TRIGGERnometry - Money & Crypto for Dummies with Saifdean Ammous

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Saifdean Ammous is a leading researcher and educator in the field of Bitcoin. Dr Ammous is also the author of the best-selling The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking.  SPONSORS:  The Alder Files, check them out for all your branding, visual, & motion graphics needs https://www.thealderfiles.com - Manscaped. Receive 20% off Manscaped products when you use the code Trigger20. Check out their products https://www.manscaped.com Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The politicians, the media, they're all the, and the major corporations, of course, they are the beneficiaries of inflation. And the victims of inflation are essentially duped into voting for their own impoverishment because they're told they're going to be getting some of the spoils. But the spoils that they get are a tiny little fraction of the wealth that gets stolen from them. Hello, Anne. Welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the author of the Fiat Standard and the Bitcoin Standard, who also runs his online learning platform at Safedin.com. Dr. Savady and Amos, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me, guys. It's a pleasure to be here.

It is a great pleasure to have you on. Before we get into the conversation itself, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, How are you where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I'm Palestinian, Jordanian, and I got a PhD in sustainable development from Columbia University, and I was a university professor in the Lebanese American University when I came across this new interesting toy called Bitcoin, and then it fascinated me, and then it drew me in like a black hole and took over everything in my life. And I left my university job, and I started teaching online. so now I'm independent. I just teach to students directly online

and I write books and I talk to interesting people on the internet like you. Well, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. I've listened to many of the things you've spoken about and read some of your work. You're very smart man, much smarter than me or Francis. So what we wanted to do is to go through the basics

for us and our audience to get a basic understanding. First of all, about money and then about Bitcoin and maybe other crypto stuff as well. So first question is, what is money? The short answer is money is a medium of exchange. It's something that people buy, not for its own sake. You don't buy money because you want to eat it, because you want to look at it,

because you want to use it for a certain thing. It doesn't have a function in and of itself. Its only function is that you plan on later exchanging it for something else. That's what distinguishes money from all other goods. It's something that you don't buy for its own sake, but for the sake of it. exchanging it for something else. And so that is what we call the function of medium of exchange because it's just something

that you use for exchange. And essentially, this is something that is developed naturally as humans, you know, as human society became more complex, as humans lived and started trading with more people, we started developing more products, we started living in larger societies. The idea of trading things directly for one another becomes increasingly impractical. You know, if it's just five people on an island, then all the only things that they can produce are, you know, maybe five or ten things or twenty things between them. It's easy for them to keep track and to just exchange things directly. But as the number of people grows, it becomes difficult for them to exchange things directly for one another because, you know, the thing that you want to, you would like to acquire is held by somebody who doesn't have the thing that you want to give them.

And so they don't, they're not interested in your apples, but you're interested in their oranges. They're interested in bananas. So you need to find somebody who has bananas and wants your apples and you give them the bananas. You give them the apples, you take the bananas and then you give the bananas to the guy with the oranges and he gives you the oranges that you want. So as naturally, you know, as the number of goods increases in an economy, naturally people start buying things not for the sake of holding them, but for the sake of exchanging them. And these things are media of exchange. But over time, you know, bananas do a pretty bad job of being money because, you know, they spoil in a few days. And not a lot of people want bananas.

If the guy that you wanted to give the bananas to changes his mind, then you're not going to find a lot of people who want the bananas. So over time, the things that end up playing the role of money end up acquiring certain, end up having certain parts. properties that make it that make them suitable for the purposes of being a medium of exchange, of being exchanged. And, you know, some of these properties are that it is divisible. You know, bananas aren't very easy to divide it to smaller pieces and that you can combine small pieces into one big piece. So the whole thing is homogenous. And another property is that it is portable, that you can move it around. So houses aren't very good as money because you can't move a house around. You can't take it with you. Same is true with land.

And I think over time, though, what ended up being the most common form of money around the world by the end of the 19th century was gold. And so in my book, the Bitcoin standard, I begin by explaining what it is that makes things good as money. And why is it that gold was the world's only money at the end of the world's prime money at the end of the 19th century? And my explanation for that is that the property that matters the most for monetary selection is monetary hardness, how hard the money is. Because that determines the ability of the money to hold onto its value over time. And in the long run, that ends up being the most important property because bananas will rot, fish or any kind of food will also rot. other metals will rust and decay and corrode, but gold doesn't rust, doesn't corrode.

And more importantly, gold, because it doesn't rust and corrode, we're constantly stockpiling more and more gold all over the world, and we're not consuming it. You know, it doesn't, you consume copper. You put copper in machines, and then the machines run out, and then copper disintegrates and rusts and is thrown away. But you don't consume gold. You know, people mined gold 5,000 years ago,

and that gold is still running around the world today being gold. It's in somebody's necklace or in somebody's gold coin. It's still there. It doesn't rust. It doesn't corrode. It doesn't ruin. So the result of this, the implication of this is that we have thousands of years of gold production piling up. Safe thing.

Can I interrupt just with a very layman question. What's the difference between gold and silver? And why do we perceive gold as having more value than silver? Yep. That's a great question. So the difference primarily is that silver can tarnish and can ruin, and it does get used up, but gold is not, does not ruin at all. And gold is more scarce in the earth's crust than it's harder to find.

