Shownotes
Many Austrians think that gold is a great store of value. It has a long history (5000 years!!!) as a form of sound money. But should it be used instead of fiat based money or is there a better solution?
News and Links
UK Nuclear Plants Face Shutdown over Windfall Taxes
Italy Imposing 26% Tax on Crypto Profits
NYT - Please go read the Bill of Right...really..
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Transcripts
Hey, Sat Stackers.
Speaker:It's January the 2nd.
Speaker:This is episode 89 of Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency.
Speaker:I'm your host, McIntosh.
Speaker:Today's episode asks why not gold?
Speaker:Of course, no one on this podcast is a financial advisor,
Speaker:and all information presented on this podcast is for informational purposes only.
Speaker:Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let's jump on in.
Speaker:All right, everybody.
Speaker:We will be wrapping up our discussion of Austrian versus Keynesian economics tonight.
Speaker:I think we've put the Keynesian economics to rest for the moment.
Speaker:We will actually circle back at the end of the episode.
Speaker:Tonight, though, I did want to discuss something a little bit different.
Speaker:Gold versus Bitcoin.
Speaker:Now, that's an interesting question, why I would even bring that up.
Speaker:But what you will find if you dig into the Austrian economics is that a lot of the
Speaker:Austrians, of course, believe in gold as a form of stable money.
Speaker:So, it's a relevant discussion if we're going to talk about gold as a standard,
Speaker:a monetary standard versus fiat versus bank-backed money, essentially.
Speaker:So, we'll discuss that.
Speaker:Let's go ahead and do our market update first.
Speaker:It's going to be fairly short this week.
Speaker:I would say with the holidays, Happy New Year, by the way, and the stock market's being closed,
Speaker:and this, that, and the other, it's been a fairly boring week.
Speaker:Markets closed down for the year last Friday.
Speaker:They'll actually be closed tomorrow, and there is where we're at.
Speaker:So, Bitcoin did close tonight at $16,625.08.
Speaker:Ethereum closed at $1,200.96.
Speaker:ADA closed at almost exactly 25 cents, 0.249771 of a dollar.
Speaker:So, very, very close to 25 cents.
Speaker:These are unchanged for the most part.
Speaker:They are down just a fraction on all three fronts.
Speaker:So, we continue to march sideways.
Speaker:No real ups or downs this week, actually, unlike some of the previous weeks,
Speaker:where we've had some spikes or drops, and it just kind of went sideways.
Speaker:Very little variance.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So, that covers the market.
Speaker:As always, I would encourage you to continue to DCA.
Speaker:Of course, I would encourage you to be buying Bitcoin,
Speaker:but into the asset of your choice, of course, as you wish.
Speaker:At this point, there's no real reason to believe that we have broken out of the bear market,
Speaker:and we will either continue to go sideways or continue to go more in a downish trend.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Weekly topic.
Speaker:Why not gold?
Speaker:Why not gold? So, like I said at the start, I know this maybe is a little bit different, but
Speaker:if you deal in Austrian economics, they talk about gold.
Speaker:Basically, any gold bug that you talk to is somebody who's buying gold as a long-term
Speaker:investment, like a lot. They're typically called a gold bug.
Speaker:Any gold bug that you talk to, they're going to be coming at this from an Austrian economics
Speaker:perspective, whether they actually even understand that or not.
Speaker:It's a hedge of inflation.
Speaker:I would caution actually when viewing gold or Bitcoin for that matter as a hedge of inflation.
Speaker:It's not necessarily a short-term hedge of inflation.
Speaker:For example, over the last couple of years, we've not seen gold go up very much in price.
Speaker:I don't think people really understand why.
Speaker:It doesn't matter, but over the long term, it is something that certainly retains a store of value.
Speaker:A brief history, if you've never heard this, this is actually fascinating, at least to me,
Speaker:but a brief history of gold as a currency is as follows.
Speaker:So, there's nothing else that's been used as long.
Speaker:The Egyptians as far back as 3000 BC were actually using gold.
Speaker:They were not minting coins, and we'll get to that in just a second.
Speaker:The first civilization to mint coins, but they actually used a kind of a form of a ring,
Speaker:specific weights of gold to represent specific values.
Speaker:So, essentially, it was a currency, and so it had both standardized weights and values to that.
Speaker:Turkey actually was the first area where they began minting coins, modern-day Turkey.
Speaker:Lydia was a kingdom there in Turkey, and they minted the first official currency in 600 BC.
Speaker:They were actually a mixture of gold and silver.
Speaker:It's called Electrum, which I had never – I'd heard of Electrum.
Speaker:I'd never heard what it was before I was doing this research.
Speaker:So, I don't know why they did that.
Speaker:I don't, but that's what they did.
Speaker:They mixed gold and silver.
Speaker:They created this Electrum, and they made coins out of it.
Speaker:They stamped different things on it.
Speaker:Apparently, it was actually stamped on only one side.
Speaker:They weren't regular in shape, if that makes sense.
Speaker:So, I don't think they had a very precise minting process down, but what they did do,
Speaker:it was a standard weight, and of course, it was acting as a currency.
Speaker:The first coin I ever minted, they had a lion on it, actually, and different inscriptions.
Speaker:But they did, like I said, they came in standardized weights, anywhere from 0.15 grams up to about 14
Speaker:grams.
Speaker:So, I actually looked up earlier tonight one gram of gold, which is typically the smallest
Speaker:amount that you would be able to buy.
Speaker:It's roughly worth $50 right now.
Speaker:An ounce of gold, a troy ounce, as they call it, is worth about $1,700 U.S. dollars right
Speaker:now, to give you some perspective.
Speaker:So, they were going to a fairly small amount at 0.15 grams.
Speaker:In today's dollars, that would be, let's see if I can do that math.
Speaker:It's more than a tenth, so about $7.50 or so, $7.50 in USD, up to whatever 14 times
Speaker:50 roughly is.
Speaker:So, that's actually a decent amount.
Speaker:So, they kind of had different currencies, so to speak, that were worth different amounts.
Speaker:And then in 550 BC, the Lydian king Croasis, I hope I said that right, who you've probably
Speaker:heard of, people will say, oh, that person, well, it's not a very common expression anymore,
Speaker:but people will say, you're as rich as Croasis, sorry, I'm butchering this guy's name.
Speaker:But he was extremely rich.
Speaker:He was basically the richest person of his time.
Speaker:And he was the king of Lydia.
Speaker:They started minting pure gold and pure silver coins, and they had stamps on both sides.
Speaker:So, they had a head of a bull and a head of a lion, apparently.
Speaker:So, from there, this whole concept of minting coins spread.
Speaker:From there, you had the Greeks, the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans.
Speaker:So, it just spread out from there.
Speaker:So, the important thing is that really for 5,000 years, we've been using gold as a currency,
Speaker:as a way to transfer value from one party to another in what amounts to a standardized way.
Speaker:An economist and somebody who's talking about this kind of stuff would call gold a store of value.
Speaker:What do we mean by that?
Speaker:It's an asset, a commodity, or a currency that can be saved,
Speaker:retrieved, or exchanged in the future without deteriorating in value.
