Dan Snow's History Hit - Bitcoin and Crypto: A History

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Jamie Bartlett joined me on the podcast to talk about the history of the Bitcoin.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit, Bitcoin. Yep, we're going there. Snow's history hit. Bitcoin. Yep, we're going there. Like any foolish investor, we're going there several years after we first hear everybody else talking about it. In the space of just two years, everyone, Bitcoin has doubled, doubled in value. One Bitcoin is now worth around about $33,000. In 2018, a previous spike saw Bitcoin reach $20,000. And in the last five days, we've seen it come off its all time peak. It peaked at over $40,000 a couple of days ago.

So what are we seeing here? Are we seeing the birth of a new reserve currency, a new way to imagine money? Or are we just seeing a good old fashioned speculative bubble? And I don't know the answer to that. And I don't think this podcast can tell you, but it is going to give you a history of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Jamie Bartlett is such a great commentator and author, he's a journalist, he's written brilliant books about the dark web and about cryptocurrency. I was really lucky to get some time with him on this podcast. He answered all my very basic questions about what the hell cryptocurrency is. And as you'll see, in a way, it's actually a very ancient concept, but using completely new technology. It's fascinating, fascinating history. Hope you enjoy. If you're going to rush out and buy some Bitcoin afterwards, just remember who sent you guys.

Remember who sent you. Everybody, if you want to invest in something that is rock solid, rock solid, you want to go to historyhit.tv. Think of it as an investment in your well-being, your education, and your historical knowledge. An investment in becoming a better person, a better citizen. Anyway, go to historyhit.tv. It's a digital history channel. It's like Netflix for history, but we've got podcasts on there as well. So actually, in many ways, it's better than Netflix. What can I say? Hundreds of hours of history documentary, exclusive documentaries on there, and lots of episodes of this podcast, all without the ads. So head over there and check that out. And if you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free and your second month for just one pound, euro or dollar pretty sweet in the

meantime everybody here is jamie bartlett talking about cryptocurrency buckle up jamie thanks so much for coming on the podcast ah thanks for having me dan i'm a fan so uh it's brilliant to be here well i'm a fan of yours even though I don't understand most of the words in any of your books or articles. But that's what we're here to do. We're trying to work it all out. Now, if you're a guy like me, you're a little bit conventional. You go on the old Google. You do a bit of the old Google. You occasionally go on the Twitter.com. I had a Facebook account, so that's the internet for me.

Do a bit of shopping. What else is there out there? The internet is bigger than that, I hear. Oh, Mike, you're just scratching the surface. You're on the 1% of what's really going on. I mean, yeah, the internet is... And there always has been just so many different bits that I suppose an ordinary user doesn't even really know about.

And it's estimated that the vast majority of the Internet is actually called the deep web. This is parts of the Internet that aren't indexed by Google or the search engine. So you'll never find them. They sit behind passwords. They sit behind firewalls. They are secret or hidden. They're not linked to any other parts of the internet. Sometimes it's really boring, like a government database, which you'll never find on Google, but sometimes it's a bit more sinister. So this is where you get into the dark net, which is, that's actually quite a small bit of the hidden internet, and you can only get on there with a special encrypted web browser called Tor,

but that's where a lot of journalists hang out there, but also drug dealers, and it's a sort of anonymous part of the internet. So there's just so much more to the net than we realise, and a lot of it is actually like how the internet used to be. It's not really very old, the internet, and back in the 70s and 80s, it really was a kind of counter-cultural, sort of slightly hidden, mysterious place that the majority of people didn't know anything about. So if people want to buy drugs and weapons and do all sorts of things on the internet, is that why we have the development of crypto? Is that essentially the need that arose for some kind of currency?

No, not really. I think some of the people that used cryptocurrencies at the beginning basically spotted there was this really fascinating new type of money that some really smart people had developed that they could use to try to stay a bit more anonymous, a bit more hidden online with their transactions. And it became very popular on these darknet drug sites where people were buying and selling drugs using most famously Bitcoin. But there are other ones as well. But that isn't where it came from. It's actually a far more interesting story than that. And I suppose it really goes back to the 1990s, where you had a sort of forgotten history now, but it was called the crypto wars. Picture the scene. We're in the 90s.

