of counterfeiting, fraud, and conspiracy,
(37:54):
and I'm currently awaiting twenty two years sentence.
Speaker 12 (37:58):
In federal prison.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Lesson learned is that.
Speaker 21 (38:04):
A hacker's convention and another one. There was a young
hacker there who used the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto, and
he talked to a friend of mine, and he identified
the liberty dollar in me as inspiring him to create
a new currency.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Bernard von Notthaus's arrest for creating private money may also
have inspired Bitcoin's inventor to keep a lower profile, publishing
the invention under an alias and vanishing.
Speaker 22 (38:40):
Part of me is interested to know, like who Satoshi is.
Maybe that's part of the mystique of the story. It's
completely irrelevant to the functioning of bitcoin because we have
the code to read, but it would be kind of
fun to know.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Who is Archimedes? Who is Euclid?
Speaker 1 (39:06):
We don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
If Euclid was one person of multiple people, and you
know what, it doesn't matter. Euclidean geometry works whether I
know whose Euclid was or not, whether Euclid was a
moral and good person or whether he was a corrupt
plutocrat and a bastard. Science and mathematics have essential truth
(39:33):
that stands alone, irrespective of its inventors and irrespective of
their motives. Well, Bitcoin is a system based on mathematical truths,
and these mathematical truths stand alone. We can read the
source code and bitcoin and understand it, and it will
be true whether a Setosina Kamoto is a man, a woman,
(39:58):
a collection of individuals, a government agency, or aliens from
the future.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Bitcoin is digital currency and computer software capital b. Bitcoin
is the shared code that creates a global payment network
using computers connected to the Internet. Bitcoins are virtual currency,
digital money created, stored, and exchanged on that network. But
(40:26):
unlike virtual dollars created by a banker, this new currency
was created with math by an anonymous inventor. Bitcoin is
an open source software protocol. Like much of the code
supporting the Internet and email, open source means anyone everyone
can use the protocol. No one person or company can
(40:48):
control it. Every change to the software is public, open
and transparent. The code was first developed by Setocian. Then
there were a dozen. There now hundreds of programmers constantly
collaborating to improve Bitcoin's features and security. So what makes
(41:09):
bitcoin a breakthrough? It tackles an ancient human dilemma and
solves a computer science problem. Any shared information or data
can be flawed corrupted. Anything can be faked. How do
we know that what we're receiving can be trusted?
Speaker 17 (41:32):
In our traditional mindset, it's very important to know who
is behind this currency, because their reputation is significant in
knowing that our funds and the true wealth is actually safe.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
In finance, we rely on trusted third parties like banks,
credit card companies, remittance services. They keep track of money
as it moves from one account to another, and they
charge us handsomely for it. We trust that their digital
ledgers of credits and debts balance. Financial system that cuts
out these middlemen could be faster, cheaper, and more secure.
(42:07):
But bitcoin is digital music and movies are easily pirated, copied, stolen.
How can a digital currency retain value if anyone can
make a million copies? The answer is at the core
of Satoshi's invention. A bitcoin is not a file on
a computer. It's an entry in the publicly distributed database
called the blockchain. Just as the medici kept a ledger
(42:30):
of credits and debits, today's banks record each transaction as
a plus and minus in their ledgers. Now we call
them databases. Bank accounts are replaced by a digital wallet
that you alone controlled. Bitcoin's ledger is the blockchain, a
record of every bitcoin in existence and every bitcoin transaction
ever made. It always balances because no bitcoin ever leaves it.
(42:56):
When a bitcoin is sent from one digital wallet to
an other, what they are really sending is controlled over
that part of the database code that is a unique
key for the new owner. As the network processes transactions,
it constantly synchronizes the one ledger across the global network.
Each computer or bitcoin miner has a complete and identical copy,
(43:20):
and because the blockchain is public, it cannot be controlled
by any one person or computer. Owners of the bitcoin
mining computers are rewarded with new bitcoins for processing transactions
and keeping the network secure. In other words, the bitcoin
(43:41):
network replaces banks and bankers. Today, the combined computing power
of this global network is greater than the five hundred
biggest supercomputers combined times ten thousand, and because every transaction
is verified and recorded by the network, bitcoin cannot be forged.
(44:02):
Digital currency cannot be debased with cheap metals or printed
by the billion at will. Too much currency can unleash
a monster skyrocketing prices, trillion dollar bills that can't buy
a loaf of bread.
Speaker 9 (44:16):
There's a big movement in the US demanding that the
Fed be auditives. We can find out what they're doing.
Nobody really knows how many dollars are in existence. For example,
bm BERN actually created several trillions dollars over the last
several years, but nobody really knows where they landed.
Speaker 5 (44:33):
At any time for any reason. The central banks can
print as much money as they want. They call it
fancy things like quantitative easing, and when they do that,
it makes the dollars or euros or yen that you
and I have worthless. So if the world starts using
bitcoin as their currency, it can't be controlled by central
bankers or politicians.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Remember, central banks create money to boost the economy and
try to pull it back out before inflation heats up,
but no one knows how much magic money global banks
are creating to boost their profits with questionable loans.
Speaker 9 (45:04):
Becomes completely opposite. It's totally transparent. You know exactly how
many exists.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
The computer code behind bitcoin has a built in brake pedal,
cutting the creation of bitcoins in half every four years.
This ensures a transparent, controlled scarcity and ultimately limits the
total number of bitcoins to twenty one million. No lobbyist,
no politician, no banker can create more or change the
(45:31):
mathematical rules dictating their creation.
Speaker 17 (45:35):
Dancing accountability.
Speaker 23 (45:37):
And that's the things I think it's most exciting about
Bitcoin and the technology behind it. Is not so much
that it will supplant the dollar, or that it will
supplant govern itself, but that all of a sudden there's
a competitor to government, and that government itself now needs
to look over its shoulder more than it did.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
This new digital currency can be purchased online with a
credit card or in person and with cash, and it
has the five key characteristics of money. But is it
a store of value? Is it stable or will it
diminish over time like a commodity rendered useless or a
crop that fails. The ultimate power of a cryptocurrency is
(46:18):
unleashed by mainstream adoption and an ever growing volume of transactions.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
With bitcoin.
Speaker 13 (46:26):
The currency has been created much more slowly than other currencies,
and the effect of that has been to turn it
into what is essentially a spectfultive asset. If you ask
a lot of bitcoin enthusiasts whether they're spending the currency,
they're not. They're sitting on it and waiting for the
price to go up. It isn't a currency if you
don't use it to pay people. The point is the
average person is quite happy to walk into a bar
(46:48):
and hand over a five dollar note in order to.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Get a drink.
Speaker 13 (46:53):
So you've got to realize that most people are happy
with the money system they have.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Most people are happy with cash, they're in love with plastic.
In the US, two thirds of in person sales are
done with debit or credit cards. That plastic is a
sixty year old technology created by a middleman, never designed
for the Internet. Each transaction requires personal data like your
(47:22):
name and address. Credit card databases are regularly hacked with
fraudulent purchases charged to your account. Criminals buy and sell
stolen credit cards by the thousands in dark corners of
the Internet. In some parts of London, one third of
all online credit card transactions are fraudulent. Card issuers don't
(47:47):
hold you responsible for fraud, but protection comes with a
price two to four percent in fees. That's fifty billion
dollars a year.
