{ "episodeId": "SLP53", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "andreas_m_antonopoulos": { "name": "Andreas M. Antonopoulos", "role": "guest", "tag": "ANDREAS" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.7, "text": "Hi and welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Learn more about the technology and economics of Bitcoin by listening to interviews with Bitcoin's best and brightest. A quick word for the sponsor of this episode, Bittl Bootcamp by Justin Moon. Justin is a past guest of the podcast, episode thirty six, who is teaching Bitcoiners how to code Bitcoin in an online programming bootcamp that goes for approximately one month. The only prerequisite is a beginner level Python course, such as SoloLearn or Codecademy. In Bittl Bootcamp, you learn how Bitcoin works by progressively building it, advancing forward to more advanced topics such as creating your own hardware wallet and building your own Final project. You get daily video and exercises to complete with a suggested twenty hours per week time commitment. You also get access to a tight knit Slack community who are all learning together, and one key factor is Justin really makes himself available to you to help you get past a barrier when you get stuck. I'm a student myself, m-moving through the course material, and I get a lot of value out of it. Justin is a great teacher. Personally, I believe that Bitcoin will only become more important in our society, and so it's important to learn and understand it more deeply. Just Justin has received a lot of positive feedback on the course, so I recommend you check it out. The website is biddlebootcamp dot com, and if you wanna hear more about the course, check out my earlier episode thirty-six with Justin and follow him on Twitter at underscore justinmoon underscore. On to the episode for today. Andreas M. Antonopoulos is one of the world's best known Bitcoin educators, having written seminal books such as Mastering Bitcoin and having delivered many electrifying talks, as well as having appeared as an expert witness in hearings around the world. In this episode, Andreas and I respectfully disagree and present clashing visions of Bitcoin. Bitcoin maximalism contrasted with a multi-coin vision. I had a lot of listeners request Andreas and many Specifically wanting me to talk about maximalism, so here it is. Andreas, it's a pleasure to welcome you to the show." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "02:13", "start": 132.54, "text": "Oh, thank you so much, Stefan." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:15", "start": 134.6, "text": "Yeah, so look, I, I've been very, very influenced by your thinking and by the way you presented Bitcoin, particularly when I was first getting involved. So I have to say a big thanks for that. And, so today, where there was some discussion on Twitter, and there's, you know, there's been some discussion that we thought it might be an interesting one to have. It's just this discussion around Bitcoin maximalism as contrasted with more of a multi coin worldview. But Andreas, perhaps let's, if you wanted to, maybe start with your thoughts on what does Bitcoin maximalism mean to you and what are your thoughts on it?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "02:54", "start": 173.95, "text": "Well, I mean, the term was coined by, Vitalik Buterin, who, used it to kind of criticize the position that only Bitcoin matters or only Bitcoin will survive. And I think that might be perhaps overstating it. But it was very quickly embraced by, quite a few people who, who found it to be a very comfortable position to take and, didn't see that as You know, kind of a provocation by Vitalik, he meant it in, in a mocking way, or, or at least, in a critical way, and, and yet it was kind of readily embraced by a bunch of people." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:39", "start": 218.81, "text": "Yeah, and then I think the other component, as one of my friends, Pierre Rochard, pointed out, is that people kind of mean different things when they're talking about maximalism. So one way to delineate or distinguish those is to think of it like there's platform maximalism, meaning everything should just be built on top of Bitcoin, and then there's other ideas more like monetary maximalism. And I think most, I, at least in my view, most of the people who were identified as maximal- Maximalists tended to be ones for monetary reasons. So I suppose then that brings the next question, what are your thoughts on this idea of monetary maximalism?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "04:19", "start": 258.94, "text": "I, I think even, even the idea of monetary maximalism, I think is, is going a bit too far. And, and again, to, to me, it's not a matter of do I believe in it or not, because I don't think belief systems are really relevant to this conversation. We're talking about the technology and, and its implications in the real world and its impact in the real world and how it will evolve in the future, which none of us can know, right? So then the question is, do I believe in maximalism or not? It's, it's not really a matter of belief system, the question is, the hypothesis is that, a-at least in monetary maximalism, that there will be one, reserve currency of the world, and that will be Bitcoin and as the hardest, soundest money, no other money can compete. If you have the ability of an open market where money can compete on its monetary characteristics, the hardest money wins, and it wins resoundingly and essentially replaces everything else that nobody wants to hold because it's not as sound as the one they can hold quite easily, right? W-would that be a good characterization of the theory?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:30", "start": 329.88, "text": "I think that's mostly accurate. I think that you would find some, people who would disagree slightly on the edges. Obviously, there's maybe some disagreement around whether it's a winner takes most market and maybe Bitcoin is the eighty percent to use that Pareto idea, and that perhaps there are other things like gold and other things floating around in that other twenty percent. But I think on the whole, that's, that's a reasonable summary." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "05:55", "start": 355.16, "text": "Well, I think a Pareto distribution, I, I wouldn't call a Pareto distribution maximalism. I, I would-- I, I talked about a Pareto distribution among hundreds of thousands of, currencies in terms of a long tail, phenomenon where you have things that have very little monetary importance, but they have other characteristics that are desirable, which might go even down to simply popularity-related things, like, a team Or an artist and people expressing popularity by holding a token. you know, I, I think we're gonna have a very strong long tail distribution of these things, which means that, yes, maybe one of them is, has got a significant percentage, but it's one among hundreds of thousands. And I, I don't think that's compatible with maximalism. I don't think that is a maximalist position, but who knows? Maybe it is. I, I, I think the term itself is, is weak. Me-meaning, maximalism doesn't describe a singular ideology. It's, it's a label applied, m-- in this case, by a critic, in order to bundle everybody into a single perspective, which I don't think is true. All I can tell you is I'm not one." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:08", "start": 428.48, "text": "Yeah, although I suppose you get accused of being one quite often, right?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "07:12", "start": 432.18, "text": "no, actually, I think a few people think I'm a maximalist and then they get disabused of that notion very quickly because there's, there's a record there. I started talking about a multi-currency environment in 2014, and I've been very consistent in that. And here's the thing, there's a very big difference between what I want and what I see coming. This isn't about what I want or what I Past, and that's a very common misunderstanding, as in you want a multi-currency future or you believe that's, you, you know, that's an immoral perspective or whatever. I, I'm simply calling what I think is going to happen. I'm not saying that's the best outcome, I'm just saying it's a likely outcome. And for that hypothesis, the likely outcome being that we will have a Pareto distribution with a very, very long tail, a hypothesis I first posed in twenty fourteen, I would argue that the evidence is accumulating towards a theory, much faster than any maximalist hypothesis. We have more and more and more and more tokens, many of which are actively traded and seem to have some monetary value, in a very long tail. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, I just see that it is. That's what the data is telling us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:35", "start": 515.39, "text": "Yeah, I totally appreciate your comments there around it being, it reflecting Seeing what the actual behavior has been over the last few years, but then I suppose the question is more, what do you see happening twenty, thirty years down the line if these do-- if, you know, Bitcoin becomes more adopted, would there be more of a tendency towards people wanting to store their value in, you know, the most marketable of those cryptocurrencies?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "09:03", "start": 542.89, "text": "I think they would want to store it in the most hard of those currencies. So I, I think there it's, it's really a matter- Of the, the soundness of that money and how hard it is, and that there's, you know, Gresham's law says that that's gonna be used as store of value, but it's not gonna be used as medium of exchange because nobody will want to spend it in, in that particular scenario, right? You, you swap it for something else that you use for medium of exchange, which is a very particular perspective of where Bitcoin ends up, in terms of how it's being used by most people. I don't know if it will end up that way. You know, this design, we're just basically predicting or trying to predict how the market will respond to this invention and what it will find it useful to do vis a vis all of the other things that might be out there. But again Even in that scenario, that's not necessarily a maximalist position. again, we're talking about a portfolio of hard assets, some of which are more flexible than others, but I think the, the fundamental premise of maximalism, i, i, i-if, if I may paraphrase, is given completely free markets and, and open frictionless protocols for exchange, where all other factors being equal, the hardest money wins, then you end up with one money, and, and you effectively get this phenomenon of hyperbitcoinization, right? You, you will trigger Gresham's law, you will trigger a flight out of weak currency. Currencies that become weaker in an endless cycle until eventually everybody only wants to hold hard money for any period of time other than instant, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:42", "start": 642.34, "text": "Yeah. So," }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "10:44", "start": 643.68, "text": "I mean, hyperbitcoinization follows from the maximalist position if you take the premise that you have free markets and frictionless commerce. The problem is in the real world, we won't have free markets, frictionless commerce, so you'll end up with a very different scenario." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:59", "start": 659.29, "text": "Right, and I think one potential idea there is just to-- is just around the observation that people continue to buy Bitcoin, and right now, yes, it is a speculation, but I guess the theory is then that people would adopt Bitcoin in spite of those government controls, and in some cases, it may be that those government controls are what drives them towards the hardest and soundest cryptocurrency." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "11:27", "start": 686.64, "text": "Yeah, and I'm not so much concerned about only the, the legal barriers, there's also other barriers to adoption and friction between currencies. There's availability of exchanges, liquidity, localized trade, there's technical barriers, uncertainty caused by protocol changes, there's capacity and fee concerns, there's all of these other bits of friction. No system is perfect, right? So what do those bits of friction do to the idea of maximalism and hyperbitcoinization? In my opinion, what they do is they express a Pareto distribution, which means that you don't end up with that Kind of degree of maximalism, you end up with a much more long tail distribution." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:17", "start": 736.89, "text": "Okay. So I think the other thing though is Having many, many different coins could also be considered another form of friction as well, because you've got to tr- you've got to find a liquid market for each of these to trade amongst them. Wouldn't it make more sense to have one that is the most liquid or most marketable?