Speaker:Now, I'm reading this, I think this came off of Investopedia.
Speaker:So, this is directly off of a website.
Speaker:In other words, to enter into this category, the item acquired should, over time, be worth the same
Speaker:or more.
Speaker:Gold and other metals are stores of values, silver, platinum, whatever.
Speaker:As their shelf-lifes are essentially perpetual, for investors, interest-bearing assets such as
Speaker:the US Treasury bonds, T-bonds, qualify as well because they retain their value while generating
Speaker:income.
Speaker:I would argue that they retain their value for now.
Speaker:We do not know that that will happen in the future.
Speaker:But again, it's a perspective of time.
Speaker:And this is actually, I think, one of the key differences between the Keynesians and the
Speaker:Austrians.
Speaker:An Austrian, I think, views it over a longer timeframe versus a Keynesian who, I just don't,
Speaker:I don't think they have the same perspective.
Speaker:Maybe I'm not accurate in that, but as in this very example here with the Treasury bonds,
Speaker:Treasury bonds haven't been around that long.
Speaker:The United States was formed in 1776, and so that's only 275 years ago or whatever.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:250, I don't know.
Speaker:Something like that.
Speaker:I cannot do this math in my head.
Speaker:It's late at night and I'm not going to worry about it.
Speaker:But regardless, in the terms of time, it's really not been that long.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:That's only about six or seven generations of people.
Speaker:The person that I take my name from, in fact, was born in 1775, the year before the American
Speaker:Revolution.
Speaker:And they were my great, great, great, great, great, great, or so either six or seven greats.
Speaker:I can never remember.
Speaker:Grandfather.
Speaker:Now, that may seem like a long time, but in the grand scheme of world history, it's certainly
Speaker:not.
Speaker:It's not.
Speaker:So anyways, I don't know how long Treasury bills have been around offhand.
Speaker:I do know it's been less time than that.
Speaker:And to say that they're a store of value, I would argue they're a temporary store of
Speaker:value, which maybe means they're not a store of value.
Speaker:We don't know what they'll be in the next 50 years.
Speaker:In fact, I think arguably they will not be a store of value in 50 years.
Speaker:Now, time will tell.
Speaker:Milk, on the other hand, is a poor store of value because it will decay and become worthless.
Speaker:That makes perfect sense.
Speaker:Milk goes bad even if it's pasteurized after just a couple of weeks.
Speaker:That's not a store of value.
Speaker:That's just an item that you buy with your store of value.
Speaker:That is a currency.
Speaker:Is gold a store of value?
Speaker:Well, it is a metal.
Speaker:It's a precious metal.
Speaker:It's called a precious metal.
Speaker:And we have a long history, 5,000 years, of it being a store of value.
Speaker:So I would absolutely argue that gold is a good store of value.
Speaker:So there we go, right off the bat.
Speaker:What are the assets of a good store of value?
Speaker:It's got to be durable.
Speaker:It can't be perishable like milk.
Speaker:It can't be easily destroyed.
Speaker:Lumber, even though it may be valuable, is probably not a good store of value
Speaker:because if it's caught on fire and burns, it's destroyed.
Speaker:Certainly, a commodity like wheat would not be a store of value
Speaker:because no matter what you do to it, it will eventually go bad.
Speaker:You would essentially, I think if you froze it, it would be OK for decades.
Speaker:But even if you take a bucket of wheat and, for example, keep it out of the sun
Speaker:in a semi-cool place, after 20 years, it's still not going to be as good
Speaker:as when you first packaged it up.
Speaker:So typically, a commodity like that is not going to be a good store of value.
Speaker:Now, gold is considered a commodity.
Speaker:Even though these days it's not used as a currency, it's fungible.
Speaker:So fungible is something that people kind of stumble over sometimes.
Speaker:Fungible means that it's interchangeable with other items of the same thing
Speaker:that are the same quality and the same quality.
Speaker:So in other words, if I took a one gold, one ounce gold piece from the United States,
Speaker:and a one ounce gold piece from South Africa, for example, because they make a Krugerrand,
Speaker:which is world famous, those should be interchangeable in value.
Speaker:And we do find that with gold, fairly reasonably.
Speaker:It must be verifiable.
Speaker:You've got to be able to identify it.
Speaker:You've got to be able to verify it as authentic.
Speaker:Now, people would say that this is true with gold.
Speaker:I would argue that somebody who is a novice could be deceived, certainly.
Speaker:And one of the things that actually happened in ancient times,
Speaker:I know a little bit about the Roman usage of gold, for example, I've done some research there.
Speaker:The emperors would start clipping what they call clipping gold.
Speaker:They would take a piece and just for sake of this discussion, let's say it was an ounce,
Speaker:and they would shave a little bit off of it.
Speaker:So maybe it was seven eighths of an ounce.
Speaker:So they took off an eighth of an ounce.
Speaker:That's called clipping.
Speaker:And they would do that.
Speaker:Another thing that they did is they would actually, it wouldn't be pure gold.
Speaker:So you might make the core or something simpler, copper.
Speaker:Copper is certainly not as expensive as gold.
Speaker:I might make the center of that coin copper and then gold around it, make it that same weight.
Speaker:Bingo, there you go.
Speaker:That looks like a gold piece.
Speaker:And unless I melt it down, I won't know that difference.
Speaker:That was the kind of things that the emperors did to raise money during hard times for an
Speaker:as an example.
Speaker:Now, I don't happen to have any examples of that offhand, but I promise you both of those things,
Speaker:and maybe it wasn't copper, but they did dilute the coins, essentially.
Speaker:Both of those things happened during the Roman time period.
Speaker:And I'm sure there were other places where it happened as well.
Speaker:Because, oh, the king's running low on his treasury.
Speaker:I need to, oh, in fact, I remember this same thing went on Britain, England.
Speaker:There was a series of this type thing that went on during the 14th and 15th centuries,
Speaker:if I'm not mistaken, because of the wars that were going on with France.
Speaker:They started doing some of this kind of stuff to the coinage, even though that was
Speaker:certainly at the start, it was gold and silver, and it was set weights and should be very standard
Speaker:currency, there was actually laws about it.
Speaker:Let me see if I can find this real quick.
Speaker:Here's what I was talking about.
Speaker:And I was off on the centuries, I apologize, although I was correct about France.
Speaker:So actually, this happened under Henry VIII.
Speaker:Which I believe he had a number of issues going on, but 1544 through 1551 was called
Speaker:the Great Debasement, which saw the amount of precious metal and gold and silver coins
Speaker:reduced and in some cases, replaced entirely with cheaper base metals such as copper.
Speaker:Overspending by Henry VIII to pay for his lifestyle and to fund foreign wars with
Speaker:France, and some of my ancestors in Scotland are cited as reasons for the policy's introduction.
Speaker:The main aim of the policy was to increase revenue for the crown at the cost of taxpayers
Speaker:through savings and currency production with less bullion being required to mint new coins.
Speaker:So bullion would be like a block of a gold bar.
Speaker:That's a bullion bar.
Speaker:I think is what they're called, and it's a gold bullion anyways, and they use that to mint coins.