So historically, silver had a lower value than gold. We had a bigger abundance of silver, but those two metals, where the two monetary metals by the beginning of the 19th century. Before that, you know, copper and iron had been used as money, but then they lost their monetary role as well. And the reason for that is their monetary, their non-monetary uses or their industrial uses became pretty significant. So people were using copper for all manner of things. And that leads to the corrosion of the copper. And so therefore, what happens is if this is why, you know, a lot of people say, well, money is just a hallucination, or money is just a shared social contract between people.

You know, we can decide that we want gold to be money or we could decide that we want copper to be money or we could decide we want pigskin to be money. And if we all decide it hard enough, then we can make it money. And I think that's completely nonsense. If we all decide that we want to make copper money tomorrow, it doesn't matter how hard we want it. It doesn't matter if everybody sells everything that they have

and buys and puts all of their, and stores all of their value in copper, it's not going to work as money. And the reason is, if we buy, if we keep stockpiling copper and we keep using it as a store of value, the people who are able to mine copper are just going to keep mining more

because the more we buy it and use it as money, the more its price goes up, the more the miners are incentivized to produce more of it. The more they produce of it, the more they bring it on the market, they crash the price. So no matter how much you want to store, copper as a store of value, eventually the mining production will catch up with you and

it will bring the price down. It's not possible to keep the price of copper significantly high because it's very easy for people to make more of it. And because it rusts and corrods and gets used up, the quantities that we stockpile will eventually decline. You know, they will get used up and they will corrode. And so new production is a large percentage. is a large percentage of existing stockpiles. This is true for all commodities and all goods, with the exception of silver and gold. Those are the two ones that manage to maintain large stockpiles, wherein annual new production is small compared to the existing stockpiles.

In the case of silver, historically, this was around 5%. So every year, we add about 5% to the stockpile of silver. A little bit of it gets consumed, but we add around 5%. In the case of gold, we're adding historically around one and a half to two percent only. So every year, you're only adding one and a half to two percent to the stockpile of gold. And every year we get better at finding gold. Every year we develop more machinery, better technologies for digging for gold. But what that leads to is that we never are able to make a 20 percent increase in the supply of gold.

because we get marginally better this year, but then that just means that the production of this year gets added onto the stockpiles. The stockpiles get bigger. So the production next year, even though it's bigger, it's still the same kind of fraction because the stockpout is also bigger. So that ratio of the supply increase annually,

in the case of gold, has always been around 1.5% to 2%. And that's why historically, I think gold became money. silver was like in second place. It had about a 5% growth increase. But the advantage that silver had is that it was more divisible than gold. A silver coin is what people would use for small day-to-day transactions, whereas a gold coin would be something that you would use for bigger transactions.

So you'd buy a house with a few gold coins. You'd buy your lunch with a silver coin. But over time, what ended up happening in the late 19th century is that as banking developed and modern banking allowed for people to just make financial instruments backed by gold, then it didn't matter how divisible gold was. We could have the British pound backed by gold, and you could make a payment with a piece of paper that was backed by gold, and it didn't matter, you know, you didn't have to cut up the gold coin itself.

The pieces of paper were divisible. And so the use of silver as gold began to decline toward the end of the money. 19th century and then its value continued to decline so around the mid 19th century the price of silver in terms of gold was 15 to 1 so 15 ounces of gold 15 ounces of silver would buy you one ounce of gold something in that range today it's around a hundred or so so it's dropped significantly silver has lost its value significantly compared to gold safety in the 19th century just to jump in again i know you'll probably go in there anyway But it seems like we're getting to the point of we're talking about, you know, gold is fairly consistent in having a certain value.

And you talk about creating currencies that are linked to gold. And then comes a point in human development when that link is broken. And that, I think, is where a lot of the modern issues we have that we're probably going to talk about a little bit. So talk to us about that and how we got there and how that decision was made and some of the consequences of that. Yep. This is a major theme in my two books, the Bitcoin Standard and my second book, the Fiat Standard. So in the Bitcoin Standard, I trace the development up until this point where gold basically won over all the other monies. And the conclusion that I get to is that the hardest money always wins.

And we also have several other examples. You know, you look at seashells. And, you know, when gold comes into a society that has seashells, the seashells lose their monetary role because it's easy. You know, it's not because people just think, oh, well, gold is shiny. yellow. It's because people keep making more seashells, but they can't make more gold. So the people who have gold maintain the value of their wealth in the gold, but the people who have seashells witness their wealth disappear. So it's not a matter of choice. And this is, I think, the main issue that a lot of economists don't get. They tell you it's a matter of choice. No, it doesn't

matter how many people choose to hold seashells. It's the choice only hurts the person. It doesn't affect the consequence. Inevitably, gold is going to drive out seashells. your choice is whether you go poor holding seashells or you trade your seashells quickly while they still have value for some gold and you manage to maintain some wealth. So this is what happened and I think I personally think this was the development of the gold standard is not just me but a lot of people also think the development of the gold standard at the end of the 19th century when the entire planet was basically using the same money and all the global currencies were effectively just different weights of gold. So there was no exchange market as it is today where, you know, the price of the dollar and the pound and the yen are fluctuating. The dollar and the pound and the, all the other currencies were just different weights of gold, specific number of grams of gold. And so the exchange rate hardly ever moved. There was no foreign exchange market variation.

