The Saylor Series | Episode 11 | The Failures of Fiat

Link to the podcast audio: https://the-what-is-money-show.simplecast.com/episodes/wim047-the-saylor-series-episode-11-the-failures-of-fiat

Robert Breedlove 1:26
So gold fails [in a] globalizing, digitizing society. And then we have fiat introduced—and where does that take us?

Michael Saylor 1:45
If I can’t use gold, I need money that’s going to be stronger and faster and smarter. So what is an example of stronger money? Well, I’m in London. I have $100 million worth of money. I need to get it to Rome on a telegram, or I need to move it to Rome at the speed of a single horse, and I can’t haul that much gold. So I use a letter of credit. If I can project money via some credit network — whether it’s the Rothschilds network or it’s an imperial network or something else — then I’ve got stronger money, and I’ve got faster money. And if I can offer you that money in return for 3% interest, it becomes smarter money — smarter meaning I created an application that does something complicated. Like when I give you money for 30 days and at the end of 30 days you have to pay it back to me plus 4%, I created a derivative of the base-layer money, or a security of sorts. So the ability to create securities and the ability to project them distances with speed enables a more sophisticated economy and it’s good for economic productivity. Hence the idea of a fiat. And I think the earliest fiats were like [the] trading stations in the French territories of Canada. They had credits: credit systems on ships, merchant credit systems. There have always been private credit systems. And then eventually there became municipal credit systems, like the mayor of the city-state or something, or mayor of a hamlet, and then you get to statewide systems and federal systems and agency systems and who knows whether or not churches didn’t generate their own credit systems. And we know in the military, the military generates credit systems. They’ll have credit vouchers or travel vouchers in the military. I remember the airlines used to give you these tickets where you could fly “space available”, and they would give them to their employees like flight attendants. So the flight attendants are able to use that and give one to their wife or husband. And they sell those things! There actually became a secondary market in travel vouchers because they had monetary value. And so you have private monies and you have public monies and then you have quasi-public monies from any kind of food stamp or institutional voucher or military voucher that gives you a right to something of value — [it] becomes money in and of its own, in time. So the real question is, Why does fiat fail? We know why it works. The reason it works better than gold is because you put it on a piece of paper, and ultimately the rise of databases along with the ability to shuffle paper around meant that it’s a lot easier to create an application of fiat base-layer money — all I’ve got to do is take a check. Every time I write a check, I created an application, right? “Hey, pay Robert Breedlove $792.27.” Doing that in a fiat standard takes about 20 seconds. Creating $792.27 of gold is impossible for all but one in 100,000 people and would take a day. So it’s pretty obvious why it works — because you can create applications faster, you can create more beautiful, complicated applications, types of credit, you can move them around faster. And you can travel with them further distances. And also, they don’t invite violence to the same degree. A very famous example of a private money that was created in my youth was American Express traveler’s checks. And I don’t know if you remember American Express traveler’s checks, they actually became popular before the credit card. If people were going to travel internationally, and you were going to go to some place, they would say, Well, before you go, you should convert your money into American Express traveler’s checks. I mean, literally, this is a big business. And the number one use case was: that way, if you lose them or they’re stolen, you can get them replaced. The idea was you were less likely to be robbed if you were carrying the traveler’s check.

Robert Breedlove 7:51
It’s like an analog multi-sig, maybe something like that?