Speaker 6 (47:57):
The issue with credit cards from a merchant's perspective is
there's a lot of risk. If they take a credit card,
there might be a chargeback there might be fraudulent purchases.
In fact, there's hundreds of billions of dollars every year
and fraudulent purchases.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
A bitcoin purchase is done for pennies, but there are
no protections. If you lose your passwords or are fooled
into paying the wrong person, you can never get your
money back. It is like digital cash for a seller.
This means no chargeback risks. For an e commerce company
like Expedia or overstock, cutting credit card fees can double
(48:34):
their profit margin.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
You could not miss the points more effectively than by
thinking of bitcoin as a currency and payment network. They
will make shopping easier for the first world. Bitcoin is
about everything else everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
There are two point five billion people without a bank
account with bitcoin. Bullbone with an Internet connection is now
a bank with access to the global marketplace.
Speaker 24 (49:06):
What happens when bitcoin services and infrastructure and bitcoin wallets
and payment processes start going into these countries. These people
will be able to gain benefits from trade where they
could not previously. These people will be able to send
money home international remittance, which is one of the major
pain points of the current financial system.
Speaker 25 (49:28):
Yeah, if I say one hundred dollars with bunks is
going to cost me twenty percent. Western Union is going
to cost ten percent. Other options that are competing Western
Union is still going to be about five percent, and
if you're sending to really remote areas, it's going to
be anywhere between fifteen and thirty percent.
Speaker 26 (49:48):
So in terms of money rivensys, it's going to be
a game changer. Using bitcoin, do you not need a
bank account, You just need internet connection and a wallet
to get set up. It's a tool to give people
and access into the global ecosystem and give them a
promise for an economic future and specifically provide a way
for them to not be dependent on a government that
(50:09):
could shut down their bank accounts or even could go
into their bank accounts and take out finances.
Speaker 27 (50:15):
Goldman Sachs came out with the report and they basically
looked at fewed to replace all transactions globally sox bank
to bank transactions with the bitcoin producgol and still charging
one percent. Mind you, it would save the global economy
two hundred billion, so not million, two hundred billion dollars
a year in saved transaction costs, which ultimately goes back
(50:40):
into the hands of the consumer.
Speaker 1 (50:42):
An international wire transfer can take up to four days.
Yet the Internet allows us to instantly and globally share text, pictures, videos,
anything digital. Why not money, money, which we now know
only exists as digits in the bank's data.
Speaker 4 (51:01):
Wouldn't it be great if you could send bitcoin transactions
just simply right tweet for example, you would say, at
the end of money, one dollar worth of bitcoin, and
so we build just that. All you have to do
is hashtag it with tip a coin persend and our
Twitter bought will process the transactions, notify you and give
(51:21):
you a link, and this will allow you to either
withdraw your bitcoins or send it to someone else.
Speaker 5 (51:27):
With bitcoin, you can send one dollar or one million
dollars worth of value anywhere in the world. You can
do it for free, or you pay the Bitcoin network fee,
which is still just around a penny, and there's nothing
that the big banks or politicians can do to stop it.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
A cryptocurrency that can only be created and transferred with
computer networks may be the next step of the digital revolution,
the rise of machines, self driving cars, drones, robots that
rely less and less on humans.
Speaker 7 (52:00):
What I often think is that the future of bitcoin
or digital currency from a broader perspective is really about
machine to machine payments. So by the time you have
an unmanned taxi driving you around New York and then
going to power up at an unmanned power station or
going to get repairs at an unmanned auto shop, you'll
(52:23):
see the machine to machine payments done with some sort
of digital currency.
Speaker 28 (52:47):
We actually built this world that we live in the
last two or three hundred years. We've made some mistakes,
We've learned to make things better. The idea that there's
some magic key that if you you just sort of
stop doing a few things, that there will be this
perfect order that will settle is a very childish ideological.
Speaker 10 (53:10):
Delusion in my opinion. But that is not to say
that bitcoin is an exciting thing. It's a terrifically exciting thing,
but we have to try and engage with it with
working minds, not with magical thinking.
Speaker 14 (53:28):
People are suggesting that it's going to be another world
currency arriving the dollar or the euro or the end.
I think that's not going to happen. I prefer to
trust the banks or the central government compared to the bitcoin.
Is because someone's accountable, whereas with the bitcoin, it's completely deregulated.
There's no central control, there's no one held accountable. It
(53:52):
is a free flood. It's purely demand and supply driven.
Speaker 3 (53:59):
So clearly this is not a currency. Currencies don't behave
like this.
Speaker 14 (54:03):
But what this is a high risk speculative commodity.
Speaker 18 (54:07):
So for the entrepreneurs, the bankers, the governments, and everyone
else studying and watching bitcoin, all I have to say
is that there will probably be a lot of volatility
in an upward trajectory. And to buckle up.
Speaker 1 (54:23):
Criminals, scam artists, bad actors are drawn to any kind
of money like a moth to a flame.
Speaker 17 (54:31):
Silk Road was a marketplace that was online. It existed
in the underground web. Now this marketplace allowed people to
sell things that were illegal.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
To governments, fake IDs, pirated music, bibles in North Korea.
Are cryptocurrencies inherently bad or just the newest tool to
acquire the forbidden pawn is illegal in Iran.
Speaker 17 (54:54):
Was a few percent percentage points of sales on silk
Road was to sell pawn to Iranians. Now a much
broader one that gets a lot of pressed with regards
to silk rode is drugs.
Speaker 29 (55:05):
I've been doing research over the past couple of years
into the online drug marketplaces in the darknet, using tour
and bitcoin as technologies to enable illicit drug transactions. We
did a global survey of drug users and we had
over twenty thousand people respond to that, and the majority
(55:29):
of those people were buying traditionally illicit drugs ecstasy, cannabis.
The FBI brought down Silk Road, it certainly hasn't stopped
the trading of illicit drugs online.
Speaker 5 (55:43):
A lot of people want to criticize bitcoin for being
used for illegal things or ilsted things, but if you
look at it, the most popular currency in the entire
world for doing bad things is the US dollar.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
If you think of bitcoin as a platform instead of
a currency, then you really begin to see the potential
it has.
Speaker 5 (56:06):
The ledger, which cannot be forced, it cannot be changed.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
As universe, accepted as genius.
Speaker 5 (56:11):
There will be bitcoin technology forever, and it'll have applications.
Speaker 8 (56:14):
For years to come.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Creating a secure global payment system may just be the beginning. Patents, contracts,
land titles, proof of ownership can be baked into bitcoin,
securely held in the public ledger.
Speaker 3 (56:30):
I've read up on more about bitcoin.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
I played with the source card, I've built some things
that I realized this is actually a very very powerful protocol.
It's not just the currency, but it's actually programmable money.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
The digital age has fundamentally changed the world. We have
embraced digitized music, film, medical records, communications, the Internet. The
free exchange of information and currency can fuel revolutions, help
in disaster. But our money is shackled to the twentieth century,
(57:05):
manipulated by governments and banks. The champions of bitcoin ask
us to imagine payments without a middleman, investments without a broker,
loans without a bank, insurance without an underwriter, charity without
a trustee, Lees grow without an agent, betting without a bookie,
(57:25):
record keeping without an accountant, Global secure, nearly instant and free.