It was just similar to the exchange between meters and inches and different units. They were fixed. So all of the world running on one currency, and that currency being. hard in my opinion is basically the pinnacle of human civilization at the pick at the turn of the 20th century at the beginning of the 20th century that's when all of the most incredible and important inventions were invented everybody anywhere in the world could save money into the future and they could be quite confident that it would hold on to its value you know you didn't have to be an expert in financial markets as you have to be today knowing

understanding stocks and bonds and commodities and monetary policy and all of these arcane fields in order to be able to maintain the wealth that you've earned. You could be a butcher, a shoemaker, you could have any kind of job, and then you get paid in a gold coin, and you just held on to that gold coin, and you knew that 10 years down the line, that gold coin will buy you slightly more than what it bought you when you earned it. You didn't have to go out and speculate in a stock market casino in order to just keep the wealth that you have. So then 1914 comes about, and that's the topic that I focus on in my second book, the Fiat standard. And we move from the gold standard to the Fiat standard, where effectively

governments, and it's a long process, and I describe the details in the Fiat standard, and like a lot of bad things that have happened in the world, started all in England. To be fair, a lot of all good things as well, you know, the steam engine and football and the three-piece suit. You guys have done good things as well. But you know, you destroyed the gold standard, which was a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake. But that led to the replacement of gold, which had an annual supply growth rate of around 1.5 to 2 percent with national currencies, which in the last 60 years, you know, you look at the data from 1960 until today, 2020.

In those 60 years, we see that the average money supply increased at around 15 percent or so in the world. Per year? Per year, yeah. Wow. So what's the total increase then since 1960? It's enormous. It must be insanely big.

It is. It absolutely is. I mean, in the best currencies, you know, the better currencies like the US dollar or the Swiss franc or the Danish croner, these kind of currencies, they've increased at around maybe six, seven, eight percent on average. That's the best, you know, that's, four or five times the rate of increase that you had with gold. But of course, you know, you look in the history of the 20th century,

you see an enormous number of countries that suffered hyperinflation, which is something that never happened on the gold standard. And on all of these hyperinflations, you know, the money supply was increasing at maybe 100%, 200%, maybe 500% in a year. So the value of the currency was getting destroyed. So the average Fiat user in the last 60 years would expect that their money would be diluted by 14% per year.

That's the number that I calculate. Fiat being normal currency just for late in late per cent. Yeah, government money basically. It's money because, yeah, it's money because government says it's money. And Save Dean, can I ask, why did the evil English in 1914 do this? Because they wanted to fight a war. Actually, this is something that is amazing. They don't teach you this in your history books.

And it's something that, you know, the history books in England completely paper over this. There was a huge inflation, price inflation that happened in England during World War I, but you don't talk much about it. But only in 2017, you know, 100 years after the event, did the Bank of England, a bunch of people in the Bank of England dug into the basement and found a bunch of papers that explained what actually happened. And it was published quite recently. And interestingly enough, you know, when the world war began, and it wasn't a world war, then it was just a bunch of European kings fighting each other. Then the British wanted to interfere and the government introduced a sale of bonds to finance the war. The English people, being not sociopaths, did not buy that bond issue. They didn't buy a third of the bonds.

So the government had a problem on its hand. They wanted to go out and kill a bunch of Europeans. But the English people had better things to do with their money than go kill Europeans. So they only bought about a third of the money that the British government needed. So what did the Bank of England? do. Well, the Bank of England got a couple of members of the bank, a couple of people who worked at the bank, high-ranking officials. The Bank of England basically gave them a credit line in their own name, and they went and bought two-thirds of the bonds in their own name.

And then a certain rag in England called the Financial Times, you may have heard of it. They published a story saying, you know, the bond issue was oversubscribed and it was extremely successful and the people of England really do want to join this war and it's going to be a great victory for England because we have all the resources we need and of course remember it was an august bank holiday it was going to be just you know a quick a quick tour into europe where we're going to go and establish our dominance and come back and that was the idea but of course when they did that what ended up happening is you know essentially they issued a lot of credit money and paper money not backed by gold and so as a result

the value of the paper money began to decline. And as a result, they started collecting the gold from people's hands. And so they instructed the post offices and the banks to only make payment in paper money. And they told everybody to hand over their gold to their local post office and bank because that was needed for the war effort. And if you weren't doing that, then you were basically a traitor, effectively. So with this kind of emotional manipulation, they managed to get gold. out of circulation and get people to use the papers. And of course, the consequence of that was that prices rose.

So during World War I, prices more than doubled. And then after World War I, there was a big recession and a big problem in England. And they were trying to get back on the gold standard at the old rate, but they couldn't do it because they had a whole bunch of other money, a whole bunch of new money that was circulating. And so it's like a comedy of errors where, you know, it's like we're watching one of these slapstick comedy movies, but, you know, with hundreds of millions dead people. where they make this lie and then they just keep making bigger lies to try and cover it up. And the money supply keeps increasing and that creates more problems, more inflation,

more economic disasters, destroys people's livelihood, destroys people's savings and creates economic recessions and all these problems. And then in order to cover it up, what do they do? You know, almost like an episode of Benny Hill, they go and they print more money to fix it. And then it just continues to get worse and worse. And then that effectively leads to Britain losing the British pound as the global reserve currency. And the dollar, which was managed by people who are slightly less insane than the Bank of England. So it was much stronger and got a lot of gold flowing into the US from Europe.