Michael Saylor 7:56
Yeah, like a multi-signature version of money or wrapped money. And American Express made all their money because people would buy $100 million to traveler’s checks and only redeem $95 million. And there was the float. And then there was the unredeemed amount. And that was the difference. People used to be very excited about these sorts of things. I mean a traveler’s check is almost like a derivative of a derivative. The paper money is on top of the gold or itself, although now I guess paper money is the base-layer money, and the traveler’s check was on top of that. People liked that idea, and then I suppose the credit card is just another example of a fiat application. The idea is: you would send your kid on vacation with a credit card feeling comfortable that you could reload the credit card if they ran out of money. But if your kid said, Dad, I need $25,000 in cash just in case I have an emergency and I need I need an emergency appendectomy or something like that — there’s no way you want them traveling with that. And of course, they couldn’t even get across the border with $10,000 of cash. So 99% of the world has more than $10,000 that they could put on a credit card. But nobody can take $10,000 in cash. So the fiat standard is appealing because of the portability of the purchasing power and because it doesn’t invite violence. If someone steals your credit card, you can cancel the credit card. If they stole your traveler’s checks, you could cancel the traveler’s checks — things like that. It’s like, Make sure you write down the serial numbers of your traveler’s checks — all of these things. But why doesn’t it work in the in the modern era? I mean the fundamental problem is: we start with inflation again — the government can create more of it. But here the inflation problem is not a minor problem like gold. It’s a major problem. Instead of getting a guaranteed 2% inflation with an occasional 20%, you get a guaranteed — I think Saifedean suggested the number was more like 10-11% guaranteed. 7% guaranteed in the US, more in other countries. So you’re getting a guaranteed inflation of somewhere between 7-11% a year, and you’re getting occasional inflation of 30% or 40% a year. So the base-layer protocol doesn’t work so well. It’s not conservative. So if you have a shared ledger that’s not conservative, it’s collapsing. And there’s just nothing — I say to people, there’s no engineered machine or structure that works with that degree of error or inflation. If you had a 2% leak in your gas tank — over what period, right? If you’re leaking 2% a day, your car won’t work. So leakage of your swimming pool or a balloon or any kind of electrical system or any thermodynamic system at all, just doesn’t work with that much leakage. So the inflation — ironically, right ?— inflation implies you’re getting more but really, it’s dilution, in a way. It’s guaranteed dilution or depletion. So the first problem with fiat is it’s just depleting energy at too rapid a rate. If we just said 10% a year on average, then a system which is losing 10% of its energy every single year or almost 1% a month — it’s kind of a crippling first-order problem on the base-layer. It’s almost like if I’m building on sand, and the sand was sinking 10 feet a year. What structure can you build? When you’re building on something, you want to build on granite and you want the minimum deflection. Granite doesn’t deflect, steel doesn’t deflect. Sand and clay deflects, swampland deflects. So the problem that we start with is the base-layer is collapsing. The second problem of the fiat standard is confiscation. The government can seize your currency or they can seize the asset. To a lesser extent other people can seize it. I mean if you carry your cash around there’s that famous image of Pablo Escobar sitting and burning $100 bills to stay warm. If you can carry it around someone with a gun can seize it, so that’s a problem. If you don’t carry it around then the counter-party that you trusted it with — generally the bank — can seize it. And in all cases, generally the government can seize it. And so these are three fundamental defects with the fiat standard: (1) your property rights are weak under the confiscation risk, and (2) your property is defective because of the constant inflation. You literally bought swampland in Florida that’s sinking. It’s worse than that! Because swampland doesn’t sink forever — it’s pretty much as bad as it’s gonna get. This is worse than that, because it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

Robert Breedlove 14:28
Yeah. There’s like a conundrum of money here, where this is the tool or the economic medium that’s intended to be trust-minimized. So you can put your wealth there and you don’t need to trust anyone else. It’s like a safe place to park wealth. But to get that you come with all these limitations of gold, historically. So to pick up these stronger, faster, smarter qualities of money comes with a cost of counter-party risk. The conundrum is: gold, you can trust nobody — you don’t need to trust anyone — but you can’t really trade with anyone because of all of its limitations. Or you can use fiat, in which you need to trust a lot of counter-parties, but you can trade with a lot of people. So there’s this conundrum we’ve been stuck between, historically. And Bitcoin is the answer: it’s the collapse of the counter-party risk.