Speaker:During debasement, gold standards dropped from the previous standard of 23 carats to as low as 20
Speaker:carats, and the more pure it is, the higher the carat is.
Speaker:While silver was reduced from 92.5 sterling silver to just 25%.
Speaker:So silver itself actually took a dramatic drop.
Speaker:Gold, not as much, interestingly enough.
Speaker:But that is an example of some of the things that even with said,
Speaker:even with gold and silver coins, currencies, these hard metals, whatever, precious metals,
Speaker:it can still happen.
Speaker:So these are not necessarily verifiable by the average person, was kind of how we got here.
Speaker:I don't know, I would point that out.
Speaker:So in my opinion, in that aspect, this is not that great.
Speaker:I think I skipped portable.
Speaker:Portable, the goods must be easy to transport and store.
Speaker:They must be able to be protected against loss or theft and must facilitate trade even over long
Speaker:distances.
Speaker:In this respect, a cow is genuinely less suitable than a gold bracelet as a store of value.
Speaker:That's certainly true.
Speaker:So if I got a gold bracelet and I got a cow and I need to take them both 500 miles, it's going to
Speaker:be a lot easier to do that with a bracelet.
Speaker:Even if I can get the cow that far, the poor cow is probably going to be as thin as a rail
Speaker:because it's walked 500 miles.
Speaker:Now, I would say I was looking up the average, well, right now, gold, Troy ounce, $1,700.
Speaker:A gold bar is like 400 ounces and that works out to $681,000, quite a bit.
Speaker:And it's a package that's actually only about seven inches long.
Speaker:It's like three and a half inches wide and like an inch and a half thick.
Speaker:Now, I may not have a lot of money, but I'm going to go ahead and go ahead and go ahead
Speaker:and I may not have that quite right.
Speaker:I've got the figures in here somewhere, but it's close enough.
Speaker:So it's actually a fairly small package.
Speaker:So that's good if I'm trying to transport it, but it's also extremely heavy.
Speaker:If you throw a bunch of gold bars into a wagon, those horses are going to have a hard time
Speaker:pulling it, for example.
Speaker:Plus you've got an issue.
Speaker:Now I've got a huge amount of money essentially in one spot and I've got to protect it because
Speaker:people are going to try and take that.
Speaker:So I would argue that maybe it's not so portable in a sense of being protected from theft and
Speaker:that kind of thing.
Speaker:Divisible, must be easy to subdivide.
Speaker:It's a mixed bag.
Speaker:Obviously they did subdivide it down to very small amounts as we talked about with the Egyptians,
Speaker:but that could only be done essentially by government or by certainly a higher level,
Speaker:you know, the king or whatever, because you're minting currency at that point and you're
Speaker:having to measure out very specific amounts.
Speaker:So it's not something somebody can just do in their house.
Speaker:Establish history.
Speaker:Well, gold has 5,000 years of established history.
Speaker:There's nothing actually.
Speaker:There's nothing actually that has a longer history as currency.
Speaker:So that's certainly end of discussion.
Speaker:Now this listed one that I like, maybe not.
Speaker:I'm going to go ahead and throw this out here.
Speaker:A store of value must be resistant to censorship.
Speaker:Resistance to all forms of censorship is a new attribute.
Speaker:That's certainly true.
Speaker:That has started to become increasingly important in our modern digital age with invasive,
Speaker:but low noise surveillance at all times.
Speaker:How difficult can it be for a third party, such as a business or a state,
Speaker:to prevent the owner of the property in question from keeping or using it?
Speaker:That's what we mean by censorship.
Speaker:Goods that are resistant to censorship are ideal for living under those
Speaker:regimes that are trying to impose strict capital controls or declare various forms
Speaker:of peaceful trade illegal.
Speaker:Now, you could make an argument that gold was fairly resistant to censorship.
Speaker:However, I would point out, certainly in the case of the United States, there is a period of time,
Speaker:I want to say it was in the 1930s, I want to say it was Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt.
Speaker:Now I may be mistaken about that, but the US, they confiscated gold from people.
Speaker:They said, you can't own gold, and they took it away.
Speaker:Here it is, 1934, the Gold Reserve Act of 1934.
Speaker:It was signed by Roosevelt in January of 1934.
Speaker:This act transferred ownership of all monetary gold in the United States to the US Treasury
Speaker:and prohibited the Treasury and financial institutions from redeeming dollars for gold
Speaker:up until that time, I could take a US dollar to the bank and get gold.
Speaker:After that time, I could not, plain and simple.
Speaker:While they didn't, to my knowledge, go door to door taking gold from people,
Speaker:you could not use your gold for anything.
Speaker:So this to me certainly was a form of censorship.
Speaker:So you could absolutely say that gold, it could be censored by a government.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So those are the attributes of a good store of value.
Speaker:Now there's not going to be any store of value that's going to be able to perfectly fill all
Speaker:of those.
Speaker:They're going to have varying aspects.
Speaker:Some are going to be better at some things than others.
Speaker:One of the questions is, is modern money, fiat, is it a store of value?
Speaker:So let's go ahead, before we dive into Bitcoin, I actually want to talk about that
Speaker:because as a currency, my US dollar should be a store of value.
Speaker:So let's go back through these things.
Speaker:Is it portable?
Speaker:Well, a dollar in my wallet is certainly portable.
Speaker:$100 in my wallet is certainly portable.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Is it fungible?
Speaker:Can I go to China and change my US dollar to a Chinese yuan?
Speaker:As far as I know currently right now, you can.
Speaker:The last time I did, I took a trip to China three years ago or so.
Speaker:I certainly did.
Speaker:So unless that's changed in China specifically, that's still the case there.
Speaker:It's certainly the case in basically the modern world.
Speaker:So yes, it's fungible.
Speaker:Is it verifiable?
Speaker:Can I easily identify it and I verify it as authentic?
Speaker:Well, that's a little bit of a mixed bag.
Speaker:We do have counterfeit money, but they do enough stuff these days that
Speaker:people typically don't get caught with that or get caught by ending up with counterfeit money that
Speaker:they take to the bank and, oh, the bank says this is counterfeit.
Speaker:They have better ways than I do of determining if it's counterfeit.
Speaker:So I think we'll give that a pass and say, yes, it's verifiable.
Speaker:Is it divisible?
Speaker:Can we subdivide it?
Speaker:Can we take a dollar and break it down into quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies?
Speaker:Yes, down to a cent level.
Speaker:Does it have an established history?
Speaker:That's a great question.
Speaker:The United States has a history of using paper money.
Speaker:Certainly, it goes back actually quite a ways.
Speaker:Now, modern paper money started in 1913 with the setup of the Federal Reserve.
Speaker:Paper money has been around a long time.
Speaker:The Chinese actually invented paper money.
Speaker:And I don't remember the timeline, but it was prior to, it was like 500 years ago,
Speaker:500 BC or something, somewhere around there.
Speaker:Established history, not that long, not for the United States,
Speaker:not really for any modern country that I'm aware of.
Speaker:They all kind of started around that same time from what I understand.
Speaker:So prior to that, we were using, now we may have been using checks or whatever,
Speaker:but there was gold in the bank to back that up, if that makes sense.