The dollar takes over as the global reserve currency and it becomes the global money that is used all over the world. but of course you know the Americans then start to be using that as well and then in 1971 all the world goes off any kind of link with gold where the bank of where the U.S. Federal Reserve stops or in the U.S. Treasury, they stop redeeming gold for their dollars and then there's no limit on how much they can print and so from 1971 onwards national currencies all over the world are backed by basically nothing. It's just governments that are just printing and Since then, we see price inflation takes off and government debt takes off. And we just, I think, you know, it's at the root of a big, big, big number,

if not the vast majority of economic problems all over the world. But of course, it's not something that is discussed extensively in your economics textbooks at university because your economics textbook is written by people who get paid from that printed money. So they turn your attention to all kinds of other inconsequential bullshit instead. Hey, KK, do you believe in spring cleaning? Yes, but only when my wife does it. In Russia, men who clean are executed for not being real men, which is correct. Well, for those men who are living in the 21st century, Manscaped has an incredible offer for you.

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And giving support for fighters, survivors and families impacted by testicular cancer as part of their We Save Bulls initiative. Gents, you now have the perfect excuse to check yourself on a regular basis. Get stuck in. That's a huge worry for the world, isn't it? Particularly as because in the COVID era, we've all been printing huge amounts of money. And before that in 2008. And by the way, can I just say before you answer that question, as an honorary Englishman now,

I've got no problem with my money going to annoy Europeans or whatever, mess it up. That's very much on brand for us. Yeah, it's true. It is a major problem. It is a major problem all over the world. world. I think, you know, it's amazing when you, if you follow the news over the last year in particular, you know, inflation is rising everywhere, prices of everything is going up. Now, listen to the mainstream media, listen to the PhDs in economics. Why is this happening? There's an infinite number of reasons

that they'll bring up. You know, it's happening because of supply chain disruptions and it's happening because of the virus and it's happening because of this and that and the other thing. And it's, you know, it's all distraction from the one very, very obvious cause, which is that the money supply just keeps going up. And you look at the rate of increase in the money supply. It's just always going up. It's gone up vertically over the last couple of years, but it had always been going up. And the problem with this inflationism, it's like a drug addiction where, you know, there's no such

a thing as a moderate heroin user. It's addictive. So you need more and more and more. And so even if initially, let's say in the 80s, inflation seemed like it was under control in the 80s and in the 90s. Well, inflation, the more it seems like it is under control, the more tempting it is to engage in more of it. And then the more you engage in it, the more problems you create.

And then if you think that inflation can solve those problems, then you were going to try and solve the problems of inflation with more inflation, which is what they're doing. And I think it is a huge problem. It's something that proper economists, what I like to think of as proper economists, what I like to think of as proper economists, you know, are the alternative schools of economics, the Austrian school of economics, which is what I consider myself a part of. They've been harping on about this for more than a century now, that this is the biggest problem in the world economy. And they are marginalized because, you know, there are a lot of very powerful interests that benefit from

money printing. And so they'd like to deflect away from this and focus on, you know, all other other kinds of inconsequential bullshit. But now it's, you know, the world's waking up onto the fact. It's very hard to, it's becoming harder and harder for establishment economists and central bank to continue to make the astonishingly absurd lie that, no, no, no, no, our money printing is helping fight the price inflation. We're not responsible for the price inflation. The reason prices are rising is because of other things and our money printing is how we're fixing

this. it's becoming less and less tenuous in many more people's minds and if we if we you know the people of england or the people of britain or the people of america went to the ballot box and we had a a choice of somebody who wanted to bring us back onto the gold standard is that even possible now or are we just are we just too drugged up now and there's no way out um i think theoretically it is possible like if you voted for somebody yeah he could do it uh it would it would require a massive revaluation of gold. So the price of gold would go up to maybe something like 10,000 pounds an ounce

or 20,000 pounds an ounce. So theoretically it is possible, but practically and politically it's impossible. So if you look at somebody like Ron Paul in the U.S., you know, he had a lot of grassroots sport, but he could not translate that into political, effective success. Because, and this is really the really pernicious thing about this, It's a very sustainable equilibrium because once you've started printing money,

then the people who are in government have an enormous amount of power over society. And so they are able to use that power in order to get themselves reelected. And if you're going in with the agenda of I am not going to use the money printer, it's kind of like going into war without a weapon, you know, because politics is the weapon, you know, democracy is, I'm going to give you free ponies and free hospitals and all of the nice things that you want, you know? And so the more promises you make, the more votes you get.

So if you run on the platform of, screw you, I'm not going to give you anything. You're going to have to work for things. You're not going to make it in politics. So a lot of people have tried. There have been a lot of economists and a lot of politicians who have run on this kind of hard money. let's go back to gold platform, but it's a dead end. The bureaucracy, the politicians, the media, and the major corporations, of course,

they are the beneficiaries of inflation. And the victims of inflation are essentially duped into voting for their own impoverishment because they're told they're going to be getting some of the spoils. But the spoils that they get are a tiny little fraction of the wealth that gets stolen from them. And that's the perniciousness of the scam, you know. So you're witnessing your savings destroyed.

You're witnessing your ability to save for the future destroyed. And you're willingly giving it up because you're voting for people who are promising you, you know, we're going to give you free this and free that. But, you know, we see how this ends up. It ends up with a lot of, you know, nothing is. At the end of the day, you're just promising these things to be done with central planners. Central planners are going to be doing those things, and it's just going to end up being more and more expensive, and it's going to end up destroying the currency even more.