There's this exciting new Internet turning up and more and more people are joining. But a small group of sort of libertarians and anarchists are really worried that all this digital technology might usher in a new age of Orwellian surveillance. And they want ordinary people to have access to powerful encryption so they can message each other without the government seeing in all sorts of different ways and they call themselves the cypherpunks and Julian Assange by the way was a cypherpunk and they get together and they start trying to design this technology how can we communicate and encrypt our messages without government seeing what we're saying and we don't want them snooping on us all the time and one kind of offshoot of them think that the really exciting technology is money. Can you create a form of money that's online, that the government doesn't control, the central banks don't mint it, and it's like peer-to-peer electronic cash that's all kind

of outside of the scope of government control. And in 2009, that's what one of these people did. control. And in 2009, that's what one of these people did. Satoshi Nakamoto puts out a white paper in a cryptography emailing list, calls it Bitcoin and says, I basically designed this really interesting peer to peer version of electronic cash. And that's where it all started. OK, OK. So this is now I'm struggling here. I'm struggling. And it's convertible, obviously. OK, so this is now I'm struggling here. I'm struggling. And it's convertible, obviously. Back in those days, so this is 2009. It was just a tiny group of people that were playing around with an idea. What they really didn't like was the idea that central banks and then commercial banks basically mint as much money as they want through fractional banking. So they can just issue loans out and increase the money supply.

They didn't like that. They thought it led to inflation. And governments basically would use interest rates or inflation to control people. And they're like, here's an idea. What if we use some of this new clever encryption technology so that anyone in the world could send this like string of numbers to each other that would kind of be like a form of money. Now, the problem was that people have tried this before, but if your money is just a string of numbers, you can copy and paste it and just, you know, it's called the double spend problem. It has no value because it has no scarcity because anyone can copy it. And this guy, Satoshi Nakamoto, we don't really know if it's a guy or a girl or a group of people, no one knows, came up with a really clever way of doing this without having to have a central database that recorded everything. I mean, we can go into the technology

if you like, but I've got a feeling it's going to be, gets a little bit complicated. But they just kind of did it as a bit of an experiment. But around 2010, 2011, these people on the dark net started using it for drug dealing. Some like libertarians and anarchists who've always hated government control over the money supply thought this is interesting. Then WikiLeaks started using it and then other people started using it saying, you know what, this new Bitcoin, it could actually be like a real form of money. We can send it to each other. It has a fixed limit of 21 million Bitcoin. The government can't control it. And then these exchanges started turning up so people could turn their Bitcoin into dollars or euros or pounds. This is what you mean about it's exchangeable. And it's just sort of proliferated. And now you

have loads of professional exchanges, really quite well run, where literally millions of people are buying and selling Bitcoin for real money. And it has a price, it has a value, and people use it. So in a way, it's like that hankering through history for like a gold standard. We don't trust these paper money, all these financiers and their clever maths. We just want gold as a gold standard. It should be linked to the value of a chunk of gold that you can put in your purse and walk off with yeah is that same hankering do you think yes i think it's exactly that it's like why shouldn't we have some kind of sort of secure

digital version of gold in in some ways bitcoin is more like digital gold than digital cash. So why can't we have this sort of online equivalent, which has some scarcity, has some value, it's easily divisible, and it can form the basis of a currency that we, Satoshi Nakamoto who created this always talked about this, a peer-to-peer version of money that we don't need a central bank or a central institution in charge of it. And it's like a bit of a, I suppose it originally sounded like a bit of a fantasy. Why don't we create this new form of money? It's online only. It's encrypted. It really has this amazing technology behind it. So it can't be controlled by anybody apart from the users. And you can send it as easily as sending an email. I don't think anyone

involved in it ever thought it would get anywhere near as big as it did as quickly as it has. But, you know, funnily enough, it was it was the banking crisis that stimulated him to create this. He put this paper out in 2009 that explained what he put it out in late 2008 that explained how bitcoin would work then he put out the kind of source code the technology that actually was bitcoin essentially in january 2009 and he added a little headline into the code from a headline from the times newspaper on the 3rd of january which says, I've actually written it down because I figured it would be important, that reads, Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. And it was kind of like a secret little message in the code of Bitcoin, which basically was saying,

we're sick of the banks and the politicians controlling the money supply. Why can't ordinary people have their own one that works online? I i mean there's often been like sort of safe haven currencies haven't they but they've been backed up by either the the value of the metal like you know the pieces of eight the piece of eight was a spanish dollar that was actually just minted in you know the spanish empire from from all that extraordinary silver that was discovered. Or through the 20th century, we all clutched our dollars when we went around the world and that was backed by the weight of the US, the republic behind it.