Michael Saylor 15:25
Yeah we go from heavyweight, indestructible money that’s a brick that is too heavy to pick up off the floor, to lightweight cotton candy which is really easy to move around but ultimately not satisfying and blows with the wind. The counterparty risk is the explanation for inflation, right? The government’s inflating it. And the counterparty risk is the root problem with confiscation. But again, even if you had your cash in your pocket, you don’t have counterparty risk in the near term, but what you do have is an invitation to violence, it’s too difficult to move it, then you’ve got counterparty risk in the form of hypothecation, which is the third problem. Which is: you put your money in the bank — maybe they won’t steal it — but they’re making more of it because they’re loaning it out with a reserve ratio of 1:10 or 1:20 and so you put a million in the bank and they create 10 million more which dilutes your million. So the hypothecation is the third failing of a fiat standard. The fourth is the authentication again, because remember we want to actually be able to move it distances, but you can’t authenticate it over a distance in it’s bearer instrument form, because you can’t pay for something with cash. The way to authenticate it is through a counterparty. So I have to put my money in a bank, the bank has to issue a credit card, then I have to input the credit card into the website, then maybe the credit gets approved, then I have to do the transaction, and maybe the transaction gets approved, and maybe it doesn’t get approved, and it doesn’t cross all borders. It would be impossible to do a transaction via credit card with a vendor in Cuba, or Nigeria, or China, all sorts of places where if you cross central banks, the credit cards don’t cross those jurisdictions. So that is another way of saying it’s an authentication and a transportation problem. How do I transfer transport fiat currency? How do I transform transport a million dollars? Do you know any private individual that’s ever moved a million in cash over a commercial airline? There’s almost a presumption that if you had a million dollars of cash in your luggage that you’re a criminal, right? Isn’t that interesting? There’s a presumption that if you try to do it yourself as a bearer instrument, that you’re a criminal. And so what we have is we have a monopoly on transportation through the banks. But the banks only can really move within the central bank network, otherwise they have to cross central banks. So the monopoly is at the bank level, then the central bank level, and then the central banks answer to the government state departments. So the central bank of the US won’t do business with the central bank of Cuba. Period. Won’t happen. So transportation across jurisdiction is difficult and dangerous where it’s possible. It either works — you’re either in the zone where it’s working, like you’re in the US moving money between Bank of America and Citigroup at 3pm on a Tuesday — and then maybe it works. Although the truth is like I get denied, I try to do little credit card transactions between my credit card and my phone — I get denied like a third of the time.

Robert Breedlove 19:38
What type of transactions?

Michael Saylor 19:41
Try to move $2,500 to Cash App from your bank, and the bank might actually stop it. Anything like that. If it looks like it’s a transfer. You get all sorts of limits on the rate at which you can move money. And if you want to go to higher volumes — if you wanted to move $50,000 or $100,000 — invariably you have to have a trusted banker, a human being that’s calling you on the phone to move those wires. So the way that we move large sums of money is between 9pm and 5pm with a trusted banker with a manual authentication. I mean it feels to me like that hasn’t changed in 30 years, right? So you can’t move outside of the 9-to-5, and you can’t do it without that trusted banker, and you can’t cross any kind of technical jurisdiction or any kind of political jurisdiction that’s not in their free-fly zone. And the result of that is that the impedance to move that money is extreme. So on one side it might take you 72 hours and the real cost is hundreds of dollars. On the other side, if we go back to the credit card network though, you have a monopoly in the credit card network and the result is a 2.5% credit card fee. So where the money does move, there’s the 2.5% fee. And that’s under the best of cases. But the remittance network gets up to 10% sometimes. So you’ve got fees that range from 2.5% to 10%. If you’re lucky, you get one of those cashback cards. And so the effective cashback is 1.5% or something. So the effective cost is only 1%. But it’s 100 basis points, which is a huge amount of money — insanely large amount of money — and the network really isn’t competitive and it hasn’t changed much in 30 years. And there’s massive fraud charge-back issues.

Robert Breedlove 22:19
All of these impedances you’re describing, I would argue too, are essentially an impairment of property rights. Where in a pure property right, you should be able to send, express, receive, move the asset however you choose. But when you have to then answer to a counterparty or jump through these hoops or wait — all of these things impair your property rights and money.

Michael Saylor 22:44
Yeah, I would agree with you on that. I think that your property is impaired. It is taxed. And it’s either explicitly taxed by a government, a municipality, a state or federal government, or it’s privately taxed by the money transfer network that’s charging you a fee to move it around. And that’s a challenge. So transportation: either difficult or dangerous or it’s impossible or it’s expensive. Those are the problems with that. And then that leads to two other real deficiencies in the fiat standard. One, you’ve got a lot of credit failures, because lots of complex debt is layered on top of the base layer money. And that’s complex debt and credit instruments with counterparty risk. Check kiting, check fraud, or any anything like that where someone’s stood in to pay — lots of fraud and lots of credit failure — and then you’ve got securities fraud. And with security fraud, what I mean by that is there’s too many complex applications that are constructed based upon a counterpartys representation to you, and there’s no way for you to transparently authenticate or assure yourself that the application is properly constructed and properly backed. And you’re destined to have that. Someone says, Oh, we have $2 billion in reserves. But they don’t — but you don’t know they don’t, and then there’s a collapse of the securities they issued or the credit or the vouchers or whatever they issued. So that those things are inevitable. And the question is, Why? Why do you have credit bubbles? And then, Why do you have securities fraud on top of the fiat standard? And I think the answer — we come back to our base first principles — is: the base layer protocol of fiat is defective. The base layer money is defective. Is it a shared, immutable, correct, ledger? And the answer is, No. It’s not shared. It’s not immutable. It’s not correct. It’s an imperfectly, heterogeneously-shared, mutable, incorrect ledger. So I guess what you could say is it’s a ledger, right?