So I don't really think that political solutions are possible. This is a job for Superman. This is a job for Bitcoin. Okay. And we segue nicely into Bitcoin. So look, here's the thing, Safe Dean. In, I think it was in 2011, a friend of mine told me, gave me two pieces of advice.

Get into silver and he said, get into Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin. And obviously me being skint as a skinted comedian, I didn't have the option of doing it. I had no idea what Bitcoin is. I still don't really understand what Bitcoin is. Can you do a basic layman explanation of what Bitcoin is? and actually why it's so powerful in today's economy. Yeah, so Bitcoin, you know, the,

I'm not going to get into the technical aspect of it because it's going to take a lot of time to go into that. So I'm just going to discuss it functionally. You know, I'm not going to explain how the car works. I'm just going to tell you what a car does. And the importance of Bitcoin is that it is a form of money. It's a digital form of money that exists on the internet that is controlled by nobody.

Nobody is in charge of Bitcoin. It's a protocol that anybody can use, but nobody can control. So it only has users. It doesn't have admins. And the really, really important thing about it, which is the focus of my first book, the Bitcoin standard, is the idea of hardness. Remember when I said gold is the hardest money, 1.5% increase. Well, Bitcoin is even harder than gold.

It's becoming harder. It's now increasing at around 2%. It started off increasing at a pretty high percentage rate of increase, but that rate declines over time. And now it's at 2% and it's going to continue to decline. And then eventually it's going to arrive at a growth rate of zero. So there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin. There's no way of making more than 21 million.

So we've already made almost 19 million at the time currently. And there's only going to be another 2 million Bitcoin that are going to be made over the next century or so. So the supply growth rate of Bitcoin has already dropped significantly. It's around the same range as gold right now. And in the next few years, it's going to decline below gold. And it's going to continue to decline until it eventually hits zero and then stops growing. So what I'll say, if you want the details for why, you should read my book.

But basically, this is extremely credible. There's no way of anybody finding a way of making more Bitcoin. It doesn't matter how many petitions you sign. It doesn't matter how many media, how many university professors, how many academics, how many Keynesian textbooks you write, you can't make more Bitcoin. And so that's why Bitcoin basically, you know, it solves the problem of politics. We don't have to convince the crazy inflationists anymore. We don't have to reason with them.

We don't have to win elections against them. This is money that just doesn't give a shit about what anybody thinks. It's just going to be there and it's only going to be 21 million. And your only option is to deal with it or, as Bitcoiners like to say, cry harder. There's nothing you can do to change it or affect it. Well, on that point, Safedin, I don't understand Bitcoin or money nearly as well as you do, but I understand people in politics, I think, reasonably well. And the one thing I know is if a government has an incentive to punish you

or to prevent you from doing something or to find a way to prevent you from doing the things that they don't want you to do, they will eventually, at least very, very, very hard look for a way very, very thoroughly and very, very hard. And I don't know if they can prevent you from making more Bitcoin or force you to make more whatever, but what they can do is prevent you from using it somehow, right? There must be a way they can prevent you from buying things, from selling things. There must be a way they can punish you. They can make it illegal, for example, right?

So isn't that a real concern going forward? It's like, okay, I hear you. It's a really hard currency. It's not going to increase by more than the specific amount. It's a very easy medium of exchange. It can be broken up. Like it works in the way that money works. But isn't it, if it's indirectly against the interests of the people who run our world,

they will find a way to prevent it from fulfilling that destiny, won't they? Perhaps, but I think, you know, the more you look into how it functions, the more difficult it is to find a way in which they can stop it. Because ultimately, this thing was built precisely with the objective of resisting capture and attack by government. It's not optimized for your user experience. It's not optimized for ease of use. It's not an Apple iPhone. It's not this cute app on your phone that is just blowing your mind and how cool it is.

It's not Netflix. It's not Apple. It's an ugly contraption. You know, think about it as like this ugly machine that you use to make a dirty job, to pull off a dirty job, but it does the job that you want. And that job is resisting capture by central authority. And so the key thing to understand here is that there's no single point of failure in Bitcoin. There's no trusted party.

There's nobody who is critical for the operation of Bitcoin. There's nobody you could kill to kill Bitcoin. There's no building you can bomb to destroy Bitcoin. There's no headquarters. There's no single computer. There's no single server anywhere in the world that you can take out. then you take out Bitcoin. Bitcoin is essentially a bunch of code.

And so anybody who runs that code on their machine is able to join the Bitcoin network. So there are maybe 10 billion internet-capable devices around the world between phones and laptops and servers and so on. Any of these just needs to run the code of Bitcoin and find a way of connecting to other machines through the internet and maybe not even

through the internet itself. you know, they could connect through radios and you could connect through mesh networks, you know, not necessarily through the internet, but through just connecting through other computers that connect to other computers. With these kind of networks, you will be able to basically do Bitcoin. So what it would take in order to shut it down. But my question is something else, Safitin, sorry, my question is, at the end of the day, if money is a medium of exchange and governments control whether you can convert Bitcoin into

their money because that's what you're going to have to convert it into to buy stuff, right? No. That's the key thing. Like eventually you don't have to. I mean, you don't have to convert Bitcoin into pounds in order to buy things. You can just give somebody Bitcoin and they give you things. And so the tricky part, are we ever going to get to a point? Sorry to keep interrupting. I just want to hone in on this. Are we ever going to get to a point where you can save all your life savings in Bitcoin and then be able to buy a house? If, the government in that country has banned transactions in Bitcoin because it thinks they're immoral or illegal or undermining the economic system or whatever. They've decided Bitcoin's not allowed