The problem with Bitcoin is, how do you trust that there's going to be a limit on the amount of Bitcoin ever produced? Or where's that trust come from that you do get from clutching a Spanish dollar in your sweaty little hands? Well, speak for yourself. I've never clutched a Spanish dollar in my sweaty little hands, unfortunately. But it's obviously the key question. Now, I suppose the cypherpunks and the people behind this would say two things.

The first is, why on earth have you trusted governments for so long? Have you not seen the history of like hyperinflation, how they inflate away people's savings? Why do we think that system is so incredibly good? But the other thing they would say, more importantly, is, OK, what we want to do is build a... Bitcoin is based on what they call a trustless system. You don't need to trust anyone's going to

inflate this currency. You can see it for yourself because we've written the computer code, made it open source and go and look at it for yourself. Check it for yourself. The way that Bitcoin works is essentially it has a, this is where it does get a little bit complicated. It has a, this is where it does get a little bit complicated. Every transaction ever made by anyone is recorded in a public database. So all Bitcoin transactions, and there's been millions of them now, are recorded on a public database that is maintained by over 10,000 computers, all of which receive updates to that database every 10 minutes or so. And that is the way

that you can check how much or how many Bitcoin everyone has at any one time so you've got this law this enormous distributed database that allows you to see who owns Bitcoin you don't know who the people are because it's just attached to a wallet a digital wallet that each person has but you can see that I have sent Dan Snow one Bitcoin, Dan Snow sent somebody else two Bitcoin. It's all there in this public database that is distributed across over 10,000 identical copies. And you can check the code itself. New Bitcoin are mined at a kind of steady rate. So every 10 minutes or so, another few Bitcoin are

released out into the world. They're given as a reward to computers that check that the database is all accurate and correct. And we know that that is going to end in 2140 and all 21 million Bitcoins will then be in circulation. There'll never be any more put out again. And we know this because we can check it. We can see it all. And so the people behind it say, you don't need trust. You don't need to trust that the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England aren't going to mess around. This is all written in code, in mathematics, in physics.

And so they think it's a superior version because you don't have to trust. So you're thinking, how do I trust it? And they say, you don't need to trust it. You know, you can see it. Why is there this association? Is it just because people don't really understand it? Why is there an association with Bitcoin and the dark web?

Surely what you're describing is actually really interesting financial innovation. Why do we associate it with scamming? Is that unfair? Are we being unfair on Bitcoin? I think, you know what? I think we're being a bit unfair on Bitcoin now. I think back in the early days, it really was a sort of a bit of a sort of libertarian anarchist idea,

a fascinating experiment. To be honest, one of the most original ideas that I think I've ever seen. And they're not they don't come around too often. It just so happens that the obviously the early uses for this weird anonymous or pseudonymous cryptocurrency, as so often is the case with many new technologies, was criminal. It was dark net, you know, dark net drug dealers thought, oh, this looks amazing. They're often, you know, I've studied sort of criminal groups in the past a lot, and very often they are the earliest adopters of new technology. They're looking for ways to get around the system,

they don't like being monitored, but that doesn't mean that the technology itself is inherently bad. But that doesn't mean that the technology itself is inherently bad. And I think that, yeah, there was these huge stories. You probably saw them in 2012, 13, especially about the Silk Road drugs market. And people are using Bitcoin to send money to each other and the governments can't monitor it. And I probably contributed to that because I wrote a book called The Dark Net and wrote about Bitcoin. a book called The Dark Net and wrote about Bitcoin. But I think ever since then, if you look now, the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin use is people actually just buying it because they think it may represent a safe investment, or they think it's a really interesting idea, or they find it useful to send remittance payments from the UK to Kenya without having to pay an extortionate fee to do so, because you can