Is it fantasy or the future of money and commerce?
Speaker 3 (58:05):
I love bitcoins. I'm really into bitcoin.
Speaker 16 (58:08):
Where Satoshi Knockamoto, that's the name I love to say,
and we don't know much about him, but he came
to save the day.
Speaker 3 (58:16):
If you don't know what a big coin is, usually
the way people describe it is a digital cash. It's
money world all the internet scene. I'm bit coin.
Speaker 1 (58:26):
As you're gone into.
Speaker 16 (58:27):
The old block.
Speaker 3 (58:28):
Chain, I'm bitting coine.
Speaker 1 (58:30):
I know you're going to rain.
Speaker 3 (58:32):
Gonea rain. People like, oh, I love my bank I'm like, really,
you Oska banker. You know what's turn plus too. He's like, well,
I can tell you, but there's a fade down the road.
Speaker 16 (58:42):
It will be told about the death of old mount cocks,
about traders trading altar coins and miners mining.
Speaker 3 (58:49):
Now, bitcoin is a new technology, and I like to
say it's.
Speaker 16 (58:52):
Banking and lots see all of it, all of the convenience,
none of.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
The three red coin.
Speaker 1 (58:59):
There's you're gone into the old block.
Speaker 3 (59:02):
Chain or big coin.
Speaker 1 (59:03):
I know you're going to rain.
Speaker 3 (59:05):
Gonna rain, dude, everybody knows. Everybody knows. You know. When
I go on line and I buy, like, I don't know,
a pair of socks. If I pay with a credit card,
I'm just buying socks.
Speaker 22 (59:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (59:17):
If I buy those socks with bitcoin, it's a revolution.
I am sticking it to the math.
Speaker 12 (59:32):
Lord.
Speaker 4 (59:36):
There's always people we're not ready to get into the
new technology.
Speaker 3 (59:39):
You know, Like when the Internet came out, there was people.
Speaker 1 (59:41):
Going, nah, I don't think this is gonna be popular.
Speaker 3 (59:46):
And then email came out and people are like, nah,
this isn't gonna catch on. And now bitcoin comes out
and people are like, I don't even think. I'm like,
aren't you singing being wrong? Get on this train, you know,
Look closely, what do we all have in common? No
matter what corner of the world you live in, you
need food, water, shelter, and money. Half of every transaction
involves money in exchange for goods or services, stocks, a
(00:23):
loaf of bread, illegal drugs. You gotta pay for it.
We spend much of our lives chasing money to make
a living and accomplish our dreams. But it's also an
instrument of destruction, some might say evil, driving criminals to lie, steal,
and even murder.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The existing banking system extracts enormous value from society, and
it is parasitic in nature.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Money is a catalyst for the worst and the best
of human endeavor. Before civilization, we created currency, feel for war,
the path to power, champion and enemy of innovation. Money
is so integral to our society and our global economy
(01:12):
that its true nature remains a mystery to most. This
is the story of money, perhaps the end of money
as we know it. No matter how fat your bank
account or how thin your wallet, to us, it's all cold,
hard cash. There are some who want to kill it,
get rid of it. Burn your dollars, your euros, your yen,
(01:33):
and transform every penny you have into ones and zeros
digital currency. Entrust it to the web and computers spread
across the planet. Magic Internet money. It's called cryptocurrency. Bitcoin
invented in secret.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
It was a gift to the world.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
It's not just the currency bit, it's actually programmable money,
a potential curse on.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Bankers, and there's nothing that the big bank her politicians
can need to stop.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
It breaking every government's grip on money.
Speaker 6 (02:04):
Supply what the Internet did for information, bitcoin is doing
for money.
Speaker 7 (02:12):
Could it be the new gold? No, you have to
really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value
of bitcoin is.
Speaker 8 (02:23):
Regulators, the Federal Reserve of the banking system, please understand
this is a thing that they have to take seriously.
Speaker 9 (02:29):
This is going to change the economic culture.
Speaker 10 (02:31):
Bitcoin could be a micro economic miracle worker, and it
could be a macroeconomic wrecking bull.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Is bitcoin the currency of the future, a god send
for criminals? Or a recipe for a financial disaster? If
you trust your money just as it is. We have
a little story to share. Once upon a time, there
(03:13):
was a big party with everyone standing around the punch
bowl drunk. Politicians credited the strong economy to their wise decisions.
Businesses jumped into new profitable markets, ignoring risk. In fact,
the experts said there was no risk. Then troubling market
(03:35):
data from minor countries spooked the markets. Rumors spread, more
bad news rattled housing prices. At the heart of the
financial world, a major bank went insolvent. Investors and businesses
made a run on the other banks, demanding their cash deposits.
The largest financial institutions in the center of the modern
world were frozen. Assets were seized, banks foreclosed. A credit
(03:57):
crunch threatened the entire world economy. And then, finally, the
government stepped in the largest bank bailout ever. Swift action
by the head of state had saved the day. Remember that, no,
you don't. It happened two thousand years ago, Rome thirty
(04:20):
three AD ground zero for the first recorded liquidity crisis
and government bailout in history. The largest empire the world
had ever seen was brought to its knees by a
banking disaster. Emperor Tiberius used money from the national treasury
to bail out the country's troubled banks and companies. History
(04:41):
may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes badly. People
in power and their money have always been at the
very center of it. The story of money is as
(05:06):
old as civilization itself. When we lived in small tribes,
keeping track of debt was easy. You owed somebody a
load of firewood, a neighbor owed you a piece of meat.
Credits and debts were kept in your head. A mental ledger.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Currency is a language that allows us to express transactional
value between people. It's a technology that's older than the wheel.
It's as old as fire.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
When humans wanted to trade outside their tribe or village,
they needed something everyone could agree had value, something scalable.
Enter commodity monies. There were many kinds, but each had
to embody the same five characteristics. A commodity money is
relatively scarce, easily recognizable, can be cut into smaller pieces,
(06:01):
You can substitute one piece for another of equal value,
and you can carry it around without too much trouble.
In ancient Rome, it was soft. The Aztecs used coco beans.
It was whale teeth on Fiji, yack dung in Tibet,
shells in Africa and China, grains, metal, ivory, rare stones, leather, fish.
(06:26):
If it had the five characteristics of commodity money, someone
probably used it as currency, and.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Then you ask what value do these currencies have. If
you go into a primary school, you'll see children exchanging
rubber bands and tamagochi and Pokemon cards and baseball cards
and sweets and candy and any other form of currency.
People invent currency when they have no other currency, and
now they're going to invent digital currencies.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
But commodities that aren't durable are a lousy store of value,
a bad coco crop, or a huge new salt discovery
can throw your currency and economy into turmoil. A more
stable system was needed. About twenty five hundred years ago,
the first metal coins were minted in China and in
(07:14):
what is now Turkey. These coins shared the same five
characteristics with commodity money, but were also very durable. In
some cases, coins are the only thing left of entire civilizations.
Speaker 11 (07:31):
Money does not originate with governments. Money arises naturally as
markets begin to develop, and as people with a division
of labor realized that if I have eggs and you
have a cow, we may need some medium of exchange
in order for you to buy my eggs for me
to buy your cow.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Coins were an objective and universal unit of account, and
they allowed people to buy and sell goods over regions.