in our country. Am I ever going to be able to buy a house? Well, I think, you know, the example here to look at is if you look at your average country that has experienced hyperinflation over the past century and there's many of them, when the currency begins to collapse and when there are problems, you know, people naturally move away from their local currency to dollars and pounds or euros and they start using these currencies. And of course, governments will clamp down on these currencies and they will stop, they will ban people from using them. But what that does is the exact opposite effect. So when you say you can't buy dollars with, you know, our peso or our whatever it is, well, then what happens? You're not going to destroy the dollar. You're just going to

destroy your local shit coin, basically. So you're just saying that this currency cannot buy real money. And so people who hold this currency now value it less and they want to get rid of it more and they don't want to get paid in it. So that's, I think, the reality in, if you, so even if major governments decide to ban Bitcoin, you know, that just gives a massive advantage to other governments to go and accumulate Bitcoin or people in other countries to accumulate Bitcoin, hold on to it. And then, you know, the people who are forced to use the inferior currencies of their governments are just

going to witness their wealth destroyed. And the people who use Bitcoin are going to witness their wealth accumulate. And I have several examples of this happening with gold and silver. So, for instance, at the late 19th century, China and India were the last two countries that were on a silver standard. And that was a massive, massive mistake. For which they're still paying, I think, until today, because the value of silver continue to decline while the rest of the world was on gold. And so that's what allowed the British and the Europeans to essentially economically dominate China and India because their money was appreciating while the Chinese and Indian money was depreciating. And so everything just got cheaper for foreigners

in China and India so they could keep buying more and more things. And this is effectively what you would be doing as a government if you ban Bitcoin. You're basically picking the seashells. You're going with seashells and saying, yeah, we're just going to ban our peasants from using gold coins. And then we'll be able to keep them on the seashell standard. And then gold will just go away. I don't think that's going to work. Safegin, and what would you say to those people who go, look, you look at the fluctuations of Bitcoin.

You know, it will surge and then it will crash, etc. it's not stable, it's not reliable, and actually it's quite reckless to invest a lot of money in it. Generally what Bitcoiners say to those people is have fun staying poor. This is the kind of very common attitude. The idea is, yes, it is volatile, of course, but it is volatile going up. So the long-term trend is always up. Bitcoin's never been down on a three- or four-year horizon. It's always going up.

It's going up in many multiples of its value. So, yes, if you hold your local national currency, it doesn't fluctuate as much as Bitcoin, but it's trending down in real terms. Look at the price of houses in your local town in terms of your local currency anywhere in the world. Houses just keep it getting more and more expensive every year. Well, why? We keep building more and more houses. And the technology to make houses continues to get more efficient.

And so we have, you know, in real terms, houses are less expensive. We make them much more efficiently today. And yet the price of houses continues to go up. It's not the price of the house that's going up. It's the value of the currency that is going down. And so if you hold on to your national currency for the long run, and even if you try to beat the inflation by investing in stocks or bonds, you're basically not beating inflation.

It's very difficult to beat real inflation. When I say inflation, I don't mean the C. PPI number or the consumer price inflation statistics that the government puts out, which is just another form of fictional statistics from government. I mean the real inflation. You know, think about your house of dreams, the house of your dreams where you'd love to live. And think about the price of that house. You know, look it up online if you can and see what has happened to the price of that house

over the last 10 years. It is going up by much more than the CPI number. Think about all the things that you actually desire, the things that you really want, you know, the value of precious goods, it's going up much higher than inflation. And that's not the thing becoming more valuable. It's the money becoming less valuable. So the answer to this is, yes, Bitcoin's volatility is a problem in the short term. If you want to hold Bitcoin for the short term, it is a problem.

If you have a lot of exposure to Bitcoin in the short term and you know, you have short term liabilities. Like if you're a business and you have to make payments, then yeah, it is a tricky thing. You don't want to be fully in Bitcoin because you might not be able to make your payroll at the end of next month. So you do still need to hold some of your local operating, some of your currency for your operating expenses. But if you want to think about the long term, if you want to hold money for the next five, 10 years, Bitcoin is really the best option. And so you have to have a long term perspective on it. And you have to ignore the day-to-day noise. And essentially understand that what we're witnessing is that this thing is just completely,

continuously going up. And it's going up because the supply is fixed. There's no way of making more of it. And so, you know, the sooner you get in, the more you're going to have and the more you're going to benefit and the less you're going to suffer from your local inflation. But of course, you may not want to get in all in initially because of the volatility, particularly if you're a business. I think perhaps that might be understandable.

But in the long run, what you think about what you want to, what you want is, You want to maintain value, or increase the value. And Bitcoin really does this better than anything else. Hi, Francis. Do you have your own business? No. What do you think trigonometry is? An opportunity for me to annoy people and shout catchphrases.

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and fill out the project request form to get 10% of your first project and a free consultation. That's theolderfiles.com slash triggered and get 10% off your first project and free consultation. We have the saying here in the UK which are safest houses

and you've alluded to the house price inflation that we're seeing. How would you say Bitcoin point will compare to something like property over a 10, 50 and 20 year period? I think, I mean, we look at the past, it's done much better than property. And I think it's likely going to continue to outperform property. And I think, you know, a big part of the reason why property continues to increase is that people use their houses as their saving accounts.