Robert Breedlove 25:49
It’s a ledger, yeah.

Michael Saylor 25:53
But it’s not shared, it’s not immutable, it’s not correct. You don’t have final settlement so you have massive fraud on the credit card network, you have transfers that didn’t take place that are represented to have taken place, you have balance sheets that don’t exist that are represented to exist. You have an issue there with the base layer. The second problem you have is the application layer protocol — it’s random and manual. So the protocol by which I would create applications is a base layer money. Like a security is an application, a credit card is an application. There’s no technical protocol, or [it’s not] programmable. There’s no API. It’s a manual protocol. So every single bank creates their own application. Like, a bank loan is an application of fiat. And every bank executes their own set of loans. And they’re all expected to maintain a certain degree of reserves, right? But they’re audited. And the fact that they have to be audited is proof that they’re all just manually executed and heterogeneous. So there’s no transparent, perfected application protocol. And the implication of that is that the applications in the fiat standard have no integrity in a mathematical sense, or a technical sense, or an engineering sense. A physical metaphor is: in the real world, I’m standing on solid ground. And in the fiat world, my eyes are closed and someone told me I could take two steps to the left and I would be standing on solid ground. But I don’t know that I’m standing on solid ground. I don’t know that I’m 100 feet from the cliff — I might be one foot from the cliff. Someone told me, and I don’t have a protocol to ascertain whether it is true or not true. So you could generously say people just make mistakes all the time — I thought you were 10 feet from the cliff, and you only were nine and so that’s why you’re dead. Maybe it’s just an honest mistake, right? But then again, maybe it was in my vested interest to tell you you’re 10 feet from the cliff and you were really 5 feet from the cliff.

Robert Breedlove 28:57
And this gets straight to the heart of Bitcoin where it’s removing the need to trust. Don’t trust, verify. And the securities fraud you’re describing culminates in the weapons of financial mass destruction with this huge gigantic derivatives market, which is really premised, I would argue, largely on this gap we have between trade and settlement in the fiat system. There’s no final settlement occurring, which is the verification mechanism. So in that gap, we have an accumulation of hidden risk that ultimately becomes systemic and leads to giant systemic blow ups. And to your point about there being no integrity, it’s like, Of course there’s no integrity. I would say the lack of integrity is synonymous with corruptibility. And so not only does it not have mathematical integrity or financial Integrity but you could ultimately say there’s no moral integrity because these systems just don’t hold up to corruption.

Michael Saylor 30:01
I can’t take personal custody of a billion dollars of gold. So therefore, I trust it to the bank. I take their gold derivative and I assume that that is base layer money. And I can’t take delivery of a billion dollars of fiat currency, so therefore I entrust it to the bank and I take their credit instrument as my base layer money. And you could say that what you’ve got is two fundamental shortcomings here that cause these two systems to break. One is (1): the base layer protocol is defective. You need a base layer protocol where you can take final settlement at any scale. Can you take final settlement of $387? Can you take final settlement of $38 million? Can you take final settlement of $38 billion? Can you take final settlement every day? If you can take final settlement at any scale at any frequency, then the underlying gold standard or fiat standard would have some integrity — at least a modicum. The second problem is (2): there’s no application protocol. So there’s no way to create a security or derivative or some layer 2 application on top of the layer 1 monetary token. We need the applications, right? The world needs more than just base layer money, like you need credit, or you want yield, or you want to build an insurance contract, or maybe you need to be able to post a security deposit and you need to be able to get the security deposit back, or maybe you want to put something in trust with a multisignature arrangement for 37 years. There are lots of applications that make the world work. But there’s no application protocol. So in both cases with gold and fiat, the base layer protocol is defective, and the application protocol is either non-existent or defective. And what makes Bitcoin special, and what makes it digital money is: Bitcoin gives you a base layer protocol to take final settlement, and it gives you an application-level protocol too. We could debate back and forth, right? Is the application protocol on the base chain — the blockchain? If so, it’s a Bitcoin transfer. Or is the application protocol on Lightning? You know, using a layer 2. Either of those could be viewed as an application protocol.