The market economy was born. Coins worked, but only if
people trusted that the king or emperor who issued them
wasn't cheating on the metal content. Using coins also meant
(08:13):
that an authority now controlled the supply of your currency.
Money and political power were inextricably linked. Centralized minting coins
in a steady and predictable manner allowed economic growth and stability.
The Wushue coin in China retained its value for five
(08:34):
hundred years. In Constantinople, the Soliders lasted for seven hundred years.
Speaker 12 (08:40):
But in those times coins didn't have the milled or
this sort of milled edge. They were flat, and what
used to happen was as coins for passing from to people,
people would cut little bits off, and in fact some
of the taxation that the kings woulding would actually be
taken one nighth of the coin off.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Taxes built castles and financed military campaigns expensive hobbies. Soon
royal mints were substituting cheaper metals for silver and gold.
This is called debasement, and Europe's kings made a habit
of it. The currency of France was debased every twenty
months for two hundred years. If no one can trust
(09:24):
the gold or silver content of your coins, how can
you trade with other countries? International merchants found a solution.
They recognized that one person's debt has value. It can
be traded or transferred. When those IOUs came from reputable sources,
(09:44):
they could be used as a form of money, paper money.
This money was not based on hard commodities or metal,
but instead on someone's promise to pay. Merchant families like
the Medici in fifteenth century Florence, acted as clearing ho
houses for these IOUs. It worked like liz An English
(10:04):
trader ordered a shipment of Italian cloth from the Medici
for one hundred gold coins. His promise to pay the
Medichi was.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Put on paper.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Meanwhile, the Medici owed one hundred gold coins to another
trading partner for delivery of wine from France. The parties
didn't go to the expense of transporting and exchanging gold coins. Instead,
the paper was transferred. Everyone agreed that the paper had
value one hundred gold coins, but only because everyone trusted
(10:33):
the Medici as solvent middlemen. They had created a paper
money machine. Within a few generations, they rose from low
crime to high finance. Their great wealth helped fuel the
Italian Renaissance and elevated the family to levels of enormous
political power, the power to marry in to royal families
(10:55):
and get elected as popes. The ties binding money to power,
politics and influence now ran through church and state. Merchants
had proven that creating paper currency could be wildly profitable.
Goldsmiths want it in on the action.
Speaker 13 (11:14):
Imagine it like this, if the goldsmith had seen over
a period of time that some of the coins he
was storing for people were gathering dust. The people who
owned them don't need them right now. So what if
I go and land them out into the community, and
I charge the interest on this loan. So he starts
out lending some of these gold coins, and then later
(11:35):
he realizes, actually people don't even want the gold coins.
They just want the piece of paper that says the
gold coins are in the bank and with the goldsmith.
So I can now make a loan with these pieces
of paper, and whatever I write on a piece of paper,
as long as people trust me, they'll trust the paper.
And effectively, the goldsmiths and the early day bankers, they
(11:57):
had literally acquired the power to money.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
More and more private paper money from merchants and banks
circulated and began to rival the crown's coins. The power
inherent in controlling and issuing money began slipping away from
the rulers. They couldn't tax or debase this new kind
of money, but they had bigger ambitions than ever, With
trading posts, colonies, and empires that now stretched across the globe.
(12:27):
For centuries, European countries would take turns, building massive fleets
and waging war on each other to rule the world.
Speaker 11 (12:40):
Government wanted to take the people's money in order to
finance its wars. That's essentially the history of money. Money
and warfare go together.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
War is expensive. One year's income taxes simply aren't enough.
Kings and queens had to borrow money against future tax
They needed a groundbreaking financial innovation, government bonds. The loans
came from rich merchant families and goldsmiths, who by now
had become powerful financiers and bankers. Sovereign debt and deficit
(13:15):
spending had been born. In sixteen ninety four, the Bank
of England was established to funder war against France. England's
(13:39):
central bank was privately owned and granted the monopoly to
issue banknotes paper that could be redeemed for an equal
amount of gold from the government coffers. The central bank
soon also managed the entire debt of the crown.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Money has been a tool of sovereignty for centuries. Being
able to issue currency gave you the power, but it
also gave the value to that monetary supply by backing
it with a force of state, with essentially the data state.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
When the US won independence from Britain, the first article
of the new constitution gave Congress the exclusive right to
coin money. This currency's value was tied to gold in
government vaults. From seventeen eighty one until the Panic of
nineteen oh seven, the financial system of the US was
an economic petri dish brief central banks, state banks, private banks,
(14:33):
private currency, government currency depressions, strong growth recessions, regular boom
and bus cycles.
Speaker 14 (14:41):
The long term, as far as capitalists concerned, people want predictability.
People want stability. From the back of that they can plan.
That's very hard to plan in the long term with
at such a level of holatility.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
In nineteen thirteen, bankers and politicians decided that it was
in the country's best interest and theirs to have a
permanent central bank, they created the Federal Reserve. Among its jobs,
expand or contract the supply of a single national currency,
the Federal Reserve Note. The dollar was tied to gold,
(15:16):
and strategic control of it would avoid booms that lead
to busts. At least that was the plan. Then came
nineteen twenty nine. The Great Depression would have a profound
effect on monetary policy worldwide.
Speaker 15 (15:40):
I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument
to meet.
Speaker 16 (15:44):
The prices broad execuative power.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Soon, the FED had printed nearly all the money it
legally could to pump life back into the economy. It
needed gold to fire up the mint, so in nineteen
thirty vere President Roosevelt issued a controversial executive order forcing
all US citizens to sell their gold to the Federal
Reserve at a fixed price or go to prison. The
(16:13):
FED offered far more cash to foreign governments for their gold.
Many jumped at the offer, Gold flowed in, and dollars
spread across the globe. World War II devastated nearly every
(16:35):
major economy except the United States. The military and industrial
Juggernaut emerged as the global financial superpower. The dollar had
become the world's most stable and trusted currency. Other countries
pegged their currency to the dollar, which could still be
(16:55):
redeemed for gold. In fact, the US owned more than
half of the world's gold reserves. In the next few decades,
more dollars flowed to foreign countries. Governments began debasing their
coins with cheaper metals and printing more of their own
currency than they had in gold. The bond between precious
(17:16):
metals and paper currency was cracking.
Speaker 12 (17:20):
This is a nineteen sixty six fifty cent pace. It
was the last coin in regular circulizing in Austria to
contain silver, and it contains eighty percent silver, so in nineteen.
Speaker 17 (17:31):
Sixty six this was fifty cents.
Speaker 12 (17:34):
Nowadays it's eight dollars roughly in silver alone.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
By nineteen sixty six, foreign nations had had enough of
the US collecting gold and printing cash, and they had
more value in dollars than the US had bullion in
its vaults. They demanded gold in return for their paper dollars.
Arguments about the value of the dollar versus their currency ensued.
In nineteen seventy one, President Nixon settled the matter. He
(18:02):
severed United States currents from the gold standards.
Speaker 15 (18:06):
I had directed Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility
of the dollar in the gold or other reserve assets,
except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the
interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Never again could anyone legally demand US government gold in
exchange for paper dollars. For better or worse, the dollar
was now backed solely by the full faith and credit
of the United States Government. The wealthiest nation the world
had ever known, would bet its future on a single
word trust.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
People have this mythology of money that is based on
very little fact. And one of the nice things about
bitcoin is that it forces people to start to ask
questions about the fundamentals of money.