send Bitcoin for hardly anything very, very quickly. So I think the association of Bitcoin with crime has really changed quite a lot over the last three or four years. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows

or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. You say it's a safe haven investment. It's tripled in value this year. It's been it's pretty lumpy Bitcoin like it's been it's been up and down quite a lot in its short life. Yes, true, true. And some people have said it's like the tulip mania. It's a speculative bubble. And there's definitely, I mean, I monitor the price

and I see people go, it fluctuates wildly. And you had periods where in 2010, it's worth a dollar. 2013, it's worth $1,000. 2014, it's then worth $300. And a lot of the government warnings about Bitcoin, rather than being to do with drugs use, are beware. Beware of putting all your money into Bitcoin on a credit card because it may go down as well as up. Again, Bitcoin advocates, and there are many, and they are real, they are true believers, would say it's volatile. But if you look at annually, the way the speed with which it has increased in value at the end of every year, it's always been worth more than the year before.

So while there's a lot of volatility year on year, it always seems to go up. And I think what's interesting at the moment is you may read this differently. up. And I think what's interesting at the moment is, you may read this differently, it looks like a lot of governments are going to be printing a lot of money in the next few months and years. And I wonder whether the current spike in price is because people think, where do I cash in the bank? It's going to be worthless. The governments are just going to start printing money to get us out of this grand recession. Where else could I put my money? Now, this weird digital currency with 21 million coins in circulation looks interesting. I'll put a few million into that.

And you're actually seeing a lot of these big investors doing that. Well, not a lot, a few investors doing that at the moment. Because there is ignorance around, like people can understand buying a Van Gogh and sticking it on a wall or having a lump of gold and again, the little Maria Teresa dollar, the pieces of eight. Is the problem not Bitcoin,

but the fact that then scammers can set up other cryptocurrencies, which are just a scam? Is that, we're sort of aligning two things here, aren't we? Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And I used to think the biggest problem with Bitcoin

was its possible criminal use, drug dealing and extortion. And do you remember the NHS ransomware that they took payment in Bitcoin because it would allow them to receive money easily without giving away their identity? And so money launderers can use Bitcoin. I did say there is this public database of every Bitcoin transaction ever done. So governments can look at that, but they just can't tie transactions to people easily. So I used to think that was the big problem. But I think now the big problem is, you're absolutely right, scammers turning up and saying, I've got the next Bitcoin. You see how Bitcoin's gone up in value from $1 to $20,000 in 10 years?

Well, this one's going to be even bigger. you from $1 to $20,000 in 10 years. Well, this one's going to be even bigger. And people are desperate not to miss out on, you know, easy money. And in 2017, you saw loads of these like cryptocurrency rivals to Bitcoin. People were putting loads of money into it and then they just collapsed and nothing would happen. And I, one of the big projects I've been working on is a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scam that was modelled on Bitcoin. It was called OneCoin. And as much as $15 billion was poured into this, and the people behind it said it was a legitimate cryptocurrency,

the Bitcoin killer, the next big thing, but it was just a pyramid scheme. And people lost literally billions of dollars. So the risk of Bitcoin to ordinary people has kind of ended up being similar things turn up, promising the same returns and then scamming you of all your money. So interestingly, Bitcoin may, although it's super fresh, may prove the old sort of historical dictum, which is, you know, if something's been around long enough, it starts to just get the sheen of respectability to it. So as more of these other cryptocurrencies collapse

and prove to be Ponzi schemes, if Bitcoin can just continue plugging away, albeit a little bit volatile, then trust in it will grow in relation to that track record. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I think it's probably true because why do you trust the dollar? Why do you value the dollar? And it's because you know that other people will value the dollar in the future. And that may be because it's backed by the central bank, that you could imagine other types of currency take on value because you have confidence that in the future people will still value that currency.