Robert Breedlove 33:15
You’re still maintaining the option for final settlement even on Lightning. So I think the core — and this is so critical — if people can understand this, the antifragility of the world economy is dependent on this simple fact: if we can have higher frequency final settlement, we can have more verifiability in the economic structure, which means less corruption and less blow ups. Whereas the fiat system right now is the complete reverse of that: very low frequency final settlement, very low verifiability, tons of corruption, lots of blow ups.

Michael Saylor 33:59
Yeah. Final settlement with high frequency creates reality.

Robert Breedlove 34:08
Yes. That’s what the blockchain is, right?

Michael Saylor 34:13
It’s reality. Every single second, gravity is testing your structure and testing your orientation. There’s that phrase, Can you defy gravity? And the answer is: Maybe if you’re a great athlete — for a second or two, right? For a very short period of time can you defy gravity. It requires extraordinary strength, extraordinary agility, and it still comes at great peril. You could try to do a backflip and you can land on your head and you can break your back and you’ll be dead or paralyzed for life within a couple of seconds. So there is a final settlement. If you’re considering a crypto-asset network like Bitcoin — and Bitcoin is the greatest, maybe the only successful example but certainly the greatest example of a crypto-asset network — the frequency parameter and the block size parameter for a crypto-asset network is the equivalent to the space-time constants in a universe. So the 10-minute frequency, that’s how fast the universe evolves. And the block size is the gravitational content, what is the relationship between mass and energy and how tightly packed is matter? And once you’ve established those two constants, you’ve defined the constants that run the universe. Everything else evolves around those two constants. This is why you would never want to change them, because changing them is playing God. And you only get to play God once. When you start the universe, if you change the frequency and the block size of Bitcoin, you invalidate all work that’s come before, you imperil all structures that have formed in the universe since the beginning of time, you impair every mechanism that’s been created within that set of structures — you impair them and maybe break them — and you throw the future into chaos. All of those things. I mean it couldn’t be clearer to me, but if you want the physical metaphor it’s like, What if I triple gravity on the surface of the Earth right now? If I could snap my fingers and triple gravity? How many pieces of furniture do you have that crumple? How many chairs collapse? How many people’s hearts stop? How many ships sink? How many planes fly? How many factories keep working? Stuff breaks — not just factories start breaking, buildings start collapsing, bridges collapse, tires deflate. The person that worked for 100 years to create that great company or the Rockefeller Center and it just crumbles? So you worked for 100 years and you did something and it was beautiful until everybody’s dead. What happened? Well you changed the gravitational constant, you changed the space-time constant, and therefore the structure which had been carefully constructed since all of eternity forward, the structure is now rendered null and void and it collapses. Ships are designed based on the Reynolds number. There’s something called a hull speed. And the hull speed is a function of the shape of the hull, and that’s a function of the way that fluid flows. These are basic constants. And no matter how fast you push that hull, it won’t go any faster because the water pushes back as hard as you push it. That’s why a 150-foot vessel that’s 30-feet wide will cruise it 12.5 or 13 knots and it doesn’t matter the horsepower of the engine in it. It’s just the way that the world works. Another example of that is shock-waves and the speed of sound. There’s a reason for the speed of sound — I mean, it’s a it’s a fundamental constant. You go faster than the speed of sound, then you’re moving faster than the air can move out of the way? You get a shock-wave. Lot’s of devastation. What happens if you change the speed of sound? What if you changed the speed of light?

Robert Breedlove 39:40
Yeah, exactly. I love this because maybe we’re creating another meme here that Bitcoin is the E = mc² of money. And that, to your point, you only get to play God once. And Satoshi did that. Satoshi set the rules. And the strategies we build based on those constants, they are dependent on the invariance of those constants. If you go and change them then all the strategies that have been built up around them collapse.