Speaker:I hope I'm stating all that correctly.
Speaker:I believe I am.
Speaker:And is it resistant to censorship?
Speaker:Well, cash certainly is, actually.
Speaker:That's one of the things that the US government honestly doesn't like about it.
Speaker:They feel like it's too anonymous.
Speaker:So you could argue it was resistant to censorship.
Speaker:So fiat in some ways is a good store of value.
Speaker:But one of the things that I didn't bring up during all of this was the volatility of it,
Speaker:was inflation, because it wasn't in this list that I was going through.
Speaker:Gold, as I mentioned already, has a long history of being an inflation hedge, essentially.
Speaker:Like I mentioned, short timeframes, probably not best to look at gold as an inflation.
Speaker:So if I buy it now and then I'm going to sell it 10 years from now,
Speaker:it may or may not be a very good inflation hedge.
Speaker:If I would have bought it 100 years ago, or my family did and I sold it now,
Speaker:it would be a great inflation hedge, actually.
Speaker:Now, is money a good inflation hedge?
Speaker:I hope y'all all know the answer to this, because this is what I've been preaching about
Speaker:for weeks. Money, fiat, of any form really, but specifically in this case, the US dollar,
Speaker:has lost 90, what was it, 96% or so of its value since 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created.
Speaker:So no, it's not a good inflation hedge, which in my book is part of being a good store of value.
Speaker:It's not stable. It's stable when you look at it over a month or maybe even most years,
Speaker:but it's not, well, not the last year. Seven. whatever percent inflation,
Speaker:but it's not, certainly not stable over the long haul.
Speaker:And see, again, the Austrian view is we're looking at the long view, I think, versus a Keynesian view
Speaker:of 20 years. I don't know. All right. So I would argue that fiat is not a good store of value
Speaker:based on those criteria, even though they say, I'm going to read what this, and I copied this again
Speaker:off of a webpage somewhere, probably some Keynesian's website. Anyways, despite this
Speaker:issue with inflation, many economists are still going to say that money, fiat is a good store of
Speaker:value because it happens, this erosion of value, this deflation of money happens over a quote,
Speaker:a long period of time. I don't understand why people have forgotten the ability to think
Speaker:beyond 10 years. I don't. I just don't. It doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker:As I get older, yes, I have the ability to look back now in my life over five decades
Speaker:and some change. Now, do I remember the first few years? Certainly not, but I can look back over
Speaker:a long period of time, but a lot of economists are not, they're not 20 years old.
Speaker:So I don't understand how they can be so narrow in their view.
Speaker:Well, it's okay if you have a little inflation. We'll target 2%. Well, it'll be 3.6% or whatever
Speaker:average over the last 30 years, but that's okay. It's over a long period of time.
Speaker:My youngest child will get out of high school in about eight years.
Speaker:So if the world is still around,
Speaker:let me do some quick thinking. And he has reasonably good health. He may live to see 2,100.
Speaker:That's an accurate statement. He won't be 120 or something crazy like that. He could live to see
Speaker:2,100. Now, as a parent, I want to be able to pass some, maybe not all, but some of my assets
Speaker:to my children. Two things, I don't want the government taking most of it and I don't want it
Speaker:losing its value because as I look at 2,100 right now for that child, that's 80 years from now,
Speaker:right? Well, it's slightly under 80 years from now. And if I put money in a bank account and
Speaker:I put money in a bank account and then expect that to be worth anything in 80 years, I'm making a
Speaker:mistake because it won't be. But why can I think about that but not an economist, not a Keynesian
Speaker:economist? I just, sorry, that's a little rant of mine, but I just, I don't understand the thinking.
Speaker:Are we trying to make the world better for our children or do we not care? So, I'll put up my
Speaker:hand and say, I care. All right. I want to take another look. So, we've talked about gold. We've
Speaker:talked about fiat. We're going to talk about Bitcoin as a store of value. And we're going to
Speaker:go through that and then we're going to kind of compare. I don't think that money is in the
Speaker:running here for the reasons I just said. When we get done, we're going to compare Bitcoin with gold.
Speaker:Bitcoin is a store of value. Scarcity, very limited supply. Gold has the same thing, by the way.
Speaker:They still mine gold. They'll be mining gold for the foreseeable future. Oh, by the way,
Speaker:some of us are a little worried about kind of the shape of the world.
Speaker:You should look into gold mining. It's not an easy, nice process. I think we grew up with the idea
Speaker:that the snow white and the seven drawers and drawers would go down in the mine and they would
Speaker:dig out gold nuggets or whatever. That's not the way gold is mined industrially. It's strip mined.
Speaker:They dig a big hole in the ground. They dig a big hole in the ground. They dig a big hole in the
Speaker:ground. A really big hole. Then they just keep digging. All right. I'll just throw that out.
Speaker:There's a reason not to use gold as a currency. In fact, to not be mining gold, maybe. All right.
Speaker:Sorry. Back to our list. Oh, is it portable? Is Bitcoin portable? Absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker:It's digital. I can send it from one corner of the world to the other in a fraction of a second.
Speaker:Is it fungible? I can interchange any Satoshi, which is the smallest unit of Bitcoin,
Speaker:with any other Satoshi of equal value because they're all equal.
Speaker:It is absolutely fungible down to a level right now that's about, I think like one sat is roughly
Speaker:one five thousandth of a dollar. So they're much less than a dollar, a cent, excuse me.
Speaker:Is it verifiable? Can you verify a Satoshi as authentic? Yes, you can. The way that you do that
Speaker:is that you run a Bitcoin node and you can verify every transaction that's ever happened,
Speaker:including yours. Absolutely verifiable. Is it divisible? Yes. One Bitcoin is divisible down
Speaker:into a hundred million Satoshis, which as I said, roughly at the current prices is something like
Speaker:5,000 sats to a dollar. Very, very divisible. Does it have an established history?
Speaker:It's the oldest cryptocurrency around, but some might argue at 13 going on 14 years now,
Speaker:that's not long enough. I can see that point. It's still in the early stages, no doubt.
Speaker:Does it resist censorship? Yes. Is it private? No. Can you resist censorship with it? Yes. Those
Speaker:are two different things. So without going into a whole lot of depth there,
Speaker:the government cannot come take my Bitcoin. The reason why is in the end, your Bitcoin wallet
Speaker:wallet comes down to 12 word seed phrases and you can store those in your head or in a locked safe
Speaker:that only you have access to or whatever. And they cannot force it out of you if you so choose.
Speaker:So there's the comparison. I'm going to mention a few other things. Bitcoin, of course, unlike gold
Speaker:and unlike money is volatile at this point. We have price swings. We're down 70, 67, 70%
Speaker:right now from our all time high. There's no doubt about that. As Bitcoin becomes more of a global
Speaker:reserve currency, I believe that we will see that volatility flatten out. I believe that there will
Speaker:be a point and I'm pulling numbers completely out of my hat, but let's say Bitcoin is worth
Speaker:$2 million. It's not going to fluctuate half a million dollars over the course of a week.