And if you think that trust is determined in that way, then Bitcoin just sticking around, more and more people use it, more and more people get used to it, then I think it will get more and more adoption. And I know it sounds really strange to think about, well, how could you have a style of money or an asset that's sort of thin air, that's just numbers, that's just maths. But when you think about how many of our digital assets, like your CD, I can see your grand book collection in the background, but many of your books may also be digital assets on a kindle many of your songs may be digital assets on a server somewhere that you access through your phone so much of the things that you write down are just digital you know pieces of thin air really and i think for a new generation of people there is nothing strange about thinking of money as a kind of digital asset with not

necessary with maths or code behind it rather than physical objects, because the rest of the world is moving in the same direction. Are you a sceptic about this? I'm interested in the historian's perspective, I suppose, because it's such a new thing. I'm quite attracted to Bitcoin because I'm thick and therefore I like the idea of a currency that

can't be manipulated having when you study history you watch states throughout history just print as much paper money as they need and sometimes that goes tits up like in weimar germany argentina or recently yeah in zimbabwe and argentina So, yeah, I'm attracted to something of which there is a finite amount. But I'm also aware that, A, that's just simplistic and that's what got us in trouble with the gold standard back in the day. And, B, the issue is, I guess,

I have trust issues around the regulatory authority of Bitcoin, but that's only because I don't understand blockchain enough. And I think if I did understand it, I have very clever friends who do, and they think it's brilliant. So I'm not, no, I'm, I think non-state, I think non-state money is exciting

and is probably a good thing as well. I think Milton Friedman once said, you know, I think in the 90s, he said, we've got, everything's going digital, but we still don't have a digital form of money. And he obviously knows that most of our money is digital at the moment in the sense that it's just numbers on balance sheets in banks. So what tiny proportion of it is notes and coins. But what he meant, of course, was a kind of an internet native currency, one that was built on the internet for the internet, not by banks and nation states. And it was almost like we had all these other things. And this one was just waiting to turn

up with this strange new blockchain technology. I mean, as a sort of system of ensuring scarcity and trust, because that was what the blockchain was really about. It was the way of recording all of these, it's like a big diary of the coin and it uses some very clever technology to work. But I think that is an interesting way you put it. You don't need to trust it because you don't really understand it all entirely,

but clever friends of yours do understand it and they trust it. And that's how you often work things out. It's like, because it's open source, you know how it works. You speak to lots of people who are specialists and they all say, this is actually really quite impressive.

And you think, okay, well, I guess it's quite impressive then. Yeah, and also like, who are we kidding? Like, do I understand what money is anyway? My daughter asked me what money is the other day, and I actually struggled to explain. Money is like an extraordinary philosophical concept. And I don't know how the Bank of England goes through that.

I mean, like, so who are we kidding? It's like when people go, oh, I'm not going to have this vaccine because I don't know what's in it. And then you get on an aeroplane that flies you through the bloody troposphere, you know, thousands of miles. It's like, you know how that works, do you?

I'm just sitting here on the internet. like well you know how that works do you i'm just i'm sitting here on the internet like what i know that works i mean i know if this is cooking my mobile phone's cooking my brain i'm like trust in trust in authority is really important i guess this is a new kind of authority and it's just we're a new we're a new dawn here and I need to get cool with this more decentralized, slightly more anarchic kind of expertise than a guy sitting in Whitehall with a plaque on his door. So, but yeah, I've got no problem with it at all. I think that is partly what it represents. represents. And there's a lot of people who say Bitcoin, you know, this idea from 2008, 2009, it will be the first of many. We don't know what the future of money will hold. We don't know exactly how it will work. But there's a lot of people that think there'll be better Bitcoins in the future, different types of Bitcoin. But one thing's for sure, it will be based on some kind of

very clever, decentralized database system where you can hold digital assets that other people also value. So it retains its value. And so we're sort of at the very beginning of a whole new type of money. We went through the gold standard. We dropped that in the early 70s. Before that, we had all sorts of other experiments. And this is the kind of experiment in money for the digital age. And I agree with you. The thing that I found most interesting about thinking about Bitcoin, reading about it, trying to understand it, is it just makes you sort of think about money in a different way. Like, what on earth is it?