Speaker 11 (18:57):
A bitcoin is an attempt to adopt the advanced computerized
system that we have the enginet to resurrecting what money
used to be all about.
Speaker 8 (19:21):
I think our dollar policies, our monetary policies, our fiscal
policies have absolutely created a nation of debtors, not just
personal debt, not just corporate debt, but government debt. And
you have to look at those all together as one
big thing. What is the wealth of the nation. Well,
the wealth of the nation is a gigantic hole of
money that we owe to the rest of the world
that is never going to be paid back.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Today, the United States pays more than four hundred billion
dollars in interest to its creditors every year. When a
government spends more money than it collects in taxes, it
simply borrows more or it creates more. At one time,
every pece of paper money was backed by gold. Remember,
(20:03):
for every twenty dollar bill, there was twenty dollars worth
of gold in a government vault. Not anymore. Today, governments
create currency by first creating bonds or treasury bills. These
bonds are sold in the market, generating funds for the
government that issued them. Large banks buy US bonds to
(20:26):
flip them, selling them to the Federal Reserve at a profit.
This is the magic money machine.
Speaker 18 (20:32):
You see.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
The FED is America's central bank, but it doesn't have
any money, no cash on its balance sheets. When a
bank buys a bond and takes it to the Federal Reserve,
the FED simply says, thank you, mister banker. Here's the principle,
and some profit. New money isn't exchanged. It simply appears
on the bank's accounts magic. For one hundred years in counting,
(20:55):
the precise mechanisms of these bond purchases have remained a secret.
Here's where it gets really interesting. The Federal Reserve is
not a government agency. It's a private entity, and its
shareholders are banks, which earn a dividend. As much as
eighty billion dollars per year total are paid out to
(21:17):
some of the very same banks that sell the government
debt to the FED, which banks don't even bother asking.
That's also a secret. In other words, the magic money
machine answers to no one. The FED also sets the
bar for how much interest you pay for a car, home,
(21:38):
or business loan.
Speaker 11 (21:40):
The Federal Reserve has been given the impossible task of
trying to run the credit and monetary system as though
we are the Soviet Union. It's the central planner for
the key aspect of capitalism, which is how money and
credit is allocated. The Federal Reserve, I'm balanced, does not
(22:02):
help the economy. I'm balanced. It hurts the economy, and
it's bound to make mistakes even with the best of intentions.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
The FED is also supposed to boost employment with low
interest rates, encouraging people and businesses to buy more goods
and services.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
Government's getting involved in money is a good thing, and
it's also a bad thing. It's a good thing because
money is.
Speaker 19 (22:30):
The arteries of the economy, the blood supply of the economy.
Markets are subject to bouts of euphoria and despair, and
it makes sense for governments to back currency and manipulate it.
Speaker 10 (22:47):
Moving the money supply up and down is the most
powerful way to sedate that boom and bust cycle.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Manipulating the supply of money has short term and long
term consequences. Central banks aim to create new money carefully, strategically,
(23:21):
and very very slowly. Releasing more money into the economy
causes prices to rise ideally by two percent every year.
That's supposed to foster economic growth, but two percent inflation
means the buying power of one cash dollar in your
pocket today will be ninety eight cents next year, and
(23:42):
less nearly every year to come.
Speaker 17 (23:46):
Since nineteen thirteen, when the Federal Reserve took over the
United States dollar, we've seen that the United State styar
has decreased in value. Ninety eight percent. Inflation is a
far high at tax because on your income you pay
it just once. If inflation is two percent, you're buying
a two percent tax on your net worth every single year,
your net worth held in currency.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
So what does that mean? If you earned a dollar
in nineteen thirteen, you could buy sixteen loaves of bread.
Today a dollar barely buys you one. That's not a
quaint notion of how cheap things used to be. It's
proof that the value of your cash is slowly withering away.
(24:31):
That one dollar invested at two percent in nineteen thirteen
would now be worth seven dollars and twenty four cents,
more than six hundred percent return versus a near total loss.
Speaker 9 (24:44):
The the US dollar has gone from being worth one dollar
to now being worth about four cents, So that's you know,
nine to six percent of it's original value. And that's
a direct result of government control.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Governments don't create money from thin air alone. You play
a key role in the magic money machine.
Speaker 13 (25:16):
It's not really the central banks out of the problem,
and they're part of the problem. But the real problem
is that we've given the panet to create money to
the same banks that cause the financial crisis.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
We put our paychecks and savings into a bank account
and draw from it as we need it. The banks
are custodians of our money, right wrong. It is now
the property of the bank on their balance sheets. They
can do just about anything they want with it, for example,
create new money. Here's how your bank account shows one
(25:49):
hundred dollars, but the bank only holds three and loans
ninety seven to Bob to buy something. In the bank's computers.
You still have one hundred dollars in your account, but
Bob now has ninety seven dollars of new virtual money
in his account, just digits on a computer screen. There's
no cash, no gold, or anything else backing up the
(26:11):
new numbers in Bob's account, just his promise to pay
it back. This is new money created as debt. When
those ninety seven dollars are spent, say in a shop,
the shop owner deposits into another bank, and it is
lent out again and again and again. And each of
(26:31):
these people have numbers in their accounts showing that they
own this money. So your original one hundred dollars has multiplied.
Now there are over three three hundred dollars in the system.
This process of loaning out far more money than a
bank actually has as cash. On hand is called fractional
reserve banking.
Speaker 13 (26:53):
In the UK, ninety seven percent of the money that
exists is just numbers in a computer system, and numbers
are created by the banks.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Banks earn untold billions in interest every year by creating
and lending virtual money. What's more, banks don't even need
your deposit to create new money. If they consider someone
credit worthy for a loan, they can put new magic
money into his or her account and start charging interest.
Speaker 13 (27:21):
So reports this talk about bit kindness as though it's
the first digital currency, but actually we use digital currency
every time you make a transaction through instant banking or
through your bank card. Actually it's not even just digital currency.
It's digital currency that is created by the banks.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Essentially, I have nothing. In other words, all new money
is debt. This is the part of money creation that
isn't taught in economics class. Money in paychecks, bank accounts
four oh one case that loan to Bob, credit card debt,
your home loan all began life as virtual money created
(27:59):
by the bank. The entire system is based on trust,
trust in the bank's solvency, trust in the debtor's ability
to repay their debt. If all bank customers demanded just
three percent of their deposits right now in cash. This
run on the banks would reveal the truth. Almost none
(28:21):
of that paper currency you think is in your bank
account exists. It never did, remember the drunken party. Our
financial crisis had everything to do with virtual dollars.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Too.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Many people with very little income borrowed a lot of
money they could never repay, But the banks didn't care.
They didn't have to. They quickly made and sold shaky
loans to someone else for a profit.
Speaker 4 (28:52):
And I got them all a currently way to apply now.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Selling bad loans was a good business until the whole
thing blew up in a global financial crisis. The magic
money machine destroyed thirty million real jobs. The United States
(29:17):
alone lost sixteen trillion dollars in household wealth, and the
banks foreclosed on more than one million homes. Selling subprime
(29:39):
loans and betting they will fail may not be sacred,
but it is lucrative. As much as one quarter of
our best and brightest are being lured by the siren
call of the money machine. Instead of science, engineering, or medicine,
they chose a career playing with betting with other people's
(30:00):
money to get rich. Quick, very rich, and sometimes they
take shortcuts by.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Say my ancestors in Greece talked about the corrupting influence
of power, and nothing has changed in these three thousand years.