Speaker:As it becomes more and more accepted, as it becomes the legal tender for different countries,
Speaker:that change. Now the US dollar may change versus Bitcoin, but Bitcoin won't be changing.
Speaker:It will not be so volatile. Correlation with markets, you don't want your store of value
Speaker:to be correlated say with the stock markets, financial markets. That right now is not true.
Speaker:So those last two things for Bitcoin, its volatility and its correlation with markets
Speaker:are just not true. Because people view it as a speculative investment right now and it will
Speaker:remain that way, I believe, probably for about 10 more years. Now I could be off on that. It
Speaker:may happen sooner. It may happen 20, 30 years from now. I do not know. That's just my thoughts.
Speaker:All right. Of course, so now let's compare gold and Bitcoin directly. Bitcoin is digital. Gold
Speaker:is not. Now I love having a piece of gold in my hand. On the other hand, I can send Bitcoin
Speaker:around the world with no intermediaries instantaneously, and I can do that anonymously
Speaker:and I can do that with privacy.
Speaker:Gold, you of course have to physically transport it. You have to worry about security or you have
Speaker:to put it in the care of a third party, a custodian. Now I'm not a fan of custodians.
Speaker:Bitcoin is absolutely limited to 21 million. There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin.
Speaker:Gold, on the other hand, we do not know how much there is. Now there's been a significant
Speaker:supply of gold being dug out of the ground over the last however many centuries
Speaker:that's remained fairly stable. But at some point, well, you may find a big reserve of gold that
Speaker:would dilute the market. That's true. Probably not going to happen, but it is true. You could
Speaker:also run out. That's also unlikely. I think you're going to have over time a pretty steady supply
Speaker:of gold if we continue to dig it out of the ground the same way we have been.
Speaker:Gold, you can definitely not divide it up as much. Bitcoin, I should say, doesn't have the same
Speaker:regulations on it. Now Bitcoin, obviously crypto in general, Bitcoin is a bit of a wild west.
Speaker:But I would argue that gold is very regulated. Maybe that's not the best thing. I don't know.
Speaker:All right. Gold simply isn't practical for small transactions. I'm not going to take gold into the
Speaker:store and buy Bitcoin. I'm not going to take gold into the store and buy bubble gum at five cents
Speaker:or whatever they've inflated it to these days. It's not going to happen. Bitcoin, on the other
Speaker:hand, because Satoshi's, there's so many Satoshi's in a Bitcoin, I can go in there, oh, that's five
Speaker:cents. Well, here's however many Satoshi's that comes out to. So it is absolutely
Speaker:absolutely dividable and able to be used for those smaller amounts. So here's kind of where
Speaker:I land on this. I don't think personally we'll ever go back to gold as a currency. Now some people
Speaker:will argue, well, we could have paper currency that's backed by gold. And I would argue, oh,
Speaker:you mean like the United States did before 1933 or 1913 or whenever it was, or certainly 1971,
Speaker:72, when Nixon took us off the gold standard. We were already off it, but that's when it officially
Speaker:happened. Why would I trust my government, who's got a history of almost a hundred years
Speaker:of not doing that, to suddenly start doing that? They're not going to. See, one of the things I've
Speaker:realized over the last few years is that the governments are not going to change, at least
Speaker:the United States. I can't speak for other countries. I'm not going to try to. The United
Speaker:States is not going to change. We're not suddenly going to become a Democratic nation or a Republican
Speaker:nation, a right nation or a left nation. We're just going to continue with politicians who line
Speaker:their pockets, who don't get anything done, and who we're just going to go right down this path
Speaker:until we have a choice. Do we hyperinflate the currency or do we default? Neither case is really
Speaker:good. We spend more money every year than we bring in, even though we have extremely high taxes.
Speaker:We've done this for a long, long time, but the left nor the right cares because they want their
Speaker:project, and they want their project, and they want their project, and they want their project,
Speaker:and nobody's willing to cut anything. Once you start a project, that project will get funded
Speaker:for now until eternity. We're not willing to face the reality that we have a political,
Speaker:I was going to say a political war machine. Maybe that's an accurate statement that sucks up,
Speaker:if I remember correctly, $800 billion a year. I may be off on that figure, but it's a lot.
Speaker:If I'm not mistaken, the military is the single biggest item in the budget,
Speaker:but we're not going to cut our military spending. If we do, it'll only be a token cut,
Speaker:and we're not going to cut... I don't know. I'm just...
Speaker:It's like I'm standing there watching this train coming, and I know the train's coming,
Speaker:and I can't do anything about it. I can't stop the train.
Speaker:I just got to figure out what's going to happen when that train hits.
Speaker:When we get to that point, like I said, they're not going to cut the budgets back.
Speaker:Everybody's got their little pet projects. We're all too busy fighting each other over it anyways.
Speaker:What's going to happen when that point is reached? We may have already reached it,
Speaker:and we just don't know it, and then we're down the path of either we default,
Speaker:which we've never done in our history, if I'm not mistaken, certainly in modern history, or we
Speaker:hyperinflate. I don't know which would be worse. All right. Yeah. Good times.
Speaker:To get back to the discussion, I apologize. To get back to the discussion, though,
Speaker:even if the government said, we will start backing money with gold, I wouldn't believe it.
Speaker:I don't. I have no reason at this point to believe it. We have an established history
Speaker:of not doing that, so why would they suddenly start doing it? Would that be better? If they
Speaker:actually did it, would that be a good thing? Absolutely. I just don't think it will happen.
Speaker:As an investment, is Bitcoin or gold better? I have no problem with people buying gold.
Speaker:I do not think that gold will become the world reserve currency again.
Speaker:I don't think that even the United States will back their money with gold again.
Speaker:I don't think that's going to happen. I think that Bitcoin has a better chance of becoming a
Speaker:reserve currency than gold. Gold has too many issues. I've got to transport it. It's heavy.
Speaker:I've got to secure it, et cetera, et cetera. All those things that I just talked about.
Speaker:Bitcoin, on the other hand, aside from its volatility, and aside from its following the
Speaker:market, which those two things are somewhat related, if it truly becomes a reserve currency,
Speaker:those two things are no longer true, and it's almost this perfect thing
Speaker:as a world reserve currency and as a currency for different countries.
Speaker:See, El Salvador can use Bitcoin as a currency. So can the United States. So can Russia.
Speaker:So can the Ukraine. So can all of the EU.
Speaker:The question is, will they? The governments don't want to give up this control that they have
Speaker:over the fiat money system, but the fiat money system will probably fail on them,
Speaker:and then they won't have a choice. They'll have to give up control. I would argue gold cannot be a
Speaker:replacement for the US dollar, for world reserve currency, whatever. I would argue that it probably
Speaker:will not except, maybe in a few small cases, even with a gold-backed paper currency that's backed
Speaker:by gold, I don't think that that's going to become widespread again. And I think Bitcoin has the best
Speaker:chance. All right, let's wrap this up. I've been talking for almost an hour and I got to get this
Speaker:wrapped up. I think over the last few weeks, we've explained Austrian versus Keynesian economy
Speaker:fairly well. I hope so. We've compared these two. In my opinion, of course, Austrian economics is
Speaker:kind of, it's the way that we should be going. Now the reality is, is that modern governments
Speaker:don't operate in that aspect. And that's why we're in the situations that we are
Speaker:with large amounts of debts. One of our supporters don't want to let the cat out of the bag,
Speaker:but they actually ask a question about debt and we'll dive into that in just a second.