Why do we have it? Who controls it? Who does it empower or disempower and that's that's an exciting thing and you think i think with this um with this pandemic and you know discussions about universal basic income and printing more money and quantitative easing i think it just goes into that sort of pot of discussions about how do we make money how do we hold how does it hold value why does it hold value what do we do with it i agree and in terms of uh and in terms of financial monetary manipulation and innovation we may decide that bitcoin is far more traditional than having no

relationship between our money and anything else and printing as much money as we want, which we've done since the 1970s. So we may decide that was the dangerous innovation that would collapse global economic order. And in fact, Bitcoin, this idea of getting back to something which is limited, finite, all that kind of stuff, that may be right. That actually looks like kind of an old-fashioned idea yes i think you're right and in a strange way and it's it's it's sort of bridging the old and new and that was the great innovation of it it created a form of digital scarcity that's really the key to it that you could have an online asset that you could send around easily but you couldn't just copy and paste it and have anyone, you know, rip you off and create fraudulent copies of it. And you also didn't have anyone in charge

who could rip you off and steal it and all the rest of it. And that was the great innovation, introducing an idea of scarcity into a digital asset. And insofar as that's quite an old fashioned idea, like a big stone or a rare shell or a piece of rare metal is scarce. So it holds its value. That's what essentially what this is about for the for the digital age. I guess the scary thing is no one ultimately no one knows that we humans like to think of some woman or man sitting there at the end of it who we can knock on the door and ask about it. And it's all very well going, oh, it's going to be limited and there's going to be it's going to we drop one or two coins a day but like that's the bit where i'm like well it says who who's that like what's that bit yeah well that's why it's an open source code so clever people get to look at it and test it and you can trust them rather than trust yourself but that isn't to say

there aren't problems the most interesting feature and the reason it has a scarcity is that it's a every as I said to you before, every every transaction ever made on the Bitcoin network is recorded in this massive public database and it's chronologically ordered and it's ad only and you cannot delete previous records once they're recorded. So it's an irreversible database. But that causes trouble, which means, Dan, if someone got your password to your Bitcoin wallet and sent me 10 million pounds worth of Bitcoin, we can't really, and I just disappear into thin air, you can't get that money back. You can't go to a bank and say yeah there's been a fraudulent thing i want the money returned please and they could there's no central authority to do that so i think that would be really annoying man i could use that 10 million dollars

exactly exactly so you you could buy some of those wonderful precious spanish dollars that you seem to love so much or some or some cow shells. I'm going to kick it old school, man. That's proper currency. So there are problems about ordinary people using it. And there's a few other technical ones. People talk about the big environmental impact of Bitcoin, because every time you update the database, every copy of the database has to be updated and lots of powerful machines do these funny number puzzles to crack a code in order to verify the transactions and then list them on the databases and they get rewarded in bitcoin for that all very technical stuff in other words but it takes an awful lot of energy to do and they reckon there's been estimates that something like

the bitcoin network at the moment is using up about the same amount of energy as the Czech Republic. It might even get worse. So there are issues here like this irreversibility, this energy consumption. There are problems in terms of it becoming a truly global currency, especially for ordinary people. When non-technical specialists get involved and their money's nicked and they're used to going to the bank to get it back and they can't this is a problem this is a big weakness in its adoption so I'm not saying there's no problems with any of this and some of those problems are based are partly the reason people like it the fact it's ad only no one can manipulate historical records is why so many people like it because they think that

otherwise governments will get involved and start doing it but it creates a problem for a user when they have their money stolen so we got a bit of ironing out to do i think to if this is going to work but like i said if you think of this as the very beginning of a new experiment in digital money rather than the end word of it. It's a really fascinating area. It certainly is. And thank you so much for trying to talk me through it. I really do feel I understand a huge amount more. So thank you very much indeed.

Where can people watch and read and follow your extraordinary work into these fields? Well, I did this BBC podcast, sorry to put a rival podcast out there, Dan, but I did a BBC podcast series called The Missing Crypto Queen about the big, the multi-billion dollar scam called OneCoin, which was essentially like a Bitcoin ripoff that they were using. And it was a giant pyramid Ponzi scheme to basically take all the hype and excitement of Bitcoin and con ordinary people into putting all their money into it. the hype and excitement of Bitcoin and con ordinary people into putting all their money into it. And that, you know what, in that I do a description of the blockchain and how it works really well, as clearly as I can. So the idea there is by seeing a scam version of the real thing, you get to better understand how it all works. That's probably the best place.

Brilliant. Go and check that out. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished and liquidated. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. He tells us what is possible, not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well. I have faith in you. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. in you. ours and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts,

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