Michael Saylor 40:13
Yeah like the entire Bitcoin mining industry: it’s all predicated upon Bitcoin coming out at a certain speed and the protocol tapering off, and that the value of all transaction fees are predicated upon the block size. If you increase the block size, the transaction revenues collapse. If the transaction revenues collapse, the Bitcoin mining profitability collapses. If the Bitcoin mining collapses, the energy usage collapses. If the security collapses, the network collapses. You know what’s going on with some of the proof of stakers is: if you flip from proof of work to proof of stake, you destroy your entire mining industry. If you destroy your entire mining industry, all of the security — all the social, political, economic, thermo-dynamic security — collapses. If it collapses, the integrity and the durability of the money collapses. There are all sorts of second-order, third-order, fourth-order consequences to this. The fundamental basis and integrity is: one has to know that God is not going to change the rules on you if you spend your entire life working on something. If you want to drive people insane, change the rules. Like if I just change the speed of light and the speed of sound and I quintuple gravity before you compete in the Olympics? And then when your competitors start competing I dial down gravity to the moon gravity and they jump 180 feet in the air and they beat you. You’re like, Well that guy had moon gravity and I had Saturn gravity and my legs are broken and my hips are broken and I’m lying on a gurney with an IV in my arm and my heart is about to stop. And the other dude is bounding over the stadium. It doesn’t seem quite fair! Okay, at some point when the Gods toy with you like that, you say, “Well I’m not going to play this game anymore.” And people withdraw from the ecosystem. It’s like, what would you do other than run as fast as you could away from a random universe that wanted to kill you?

Robert Breedlove 42:49
We’re back to the original introduction of immutability — how important that is for money. And I’ve said this before but I think the way you’re articulating it here really unpacks it, is that this is really what Bitcoin’s doing: it’s radically changing the world by virtue of being unchangeable. It’s the first unchangeable set of rules we’ve ever had. So it’s causing us all to reorient our strategies. Whereas fiat is a constant changing of the rules. So you’re talking about driving everyone insane — that’s why we’re going mad in the world.

Michael Saylor 43:23
With every election cycle. You could argue, with every political appointee. Because I could even appoint a different head of the Fed tomorrow. The immutability of Bitcoin though is an emergent property — people would say, There’s nothing that’s absolutely immutable short of being God — it’s an emergent property, but as Bitcoin becomes more decentralized, the thermodynamic inertia of the thing increases and it becomes more immutable. When there were a hundred HODLers it was something, when there was a million it was more immutable, when there was a hundred-million it was more immutable. When the Bitcoin mining spreads further, when the HODLers spread further, when there are more institutions and organizations and jurisdictions HODLing — the more it spreads, the more immutable it gets, and therefore the higher degree of confidence you can have in the integrity of the entire thing. That is what’s interesting about this entire phenomenon. I’ve described it as a fire in cyberspace, but a better metaphor might very well be a monetary virus in cyberspace. It’s a living creature — and we can go back and forth over what kind of living creature it is —but it’s a living creature that’s massively decentralized, massively fault-tolerant, that’s got a genetic code. And it’s a swarm creature: it’s genetically reproducing DNA and the more it reproduces, the more it spreads, the more decentralized it gets, the more immutable it gets, the more vital it gets, and the stronger it gets.

Robert Breedlove 45:49
It’s paying us to live in symbiosis with it. That’s how it’s growing, right? It’s incentivizing everyone to interact with its network favorably, whether you’re a miner, a HODLer, a developer — everyone’s aligned with the success of Bitcoin by virtue of its incentive design.

Michael Saylor 46:09
Yeah it’s some kind of swarm cloud of truth. A living truth nebula.

Robert Breedlove 46:26
I tweeted this out the other day, I thought you might like it: because fiat is the opposite — it’s like a cloud of self-deception, we think we can just print more money and things are okay, paper over past mistakes. And the remedy to self-deception — I’ve been talking to this guy John Vervaeke — he says: is wisdom. So you might say it’s this cloud-swarm-organism of wisdom, too. That we’re getting back to the principles of money.

Michael Saylor 46:56
Yeah. An extraordinary thing. Extraordinary.

Robert Breedlove 47:00
And to outsiders we sound crazy.

Michael Saylor 47:05
So the human race tried with metal money, and then it went on to fiat money, and then we invented computers, and then we put them on a network, and then we perfected cryptography. So once we checked off the computer box, the network box, and the cryptography box, then you had all the components you needed in order to create a crypto-asset network. And that’s what Bitcoin is, right? Maybe not the first, but the first successful crypto-asset network that emerged as the ideal technology for money.

END

Robert Breedlove 47:53
Alright guys, that was Episode 11.