Speaker:That's something that we're going to explore down the road. But in my opinion,
Speaker:the Keynesian economics of the last hundred years is the reason we have massive amounts of debt.
Speaker:And governments operating under an Austrian economic system would be better off.
Speaker:If I have any control, and I just said, I don't feel like I do, but if I did, I would be advocating
Speaker:for this Austrian economics. The only thing I can do is prepare myself for what happens
Speaker:when these systems fall apart as they invariably will. Let's talk about our supporters. In terms
Speaker:of support, it's been a good week. I appreciate that. I was looking through the stats tonight,
Speaker:of course, as I was preparing for this, and I saw something very interesting. I had not seen,
Speaker:that I recall, I had like at one point, I think it was actually Christmas day, I had like five
Speaker:people streaming stats at the same time. So there was like five different names with each one coming
Speaker:in. I thought that was very interesting. Really cool that that many people were actually watching
Speaker:it or listening, I should say, at the same time. But for this week, in business cycles and government
Speaker:intervention, last episode, hypersensitivosaurus, I hope I said that right, 99 stats. Thanks for
Speaker:all the work you're doing as people like you that rekindle my interest in economy and finance,
Speaker:and your summary of all your knowledge saves me a lot of time. I appreciate it. PS,
Speaker:Austrians for the win. Thank you. Appreciate that. I appreciate the kind note. I certainly
Speaker:appreciate the sats, and thanks for your support. Mere Mortals podcast came in, and with 12,199
Speaker:sats, which if I'm not mistaken, was our biggest boost in the week. I really appreciate that,
Speaker:Kyrin. I'd love to hear an episode diving into debt McIntosh. So this is the one I was talking
Speaker:about. I'm confused as to how all this money is owed. Kyrin, I'm just going to tell you outright,
Speaker:I'm confused too, but maybe together we can figure it out, at least a little bit.
Speaker:Imagine if we took a snapshot of everyone and every entity's assets right now and tried to
Speaker:sort it all out. How much of that USA's 31.6 trillion is owed to Australia, and how much of
Speaker:our 0.9 trillion to you? That's an interesting question. We'll see what we can figure out about
Speaker:that. How much is imaginary money that is simply owed back and forth? I would argue it's all
Speaker:imaginary, but people call me crazy. What countries or types of people would essentially become slaves
Speaker:until repaying if there was no more fiat ability to manipulate the money? That is a very good
Speaker:question. I'm going to try and explore that because that actually is one of my concerns.
Speaker:I think I'm going to say this, and then I'm going to take on and do some more research.
Speaker:I'll take the United States. We owe $31 trillion. If we hyperinflate the dollar
Speaker:10 times, and then we use those dollars to pay back the debt, technically we would not owe the
Speaker:debt, but our dollar would only be worth one-tenth of its value. So a dollar would be worth a dime,
Speaker:which if you've got, say, $100,000 in the bank account and all of a sudden it becomes $10,000—I
Speaker:think I did that right—of spending power, then that's not good for the saver, obviously.
Speaker:That would be hyperinflation. If we did default on our money, on our debts, I should say,
Speaker:it's like going into bankruptcy. The debtors lose that money.
Speaker:So that would be bad for the people who are owed the money, which if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker:for the majority of that debt, if not all of it, that I'm talking about, the $31 trillion,
Speaker:that's UST bills. Now I want to look into that and make sure I'm saying all that correctly,
Speaker:okay? So the people who owed the T-bills, the people who had bought the T-bills, they'd be
Speaker:worthless. So T-bills are bonds, so people who own those bonds, they'd be out their money.
Speaker:So that's what would happen there. So it wouldn't directly impact the average person
Speaker:except for that savings aspect. If I hyperinflate and my money's only one-tenth of what it used to
Speaker:be, then everybody's savings is diminished. Everything is diminished. How do you deal with
Speaker:that? I'm doing good to get, say, a 5% raise every year. If I'm lucky, well,
Speaker:well, are they just going to jack it up 10X? I don't think so. So the wage earner will end
Speaker:up losing in that as well. A lot of people will lose. Spending versus savings episode.
Speaker:Mayor Mortals again. Thank you, Karen. I appreciate all that. I love these questions,
Speaker:by the way. I do. It gets me thinking about different things and gives us a topic. We will
Speaker:talk about debt in general. I've talked about debt off and on over the last two years, but
Speaker:we'll do a specific episode on that. I'm good with that. I'm going to take a break from
Speaker:the Austrian talk for a few weeks, at least, maybe. Spending versus savings,
Speaker:$5,500 from Karen again, Mayor Mortals. I'm starting to see the Keynesian viewpoint
Speaker:as a common pitfall in human thinking, which is trying to control volatility, change, or variation
Speaker:and make everything linear and smooth. Ultimately, this leads to bigger and worse outcomes
Speaker:like huge forest fires from stopping the small ones and the Holodomor from trying to feed
Speaker:everyone equally. The Holodomor was something that happened. I had to look this up.
Speaker:I had heard of it. I did not know the name of it. It was a famine, essentially, that happened in the
Speaker:Ukraine during the time of the early Soviet Union. You can go look that up if you want more in depth
Speaker:about that. H-O-L-O-D-O-M-E-O-R, Holodomor. Karen, that's actually exactly how I view it,
Speaker:very much. That's how they view it. They think that it could be perfect. We'll have a little
Speaker:recession here, but we'll tamp it down and whatever. That's just not reality. It's living
Speaker:in a fantasy world, a utopia, in fact. That's just not possible. Because of that thinking,
Speaker:I agree that actually leads to worse things. I think that's absolutely true, at least in my view.
Speaker:The It's a Dilemma, Security, Speed, and Decentralization podcast, user 5170931939050220
Speaker:from Fountain, 99 sats, no message. Thank you very much, sir. Appreciate it. Or ma'am,
Speaker:thank you very much. Gerard13 sent 99 sats as well, no message. Appreciate that. Glad
Speaker:y'all enjoyed those episodes, that episode. And then the What's Buzzing with Hive episode,
Speaker:our friend Hypersensitivosaurus, I'm going to get that right yet, who we heard from earlier,
Speaker:apparently listened to a couple of episodes, and boosted this, which I don't have the boost
Speaker:amount. I think it was 99 sats. As someone who has been active on Hive since the early days,
Speaker:it was fun to discover an interview with Brian of London. Keep up the good work. Meanwhile,
Speaker:I trust Brian will do the same for Hive. I happen to know that Brian is very much active on Hive.
Speaker:He and I intersect through the podcast 2.0 ecosystem, if you want to call it that.
Speaker:And so I see his post on Mastodon, and he is certainly busy.
Speaker:All right, that is it. And that is awesome. A lot of streaming this week and appreciate that. Of
Speaker:course, like I said, I just never have time. I do not have time to go through those. I'm sorry.