Under the gold standard, you had a saving account which was backed by gold. you would buy the house that you'd need and you would just buy the house that you need as a consumption good. Now people think of their houses as their saving account. This is where I put my wealth and you maybe overinvest in housing because if you have a lot of money, you'd rather have that money in a house than have it in a bank, right? It's a better investment. Or you buy more houses and you rent them out, which leads to the situation where people who have money end up with a lot of houses and people who are young and who are just getting started, they can't afford to buy houses because their houses are being bid up by the people who already have the money because they're using them

as a saving account. So, you know, young people, the reason that young people can't afford housing and they need to get into, you know, enormous amounts of debt is that you're not just bidding against other people who want to buy a house. You're bidding against people who want to buy a savings. An investment. It's an investment. Exactly.

And I think the interesting thing is that Bitcoin is going to obsolete this use case for houses. So I think the long run, it's going to, you know, more and more people are discovering that you're better off putting your money in Bitcoin than putting it in a house. Therefore, I think over time, that's just going to return housing to being a consumer good where people buy the houses that they need to live in, not the houses that they, you know, not saving accounts. You'll use Bitcoin as a saving account. So, I think one of the issues that people have with Bitcoin is, it seems to be because it's such a new thing, there seem to be a lot of scam artists.

You hear all these stories about people being scammed. You know, I got an email sent by my bank, and you can question the bank's motives for this, but basically saying there's a lot of people out there using Bitcoin, using crypto as a way to scam others. Is this being overstated or is this a problem in the market? No, I think it's true. I think it's a new technology,

and it's very difficult for people. to figure it out quickly. You need a lot of time. You need to spend a lot of time figuring it out and understanding it. You know, nobody has, nobody's born understanding Bitcoin. You need to spend a lot of time understanding it. So that is, that creates a very rife environment for people to take advantage of people who are not very familiar with what's going on.

And personally, I think, you know, my personal opinion is that all the other digital currencies are effectively scams. they pretend to be decentralized like Bitcoin and that allows them to sell themselves as being the equivalent of Bitcoin but they're not decentralized. Only Bitcoin has truly managed to be decentralized because you look at the history of how Bitcoin has developed. The guy who made it, he was anonymous.

He didn't, nobody knew who he was. It was just one person. And he made it, he put it online for anybody to use and then other people started to use it and then he disappeared and nobody knows who he is nobody knows what happened to him

he may be dead he may have just you know gotten rid of that identity and moved on with his life but the important thing is that it's now been 11 years that he's been disappeared so the person

the only person who could control Bitcoin has been gone for 11 years and Bitcoin has been running for 11 years so we can and and in the those 11 years, a lot of people have tried to take control of Bitcoin. A lot of people have tried to make changes to Bitcoin. They've all failed. Bitcoin continues to refuse to be controlled. And so therefore, when I say 21 million Bitcoin, I know there's going to be only 21 million Bitcoin. I'm,

comfortable going out there in public and putting my name out and saying, this is what's going to happen. And I know that if one day there's going to be more than 21 million Bitcoin, I want to have an entire bucket load of egg on my face. But I'm willing to be. to take this chance because I think really the mold's been broken and there's no way to make another Bitcoin. There's no way to mess with Bitcoin. That's not the case with all the others.

Once Bitcoin was up and running, it was the real thing. It was decentralized. Nobody could control it. And then if anybody came about and built another one, them building another one, was only going to work and is only going to succeed if they were able to be in charge of it.

If they were able to be handling it And that's why, basically with all the other currencies, you know, it only takes you 50 minutes of digging to figure out who are the people behind it. And it's entirely easy for the people behind it to change the supply, change the rules. And we've seen that happen with pretty much most of the big currencies that they run like startups, whereas Bitcoin is a neutral protocol. Bitcoin is like a language. You know, who controls the English language? Nobody. There's no authority that can say what is the English language.

and to the extent that there are authorities that write dictionaries, they don't make up new words. New words emerge and then they incorporate them into the dictionary. So this is what Bitcoin is like, whereas all the others are, I believe, centralized. And I think, therefore, they're essentially fraudulent because they're marketing themselves as decentralized, but really they're just securities.

It's a bunch of people issuing financial liabilities. Sorry. Oh, sorry. So you'd say even a big currency like Ethereum, which loads of people have bought into, you know, which has become pretty much mainstream, you would say that that is not a good investment. No, I would not recommend anybody put any money in any digital currency other than Bitcoin. And Safe Dean, it's really interesting. You've explained things so brilliantly in a way that's simple to understand. And I really appreciate it. And your books do a great job of that as well.