When you give control over massive amounts of money to
a few individuals, they will take advantage of that control.
Speaker 18 (30:39):
Banks today are factoring in fines and money laundering and
all the rules that they break into their cost of
doing business. JP Morgan is today coming out and saying
that bitcoin is not a legitimate way of doing business.
Banks today are tied into a system that is completely
rigged to basically harvest money from the entire global economy
and pump it into the hands of very few.
Speaker 20 (31:01):
So get consumed.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
By the existing banking system is cozy, it's captured the regulators,
It extracts enormous value from society without delivering anything in return,
and it is parasitic in nature.
Speaker 14 (31:20):
The banks play a very pivotal role in an economy.
You look at any successful economy, it has successful banks.
There's a very close correlation with banking profits and the
economy as a whole.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
In medieval Europe, a banker who couldn't repay depositors was hanged.
Today that same banker would get bailed out, paid bonuses,
and enjoy some tax benefits too. To date, no senior
US banking executive has been charged for selling the bad
loans that fueled the Great Recession. In December twenty fourteen,
(31:58):
just six years after the last banking crisis brought the
world to its knees, a Congressman snuck a last minute
provision written by City Group into a crucial funding bill.
The provision allows the largest US banks to once again
make risky derivatives bets with bank deposits, but no need
(32:21):
to worry if the banks implode again. Loss deposits must
be paid back by US taxpayers. Today's financial innovators package
(32:52):
assets in ever more complex ways, slicing, dicing, securitizing, always
using someone else's money. They sell debt transfer risks, leverage bets.
That's what they call innovation.
Speaker 14 (33:08):
When you're talking about financial innovation. Bitcoin certainly is a
very good example of innovation, but there's also been other
innovations that people a bit closer to the world of
finance would cite as good examples. An example of that
would be the original swaps market. From then, moving on
to the credit of false one, it is an excellent
(33:28):
example of financial innovation, but also if it's used incorrectly,
it can create a lot of problems.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
As we've just seen, History teaches that the most revolutionary
and disruptive innovation nearly always comes from the fringe, not
from corporate cubucklers. True innovators see the world differently. They
see the big picture, creating new products and entire systems
that lead to new industries. Steve Jobs called them the
(33:56):
square cogs in round holes.
Speaker 20 (34:00):
It's unsurprising that new innovations always come from a niche
group of early adopters because it is inherently very hard
for many people to realize the benefits of new technologies.
In twenty eleven, most bitcoin community people were either people
from the technology space, the gigs and hackers, or people
(34:22):
from the traditional financial industry. There are even some bankers
and hedge fund traders using biconnica at that time as well,
which was really surprising to me.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
A radical new idea is often met with skepticism, ridicule,
even hostility from those who stand to lose the most
from its success. Case in point, the automobile in the
late nineteenth century. Carl Benz and others built the first cars,
(34:55):
contraptions that could threaten the stagecoach and railroad industries. These
self propelled vehicles or road trains would certainly scare horses,
injure people, and damage roads. Cars the railroad baron said
were just too dangerous, and to protect us, they used
their power to pass a law in eighteen sixty five
(35:17):
it required every automobile in England to observe a four
mile per hour speed limit and to be operated by
a crew of three, a driver, an engineer, and a flagman.
This heroic flagman walked in front of the car to
warn fellow citizens of the coming danger. The railroad tycoons,
(35:38):
the lawmakers, the self appointed gatekeepers used regulation to stifle innovation.
But they didn't invent the flagman. He's been around for
a long time. For centuries, very few could read. Books
were copied by hand. The people in control, political and
(35:59):
religious leaders, wanted to keep it that way, and they
greeted Johann Gutenberg's printing press with licensing laws, publishing bands, taxes.
In some parts of the world, printing was a crime
punishable by death. After all, they were just protecting us
from dangerous ideas. Before the printing press, there were an
(36:20):
estimated thirty thousand books in all of Europe. Fifty years
later there were ten million. As Gutenberg's invention flourished, the
dark ages withered. Progress couldn't be stopped, but the flagman
never stops trying. His masters set him loose on each
of these innovations because they threatened someone's profits, someone's control.
(36:47):
But remember this is a story about money. What if
a technological innovation allowed anyone in the world to be
their own bank, to create a currency free from taxes
and banking fees. The US Constitution forbid citizens from printing
(37:16):
or minting their own currency, competing with or undercutting reliance
on the US dollar. In nineteen ninety eight, Bernard von
Notthaus decided to test the resolve of the federal government.
Speaker 21 (37:31):
The Liberty Dollar was available in gold, silver, platinum, and copper.
It was available in three forms, both in specie in
other words, gold and silver, in paper as warehouse receipts,
and in digital form. Obviously, the government didn't like it.
They arrested me and convicted me of counterfeiting, fraud, and conspiracy,
(37:54):
and I'm currently awaiting twenty two years sentence.
Speaker 12 (37:58):
In federal prison.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Lesson learned is that.
Speaker 21 (38:04):
A hacker's convention and another one. There was a young
hacker there who used the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto, and
he talked to a friend of mine, and he identified
the liberty dollar in me as inspiring him to create
a new currency.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Bernard von Notthaus's arrest for creating private money may also
have inspired Bitcoin's inventor to keep a lower profile, publishing
the invention under an alias and vanishing.
Speaker 22 (38:40):
Part of me is interested to know, like who Satoshi is.
Maybe that's part of the mystique of the story. It's
completely irrelevant to the functioning of bitcoin because we have
the code to read, but it would be kind of
fun to know.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Who is Archimedes? Who is Euclid?
Speaker 1 (39:06):
We don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
If Euclid was one person of multiple people, and you
know what, it doesn't matter. Euclidean geometry works whether I
know whose Euclid was or not, whether Euclid was a
moral and good person or whether he was a corrupt
plutocrat and a bastard. Science and mathematics have essential truth
(39:33):
that stands alone, irrespective of its inventors and irrespective of
their motives. Well, Bitcoin is a system based on mathematical truths,
and these mathematical truths stand alone. We can read the
source code and bitcoin and understand it, and it will
be true whether a Setosina Kamoto is a man, a woman,
(39:58):
a collection of individuals, a government agency, or aliens from
the future.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Bitcoin is digital currency and computer software capital b. Bitcoin
is the shared code that creates a global payment network
using computers connected to the Internet. Bitcoins are virtual currency,
digital money created, stored, and exchanged on that network. But
(40:26):
unlike virtual dollars created by a banker, this new currency
was created with math by an anonymous inventor. Bitcoin is
an open source software protocol. Like much of the code
supporting the Internet and email, open source means anyone everyone
can use the protocol. No one person or company can
(40:48):
control it. Every change to the software is public, open
and transparent. The code was first developed by Setocian. Then
there were a dozen. There now hundreds of programmers constantly
collaborating to improve Bitcoin's features and security. So what makes
(41:09):
bitcoin a breakthrough? It tackles an ancient human dilemma and
solves a computer science problem. Any shared information or data
can be flawed corrupted. Anything can be faked. How do
we know that what we're receiving can be trusted?