Speaker:I wished I did. Oh, and one other thing, because this is our first episode of
Speaker:2023. I'm going to run through real quick, basically the top supporters. I'm not going
Speaker:to do the top 10. I'm going to go a little deeper. And I'm not going to give out their sat totals,
Speaker:but this will be in order. Mere Mortals or Kyrin, he actually posts under two different
Speaker:accounts. I assume it's all Kyrin. But anyways, they were our top supporter. Kyrin, of course,
Speaker:I really appreciate that. You've been a supporter of this podcast for a long time. And obviously,
Speaker:I say this basically every episode, you should check them out if you haven't already. They run
Speaker:a great podcast over there, Self Help, Book Reviews. I think right now he's actually looking at
Speaker:Tess of the D'Urbervilles, all kinds of different books. He's just recently reading some Greek stuff,
Speaker:if I'm remembering correctly. Jenny Jams, second, Signs of New Growth, third, Petar, fourth,
Speaker:Defunct Mode, Lyceum. And Lyceum, I think yours might actually be off a little bit. You might be
Speaker:a little bit higher. I think yours was the one that had the 1776 post that did not make it.
Speaker:I'm sorry, it's either yours or Martin's, and I can't remember at this point. Pooch, user 5-30-369-602-54-36824.
Speaker:I swear the fonts get smaller every year. Is next. And now Excel has gone crazy on me.
Speaker:5 times 9 is 45, and user 5175386301288162, and then our friend Borsen Gelber from Germany,
Speaker:and Brian of London actually, and then RDG3, and Captain Egghead, and Takurip, and Wist 6,
Speaker:and we'll stop there. So those were our top boosters for the year, boosters and streams.
Speaker:I think that's a combination of both. I will say this, I have the numbers for the total.
Speaker:I'm going to go ahead. I've debated. I don't know. To be honest, I don't really like revealing this
Speaker:kind of stuff. It's just kind of my nature, but I just want y'all to know kind of where we're at.
Speaker:This is where we're at. Total, and this was since February, March, actually, since I started using
Speaker:Satoshi Stream. So this doesn't actually reflect the entire thing, but the reality was prior to
Speaker:this, there wasn't a whole lot of activity. There were some. So this isn't all-inclusive,
Speaker:but certainly for most of last year, I earned 119,894, and so I ended up with, because Satoshi
Speaker:Stream takes out as well, their percentage, it's like a percent or two, 110,494 Sats.
Speaker:152 boosts and 4,158 stream pays. So that is awesome. So I truly, from the bottom of my heart,
Speaker:appreciate that. We are going to continue to build this podcast. I posted, I think,
Speaker:some of the ideas. I did post some of the ideas I had for the upcoming years, for the upcoming year.
Speaker:And I do plan on, assuming I can come up with capital, essentially, expanding things out.
Speaker:I want to put up a chat room. I want to redo the website. I've already told y'all we're already
Speaker:working on, the first thing I want to do is get my own Lightning node back and actually run it here
Speaker:at my house. That is coming along. Got to get that little server taken care of, which hopefully
Speaker:tomorrow, actually, it will be, and I'll be able to go home with that. So lots of things. Oh,
Speaker:and I would certainly want to continue to implement features like chapters. It's actually a big thing
Speaker:for me, which means I have to move my site. The current host, we're going to have to move my site
Speaker:which means I have to move my site. The current host will not do that. All right. I believe I
Speaker:had an episode every week this year. We are, of course, on episode 89. We're closing in on 100.
Speaker:I think I figured out that in March, I'll hit 100. Looking forward to that.
Speaker:And news. You know what? I'm going to go over a little bit of the news. We're running really long.
Speaker:I don't want to, I want to be respectful. I'm going to run over a little bit of the news.
Speaker:I did want to mention, if you are interested in what I talked tonight about Bitcoin being a
Speaker:store of value, Bitcoin being a future currency, if you want to call it that,
Speaker:it already is a currency actually, certainly in El Salvador. But as an example,
Speaker:the Bitcoin standard by Safedin Amoos, you can get it on Amazon. He probably has it on his website,
Speaker:whatever. I don't get a dime if you buy it. That's fine. I don't have it listed on my website,
Speaker:an affiliate leak or anything like that. I've bought it. I've read it. It's a good book.
Speaker:It's worth the read. It's not technical. It's well thought out, historical research and analysis.
Speaker:So it's probably more, I would like to think I'm well thought out and researched. It's kind of what
Speaker:you would hear on here. I'll put it that way. But certainly his spin on it, he is a better scholar
Speaker:than I am and certainly has a lot more time to do this than I do. So worth that read.
Speaker:He has fascinating stuff about the history of money in there. It's crazy the things that people
Speaker:have done to be able to store a value, a form of currency. So again, as I always say, follow me
Speaker:on Twitter. I post all the new stuff on there. I actually came across something very interesting
Speaker:very interesting. I do want to mention tonight. I'll skip over a lot of the other stuff.
Speaker:So I posted this tweet three hours ago. I had never had this happen before.
Speaker:Y'all are finding out about this same time. I have a thing on there that says this tweet
Speaker:links to an Iran state affiliated media website. That is true. I did not note it.
Speaker:I did not notice this, but I'm going to read it because I actually know that this was posted
Speaker:most other, a bunch of other places. This is actual news, but you know,
Speaker:Twitter thinks I need to know that this was from Tehran and blah, blah, blah. So hey guys,
Speaker:this is a Tehran website. So take this with a grain of salt. I'll also tell you that it was on,
Speaker:it was a UK website, one of the newspapers. The reason why I didn't use that one is because it
Speaker:was where you had to pay. Telegraph, the UK Telegraph actually. They cite the UK Telegraph
Speaker:or whatever, the Telegraph newspaper. So I'll get to the punchline here because like I said,
Speaker:we're going on. The UK nuclear plants face a shutdown over windfall tax.
Speaker:Now to set the stage really quickly, of course, the UK has some of the highest electricity rates
Speaker:in the world right now. They're out of control. They've gone up like 10X in some cases in the
Speaker:last year for a number of reasons, lack of natural gas, shutdown of coal plants, whatever.
Speaker:According to the Telegraph report on Sunday, citing French grid operator Electricité de France,
Speaker:EDF, which runs the stations and owns all five of the serving nuclear plants across the UK,
Speaker:said that the new levy, which comes into effect on January the 1st,
Speaker:will make it harder for the operator to run two different stations. I'm going to skip through
Speaker:a lot of this. They've got a tax on oil and gas generators that was raised from 25% to 35%,
Speaker:imposing an overall tax rate of 75% on profits from UK operations.