Can we talk a little bit about it since you're making predictions about the moment that we find ourselves in right now as a as a world Particularly the Western world So let's just go back a little bit 2008 you know we have a massive financial crash our solution is to print a shit ton of money and give it away mainly to banks and to ourselves Right then and then we we have you know Zero interest rates or maybe even negative interest rates depending on how you want to look at it for however many years it's been 14 years now. Then we have COVID when we go, okay, well look,

we've got this disease. Let in, I don't know what you guys did over there, but in this country, what we did is we went, stay at home, the government's gonna give you shit loads of money that we're gonna print, right? Now, you know, World War III, if we all survived that, like where are we gonna be? Because you know, we had people on the show two years ago

going, inflation's coming, it's coming, it's coming, and it's been coming and now it's here. Like what's happening economically and what is the future gonna look like? I mean, I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't really know, and I'm wary about making predictions in the future, but I think betting on these very strong, very persistent decades-long trends to continue is probably the best bet. I think we're just going to be more of the same. We're going to have more money printing, more inflation, more devaluation of the currency, more price rises. and I think the dangerous thing that we're seeing increasingly is that the more this money printing we get,

the more power the government has. And I think the last two years, just the insanity of the idea that government can just decide, all right, we don't want you to get sick. So, you know, screw your business, screw your life, screw everything that you care about. You just need to stay home and we're going to lock you up. I think this is just completely insane. And I think it's something that can only happen when a government has this insane tool that is a money printer. And so, you know, a lot of people would say, well, what would happen if we were on a Bitcoin stand?

A lot of people have asked me this question. What would happen if we were on a Bitcoin stand? And then COVID comes along, how do you expect the government to shut down the world and give people free money? And the answer is exactly, they won't shut down the world. And then people would have to make their own choices. And I believe in the world in which people have to make their own choices, COVID would have been dealt with extremely far more efficiently. I think doctors would have done a much better job than what happens now

when all these essentially non-medical bureaucrats were making decisions for millions of people rather than letting doctors and patients make their decisions for themselves. And we saw this with a lot of these medicines, which I'm not going to mention because I don't want to get your YouTube channel canceled. But, you know, there's a lot of these medicines that came about that we're proof. very effective and many doctors were speaking about them but the bureaucrats had they didn't see any power in it and so they were promoting the measures that involve power and submission and compliance and dependence you know they want to shut down your business so that you need the government for their money and then you'll have to vote for the government to give you more money and then

they'll be able to control you politically and they'll be able to control you more and more so i think it's a very very dangerous world and um another aspect of it is just the amount of government propaganda that we're seeing and the ability of the government to just brainwash everybody into marching along with everything that they want is extremely dangerous. I think it's sadly, I think things are just going to keep getting worse. Of course, nobody knows how things are going to get worse. I mean, if I asked you five years ago, what's going to happen in 2022, you know, you wouldn't have imagined that there's going to be a big war of Russia and Ukraine. You wouldn't have imagined there was a

going to be a virus and break out. These things just come out of nowhere and they show up. So I think, you know, we're going to be getting more and more of these kind of dramas in the next upcoming seasons of the Fiat world. And things are going to keep getting worse and worse until Bitcoin fixes things. And I think it's just we need more and more people are going to wake up to Bitcoin and they're going to join Bitcoin not because of, you know, not because of ideology, not because they want to fight government.

they want to take money out of the government, they're going to join Bitcoin because it appreciates. And it protects them from inflation. It makes gains. We call it number go up technology. The price of Bitcoin keeps going up. People are going to come for the number go up. And the more people join for the number go up, the more Bitcoin rises in value. And the more that this free market monetary system grows as an alternative to the clown world of fiat that is just threatening to,

nuke the auto existence into oblivion and i you know it's it's like the final scene of a movie where will the hero manage to rescue the sweetheart before the bomb goes off in the building or not i think this is where we are right now so stay tuned and on that wonderfully positive note saved in it's been it's been a great episode and thank you interview and thank you so much for coming for explaining to us and illuminating not only myself but also audience as to what Bitcoin is and the potentials of it. Yeah, I knew all about Bitcoin safety and about I can't remember when it was probably about 2011, something like that. I bought 400 quid 400 pounds worth of Bitcoin and then a few years later it doubled it doubled to 800 pounds and triumphantly I sold it. What a legend and now

that amount that I had I think it was like half a Bitcoin or something is worth about 20 grand. So I knew even less than nothing about it. So thank you for coming on and talking about it. Listen, before we ask you our questions from our supporters on locals only, we have our usual question, which is the one we ask all our guests, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? I'm going to go with meat.

I think people should be eating more meat. And government is constantly telling you that you need your grains and you need your veggies and you need your fruits. I think that's all bullshit. They want you to eat all that crap because it's cheaper and eating meat is expensive and then it brings up inflation numbers. So for the last 50 years since we moved on the Fiat standard

and I discussed this in detail in my book, governments have been telling people to eat shit basically because they want to cover it up and then all these industrial food manufacturers have developed massively profitable business models of feeding people industrial waste which they make highly, And the way to beat that is to eat meat.

I've eaten nothing but meat for the last six and a half years, and it's been the best thing that has ever happened to me. So I eat only meat, literally, only meat and water. That's all I eat. And I highly recommend it. You won't hear your nutritionists talk about it because your nutritionists. Nutrition Department is financed by industrial food manufacturers. And if you eat meat, you don't desire the industrial junk that makes them a lot of money.

So there's that. Our producer is a passionate vegetarian. We're called Trigonometry for a reason. Yeah, he's walking off now, I can see. That's it, he's left. He's folded his arms and he's furious. Yeah, yeah. So that's fantastic.

So safdean.com for your lectures, the Bitcoin Standard and the Fiat Standard, your two great books. We're gonna ask you a couple of questions. But with that, thank you so much for coming on Trigonometry and thank you all for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon. With another brilliant episode like this one,

or Oror Show, them go out at 7 p.m. UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. How concerned is Safedene by the Canadian government seizing the trucker's crypto wallets and the incoming regulations aimed specifically at crypto?