Speaker 17 (41:32):
In our traditional mindset, it's very important to know who
is behind this currency, because their reputation is significant in
knowing that our funds and the true wealth is actually safe.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
In finance, we rely on trusted third parties like banks,
credit card companies, remittance services. They keep track of money
as it moves from one account to another, and they
charge us handsomely for it. We trust that their digital
ledgers of credits and debts balance. Financial system that cuts
out these middlemen could be faster, cheaper, and more secure.
(42:07):
But bitcoin is digital music and movies are easily pirated, copied, stolen.
How can a digital currency retain value if anyone can
make a million copies? The answer is at the core
of Satoshi's invention. A bitcoin is not a file on
a computer. It's an entry in the publicly distributed database
called the blockchain. Just as the medici kept a ledger
(42:30):
of credits and debits, today's banks record each transaction as
a plus and minus in their ledgers. Now we call
them databases. Bank accounts are replaced by a digital wallet
that you alone controlled. Bitcoin's ledger is the blockchain, a
record of every bitcoin in existence and every bitcoin transaction
ever made. It always balances because no bitcoin ever leaves it.
(42:56):
When a bitcoin is sent from one digital wallet to
an other, what they are really sending is controlled over
that part of the database code that is a unique
key for the new owner. As the network processes transactions,
it constantly synchronizes the one ledger across the global network.
Each computer or bitcoin miner has a complete and identical copy,
(43:20):
and because the blockchain is public, it cannot be controlled
by any one person or computer. Owners of the bitcoin
mining computers are rewarded with new bitcoins for processing transactions
and keeping the network secure. In other words, the bitcoin
(43:41):
network replaces banks and bankers. Today, the combined computing power
of this global network is greater than the five hundred
biggest supercomputers combined times ten thousand, and because every transaction
is verified and recorded by the network, bitcoin cannot be forged.
(44:02):
Digital currency cannot be debased with cheap metals or printed
by the billion at will. Too much currency can unleash
a monster skyrocketing prices, trillion dollar bills that can't buy
a loaf of bread.
Speaker 9 (44:16):
There's a big movement in the US demanding that the
Fed be auditives. We can find out what they're doing.
Nobody really knows how many dollars are in existence. For example,
bm BERN actually created several trillions dollars over the last
several years, but nobody really knows where they landed.
Speaker 5 (44:33):
At any time for any reason. The central banks can
print as much money as they want. They call it
fancy things like quantitative easing, and when they do that,
it makes the dollars or euros or yen that you
and I have worthless. So if the world starts using
bitcoin as their currency, it can't be controlled by central
bankers or politicians.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Remember, central banks create money to boost the economy and
try to pull it back out before inflation heats up,
but no one knows how much magic money global banks
are creating to boost their profits with questionable loans.
Speaker 9 (45:04):
Becomes completely opposite. It's totally transparent. You know exactly how
many exists.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
The computer code behind bitcoin has a built in brake pedal,
cutting the creation of bitcoins in half every four years.
This ensures a transparent, controlled scarcity and ultimately limits the
total number of bitcoins to twenty one million. No lobbyist,
no politician, no banker can create more or change the
(45:31):
mathematical rules dictating their creation.
Speaker 17 (45:35):
Dancing accountability.
Speaker 23 (45:37):
And that's the things I think it's most exciting about
Bitcoin and the technology behind it. Is not so much
that it will supplant the dollar, or that it will
supplant govern itself, but that all of a sudden there's
a competitor to government, and that government itself now needs
to look over its shoulder more than it did.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
This new digital currency can be purchased online with a
credit card or in person and with cash, and it
has the five key characteristics of money. But is it
a store of value? Is it stable or will it
diminish over time like a commodity rendered useless or a
crop that fails. The ultimate power of a cryptocurrency is
(46:18):
unleashed by mainstream adoption and an ever growing volume of transactions.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
With bitcoin.
Speaker 13 (46:26):
The currency has been created much more slowly than other currencies,
and the effect of that has been to turn it
into what is essentially a spectfultive asset. If you ask
a lot of bitcoin enthusiasts whether they're spending the currency,
they're not. They're sitting on it and waiting for the
price to go up. It isn't a currency if you
don't use it to pay people. The point is the
average person is quite happy to walk into a bar
(46:48):
and hand over a five dollar note in order to.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Get a drink.
Speaker 13 (46:53):
So you've got to realize that most people are happy
with the money system they have.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Most people are happy with cash, they're in love with plastic.
In the US, two thirds of in person sales are
done with debit or credit cards. That plastic is a
sixty year old technology created by a middleman, never designed
for the Internet. Each transaction requires personal data like your
(47:22):
name and address. Credit card databases are regularly hacked with
fraudulent purchases charged to your account. Criminals buy and sell
stolen credit cards by the thousands in dark corners of
the Internet. In some parts of London, one third of
all online credit card transactions are fraudulent. Card issuers don't
(47:47):
hold you responsible for fraud, but protection comes with a
price two to four percent in fees. That's fifty billion
dollars a year.
Speaker 6 (47:57):
The issue with credit cards from a merchant's perspective is
there's a lot of risk. If they take a credit card,
there might be a chargeback there might be fraudulent purchases.
In fact, there's hundreds of billions of dollars every year
and fraudulent purchases.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
A bitcoin purchase is done for pennies, but there are
no protections. If you lose your passwords or are fooled
into paying the wrong person, you can never get your
money back. It is like digital cash for a seller.
This means no chargeback risks. For an e commerce company
like Expedia or overstock, cutting credit card fees can double
(48:34):
their profit margin.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
You could not miss the points more effectively than by
thinking of bitcoin as a currency and payment network. They
will make shopping easier for the first world. Bitcoin is
about everything else everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
There are two point five billion people without a bank
account with bitcoin. Bullbone with an Internet connection is now
a bank with access to the global marketplace.
Speaker 24 (49:06):
What happens when bitcoin services and infrastructure and bitcoin wallets
and payment processes start going into these countries. These people
will be able to gain benefits from trade where they
could not previously. These people will be able to send
money home international remittance, which is one of the major
pain points of the current financial system.
Speaker 25 (49:28):
Yeah, if I say one hundred dollars with bunks is
going to cost me twenty percent. Western Union is going
to cost ten percent. Other options that are competing Western
Union is still going to be about five percent, and
if you're sending to really remote areas, it's going to
be anywhere between fifteen and thirty percent.
Speaker 26 (49:48):
So in terms of money rivensys, it's going to be
a game changer. Using bitcoin, do you not need a
bank account, You just need internet connection and a wallet
to get set up. It's a tool to give people
and access into the global ecosystem and give them a
promise for an economic future and specifically provide a way
for them to not be dependent on a government that
(50:09):
could shut down their bank accounts or even could go
into their bank accounts and take out finances.
Speaker 27 (50:15):
Goldman Sachs came out with the report and they basically
looked at fewed to replace all transactions globally sox bank
to bank transactions with the bitcoin producgol and still charging
one percent. Mind you, it would save the global economy
two hundred billion, so not million, two hundred billion dollars
a year in saved transaction costs, which ultimately goes back
(50:40):
into the hands of the consumer.