Speaker:Look, this is silliness. The country desperately needs power and they're fixing to shut down two
Speaker:nuclear power plants because of taxes. I cannot believe that any reasonable government would
Speaker:not understand that. I do think this is very relevant. The percentage of 25 to 34-year-olds
Speaker:living with parents or relatives in the United States in 1970 was 11%. In 2020, it's 29%. I bet
Speaker:it's higher now. Right, because we're doing so much better than we were in 1970. Christine,
Speaker:I think, Lagarde, the ECB, the European Central Bank president, said, the recession we feared is
Speaker:likely to be short-lived and shallow. If you live in Europe, I would start putting aside food because
Speaker:you're probably going to need it before this thing is over because she has about as good a track
Speaker:record as Jim Cramer here in the United States. If you don't know who Jim Cramer is, go look him
Speaker:up. MSNBC, if I'm not mistaken, picks stocks, does a really good bad, a good job of it, does a really
Speaker:bad job of it, I should say. All right, skip, skip, skip. Italy's going to tax 26% on cryptocurrency
Speaker:profits over €2,000 in 2023. Italy's in a lot of trouble. They need revenue, I get that. At least
Speaker:they said over €2,000, so I don't know. I don't know if that's good or bad, whatever. It's just the
Speaker:news. There's some stuff on here about the month. Bank of Japan, they're setting new records for
Speaker:bond purchases. Japan's in trouble. Japan, in my opinion, is the canary in the coal mine.
Speaker:Central banks are buying up gold. I talked about this last week. I'll skip it.
Speaker:And I'll stop with this. The New York Times had an opinion piece.
Speaker:Signal, which is some messaging app, is bad because the people who build it are morally
Speaker:committed to preserving the privacy of its users. I think I'm just going to get a copy of the Bill
Speaker:of Rights and post it in every tweet that I post. Could you do that? Could you maybe like minimize
Speaker:that down to however many characters? I don't know these people. What are they teaching these
Speaker:people in journalism school? Sorry. There we go. By the way, cold snap, really cold temperatures,
Speaker:in Texas and a lot of the Bitcoin miners helped out by shutting down their machines temporarily.
Speaker:They had made agreements to do that. When, when Texas stayed online, they had made agreements
Speaker:to get paid for that time period. It stabilized the system, but Bitcoin uses too much money,
Speaker:electricity. All right. There we go. That's enough. That's it. You guys can follow me on
Speaker:Twitter. I post more stuff, but I'm at 82 minutes, which is the longest I've done in a long time.
Speaker:I really appreciate everybody. It's been a good year in a lot of ways. It's been a hard year,
Speaker:to be honest. And I posted, I will say this to wrap things up. I boosted, messaged, whatever,
Speaker:the guys at the podcasting 2.0 podcast, Adam and Dave. And I said something to the effect of,
Speaker:actually, I'll just read the tweet or the boost because I don't want to mess this up. I think
Speaker:this is very important. I actually put some thought into it. Well, I said something like this,
Speaker:I can't find it, but I said something along these lines. I said, I appreciate the hard work that
Speaker:those guys have done because the reality is if they hadn't done their work, I would have started
Speaker:a podcast a couple of years ago, just like I did our year and a half, however long it's been.
Speaker:But I would not have made it this far. And the reason why is my podcast is far too small
Speaker:to get ad support. That's the reality of it. I never would have had any chance to make any kind
Speaker:of money other than podcasting 2.0 streaming sats, boosting that kind of thing. And I really
Speaker:appreciate that. However, I said, you know, that's actually not the thing. I said,
Speaker:what they've done is they have created a feedback loop. So they've made it very easy for me to hear
Speaker:from my listeners, people like Kyrin, where he came and talked about the debt that we were just
Speaker:discussing earlier. And we'll have a show about that. That's a feedback loop. I'm getting feedback
Speaker:from my listeners. And now I'm going to go out and actually change my show, if you want to put it
Speaker:that way, because of that. And I appreciate that. I appreciate it. There's a lot more value to it
Speaker:than the monetary value. And I do appreciate the monetary value, the sats, but there's a lot more
Speaker:value to it than that. So that's really what value for value is all about. And of course,
Speaker:we're a value for value show. We don't have sponsors. We don't have advertising.
Speaker:And I depend upon the listeners to support this show. And it doesn't necessarily have to be
Speaker:streaming sats. Now apps like Fountain make it very easy to do that. But you can also
Speaker:support the show by helping out. I really want to do a rewrite of the website. Once I've moved,
Speaker:I've got to move off the platform we're on. So I'm working on that part of it. But once I've done
Speaker:that, I will really want to rewrite the website. And I don't necessarily, if I do it, it will take
Speaker:six months. Now that doesn't mean it's a tremendous amount of work. It just means that's the amount of
Speaker:time I can allocate to it over a six month period. It would take me that long. That would be
Speaker:something that people could help with. Transcripts are something I do every week. It takes about 30
Speaker:minutes from start to finish. And it's something that would be a tremendous help for me if somebody
Speaker:would step in and say, hey, I would love to help with that. Now it would also, I use Lambda Labs.
Speaker:They're cloud servers that have high speed, these very high powerful GPUs on them.
Speaker:And I use software, open source software. I believe it's open source. Maybe it's not. Anyways,
Speaker:I use software that transcribes it very efficiently on those servers. So it's actually faster than
Speaker:real time and very, um, without, with very few errors. So I have a process from start to finish
Speaker:that I can go through in about 30 minutes and transcribe that out and have it posted to the
Speaker:to the webpage, uh, for the, the web host podcast host, I should say, and then also on my webpage.
Speaker:So it's available for Google or whatever to get indexed.
Speaker:It costs about 30 cents a week for me to do that. I can pay for that. Or I mean, honestly,
Speaker:if somebody wanted to support the show by taking that over, I can go through the process with them
Speaker:and they could pay for it. Um, and it's not a huge amount unless you leave that sucker running for
Speaker:hours and hours, which you would certainly want to make sure that you don't do. It's like a dollar
Speaker:10 an hour is what the unit costs. And it literally takes like 15 minutes or less to transcribe it
Speaker:and get the files off. So anyways, those are other ways that you could participate. And as we
Speaker:continue to build this community into 2023, I would ask that if you are interested to step forward,
Speaker:reach out to me on Twitter, Mastodon, whatever email. All right. If you, where were we at? So,
Speaker:um, certainly you can support it through using one of the podcast 2.0 apps like Fountain.
Speaker:Uh, they're fixing to roll out a big update that I think you'll find very interesting. I've been in
Speaker:the beta testing on that and it'll help out a lot there. Also, I believe in the process of working
Speaker:on the lit, the live item tag or whatever. Uh, so that when we go live, which is something I would
Speaker:love to do this year as well, you would be notified of that, whether that's my podcast or one of the
Speaker:other podcasts, obviously, if you want an app like that, you could go to podcasting 2.0 or the new
Speaker:podcast apps.com. I should say website. They have a whole bunch of them there. You can try different
Speaker:ones. If you like the content, I would love it if you would tell your friends about the generational
Speaker:wealth cryptocurrency podcasts. Thanks for being here. Everybody. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope
Speaker:it's been helpful. I hope you've appreciated this series. I've, I have loved it. And, but to be
Speaker:honest right now, I'm glad it's done with it has been stretching and there's a lot more I want to
Speaker:learn specifically about Austrian economics. I'm not really going to spend time going any more in
Speaker:depth on Keynesian economics. I don't have any interest in it. I think it's flawed and wrong and
Speaker:I just don't want to learn about it. Don't have any reason to, so you'll hear more about it down
Speaker:the road. Well, that's about it. So you got those different ways. You can reach out to me. You guys