Speaker 1 (50:42):
An international wire transfer can take up to four days.
Yet the Internet allows us to instantly and globally share text, pictures, videos,
anything digital. Why not money, money, which we now know
only exists as digits in the bank's data.
Speaker 4 (51:01):
Wouldn't it be great if you could send bitcoin transactions
just simply right tweet for example, you would say, at
the end of money, one dollar worth of bitcoin, and
so we build just that. All you have to do
is hashtag it with tip a coin persend and our
Twitter bought will process the transactions, notify you and give
(51:21):
you a link, and this will allow you to either
withdraw your bitcoins or send it to someone else.
Speaker 5 (51:27):
With bitcoin, you can send one dollar or one million
dollars worth of value anywhere in the world. You can
do it for free, or you pay the Bitcoin network fee,
which is still just around a penny, and there's nothing
that the big banks or politicians can do to stop it.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
A cryptocurrency that can only be created and transferred with
computer networks may be the next step of the digital revolution,
the rise of machines, self driving cars, drones, robots that
rely less and less on humans.
Speaker 7 (52:00):
What I often think is that the future of bitcoin
or digital currency from a broader perspective is really about
machine to machine payments. So by the time you have
an unmanned taxi driving you around New York and then
going to power up at an unmanned power station or
going to get repairs at an unmanned auto shop, you'll
(52:23):
see the machine to machine payments done with some sort
of digital currency.
Speaker 28 (52:47):
We actually built this world that we live in the
last two or three hundred years. We've made some mistakes,
We've learned to make things better. The idea that there's
some magic key that if you you just sort of
stop doing a few things, that there will be this
perfect order that will settle is a very childish ideological.
Speaker 10 (53:10):
Delusion in my opinion. But that is not to say
that bitcoin is an exciting thing. It's a terrifically exciting thing,
but we have to try and engage with it with
working minds, not with magical thinking.
Speaker 14 (53:28):
People are suggesting that it's going to be another world
currency arriving the dollar or the euro or the end.
I think that's not going to happen. I prefer to
trust the banks or the central government compared to the bitcoin.
Is because someone's accountable, whereas with the bitcoin, it's completely deregulated.
There's no central control, there's no one held accountable. It
(53:52):
is a free flood. It's purely demand and supply driven.
Speaker 3 (53:59):
So clearly this is not a currency. Currencies don't behave
like this.
Speaker 14 (54:03):
But what this is a high risk speculative commodity.
Speaker 18 (54:07):
So for the entrepreneurs, the bankers, the governments, and everyone
else studying and watching bitcoin, all I have to say
is that there will probably be a lot of volatility
in an upward trajectory. And to buckle up.
Speaker 1 (54:23):
Criminals, scam artists, bad actors are drawn to any kind
of money like a moth to a flame.
Speaker 17 (54:31):
Silk Road was a marketplace that was online. It existed
in the underground web. Now this marketplace allowed people to
sell things that were illegal.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
To governments, fake IDs, pirated music, bibles in North Korea.
Are cryptocurrencies inherently bad or just the newest tool to
acquire the forbidden pawn is illegal in Iran.
Speaker 17 (54:54):
Was a few percent percentage points of sales on silk
Road was to sell pawn to Iranians. Now a much
broader one that gets a lot of pressed with regards
to silk rode is drugs.
Speaker 29 (55:05):
I've been doing research over the past couple of years
into the online drug marketplaces in the darknet, using tour
and bitcoin as technologies to enable illicit drug transactions. We
did a global survey of drug users and we had
over twenty thousand people respond to that, and the majority
(55:29):
of those people were buying traditionally illicit drugs ecstasy, cannabis.
The FBI brought down Silk Road, it certainly hasn't stopped
the trading of illicit drugs online.
Speaker 5 (55:43):
A lot of people want to criticize bitcoin for being
used for illegal things or ilsted things, but if you
look at it, the most popular currency in the entire
world for doing bad things is the US dollar.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
If you think of bitcoin as a platform instead of
a currency, then you really begin to see the potential
it has.
Speaker 5 (56:06):
The ledger, which cannot be forced, it cannot be changed.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
As universe, accepted as genius.
Speaker 5 (56:11):
There will be bitcoin technology forever, and it'll have applications.
Speaker 8 (56:14):
For years to come.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Creating a secure global payment system may just be the beginning. Patents, contracts,
land titles, proof of ownership can be baked into bitcoin,
securely held in the public ledger.
Speaker 3 (56:30):
I've read up on more about bitcoin.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
I played with the source card, I've built some things
that I realized this is actually a very very powerful protocol.
It's not just the currency, but it's actually programmable money.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
The digital age has fundamentally changed the world. We have
embraced digitized music, film, medical records, communications, the Internet. The
free exchange of information and currency can fuel revolutions, help
in disaster. But our money is shackled to the twentieth century,
(57:05):
manipulated by governments and banks. The champions of bitcoin ask
us to imagine payments without a middleman, investments without a broker,
loans without a bank, insurance without an underwriter, charity without
a trustee, Lees grow without an agent, betting without a bookie,
(57:25):
record keeping without an accountant, Global secure, nearly instant and free.
Is it fantasy or the future of money and commerce?
Speaker 3 (58:05):
I love bitcoins. I'm really into bitcoin.
Speaker 16 (58:08):
Where Satoshi Knockamoto, that's the name I love to say,
and we don't know much about him, but he came
to save the day.
Speaker 3 (58:16):
If you don't know what a big coin is, usually
the way people describe it is a digital cash. It's
money world all the internet scene. I'm bit coin.
Speaker 1 (58:26):
As you're gone into.
Speaker 16 (58:27):
The old block.
Speaker 3 (58:28):
Chain, I'm bitting coine.
Speaker 1 (58:30):
I know you're going to rain.
Speaker 3 (58:32):
Gonea rain. People like, oh, I love my bank I'm like, really,
you Oska banker. You know what's turn plus too. He's like, well,
I can tell you, but there's a fade down the road.
Speaker 16 (58:42):
It will be told about the death of old mount cocks,
about traders trading altar coins and miners mining.
Speaker 3 (58:49):
Now, bitcoin is a new technology, and I like to
say it's.
Speaker 16 (58:52):
Banking and lots see all of it, all of the convenience,
none of.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
The three red coin.
Speaker 1 (58:59):
There's you're gone into the old block.
Speaker 3 (59:02):
Chain or big coin.
Speaker 1 (59:03):
I know you're going to rain.
Speaker 3 (59:05):
Gonna rain, dude, everybody knows. Everybody knows. You know. When
I go on line and I buy, like, I don't know,
a pair of socks. If I pay with a credit card,
I'm just buying socks.
Speaker 22 (59:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (59:17):
If I buy those socks with bitcoin, it's a revolution.
I am sticking it to the math.
Speaker 12 (59:32):
Lord.
Speaker 4 (59:36):
There's always people we're not ready to get into the
new technology.
Speaker 3 (59:39):
You know, Like when the Internet came out, there was people.
Speaker 1 (59:41):
Going, nah, I don't think this is gonna be popular.
Speaker 3 (59:46):
And then email came out and people are like, nah,
this isn't gonna catch on. And now bitcoin comes out
and people are like, I don't even think. I'm like,
aren't you singing being wrong? Get on this train, you know,
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