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "12:36", "start": 756.13, "text": "Yes, it would. And so what you're going to have i-i-in that scenario, at least that's my conception of this, Stefan, is you have two opposing forces, and one force is the pressure to move into the soundest money and stay in there for as long as possible in order to maintain store of value. And the other pressure is all of the technical, political, and legal frictions in both directions that are, that change that equation. And so perhaps- In one scenario you have hundreds of thousands of tokens, the other scenario you have one, and those frictions and pressures are pulling in both directions, and what you end up with is an equilibrium somewhere in the middle. And where is that middle? Is it closer to one or is it closer to a hundred thousand? I don't know, but What I think is you're gonna, you're gonna end up at neither extreme. What you're gonna end up is finding the natural point at which the equilibrium of friction in one direction versus friction in the other Equalizes. It's kind of like hitting terminal velocity, right? Hahaha. It's, at some point, gravity plus the air friction against you, you're gonna max out, two hundred miles per hour, that's it. And, and so the velocity at which you move into the sound money is tempered by friction, and there's an equilibrium point, and so maybe that means we have 80% dominance or 60% dominance or 50% dominance of the soundest money, but not 100%." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:06", "start": 845.6, "text": "Well, I think, I mean, for me, that's kind of, I, I would sort of think of it more like, it, it could be sort of anywhere in that range of 80 to 1, 80 to maybe like 95% dominance, let's say. Obviously, you know, we all know the problems with, you know, the so-called Bitcoin dominance index, but just, you know, using it as a kind" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:28", "start": 867.95, "text": "Most maximalist types would believe that it might fall somewhere in that kind of eighty to ninety-five, and maybe some people do truly believe it will go literally one hundred. But then that's the other question." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "14:39", "start": 878.83, "text": "And I, I would, I would disagree even with the eighty and ninety, and I would say that Perhaps that is one scenario. If that's your hypothesis, then I would argue that the evidence is moving against you. In that, you know, one of my, favorite authors, Douglas Adams, wrote, the trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and his fourth book was called, \"The Fourth Book in the Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.\" And I love this idea of increasingly inaccurate, right? So the idea that you're gonna achieve eighty-five percent, ninety percent maximalism or dominance, even if you've met- Managed to somehow, reform the dominance index so it, it really counts actual market cap of actual liquid over the actually available distribution of coins, so it means something. You still don't get to eighty to ninety percent. The market has moved away from that, o-over the last three years. And again, I'm not saying that's a good thing, and I'm not saying it's a desirable thing. I'm just looking at the data and saying You know, you, you're forecasting one thing and, and the data is forecasting another. maybe, maybe over the long term things change, but again, look at, look at human society. it's, it's not as if- It's not as if people don't have information about the relative strength and soundness of different fiat systems, and, and yet the, the markets don't act perfectly rationally or in a frictionless way to, to create the scenarios you were talking about in maximalism." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:24", "start": 984.39, "text": "Right. And I think maybe it's a question of timeframes then. So I think many of the, let's say, monetary maximalists would argue then that really what we're seeing today is just this sort of very speculative bubble, and that is driven by, you know, the, this speculative excess and that what, what we're really thinking Of is more like a longer term forecasting idea that, you know, thirty, forty years out, that is where that kind, kind of eighty, ninety percent dominance aspect would come into play. So I think to say, i-is it right then to say, \"Oh, look, at these last few years, we've seen a lot of new altcoins come up. Is that, is that necessarily what's gonna become the most?\" You know, which of these is gonna become a money in thirty or forty years time?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "17:12", "start": 1031.99, "text": "No, who knows. some of them maybe. I think there are good reasons why some of them are able to and may be able to differentiate sufficiently with Bitcoin in order to occupy a parallel niche that maybe isn't as, as sound money, but has other properties that are desirable. A, a very good example of that would be privacy. You know, Bitcoin privacy, at the base layer at the moment is, is weak. It's- Poor, and we hopefully can fix that. But, you know, again, th-there are, other capabilities and other features out there. I, I'm not advocating for any of the specific privacy coins we have today, but that doesn't mean we can't see something that Doesn't have as much hard money soundness perhaps, but has more privacy, and so it will occupy a slightly different niche where people who are optimizing for a different set of features will find it more useful for their use cases. A-and again, we, we can't really predict this stuff, but I, I would say that the data speaks otherwise. On the one hand, we're playing this \"no true Scotsman\" fallacy, where it's the \"no true maximalist\" fallacy. Yeah, yeah, we believe In maximalism, but it's not platform maximalism, it's, it's monetary, maximalism. And by maximalism, we don't mean a hundred percent, we mean eighty percent in a Pareto distribution, not now in ten, twenty, eighty, a hundred years. Well, we've moved the goalposts significantly at this point, because I'm arguing every day on Twitter with people who call absolutely everything except for Bitcoin a shitcoin, believe in platform maximalism as a corollary to monetary maximalism As in, you can't run a platform at all unless it is the hardest of hard monies, and there are no other applications than money that matter, and everything is money in the end. And finally, The, the have a, a much tighter timeframe for hyperbitcoinization. So I object to that maximalism maximally. I, I find that I find that kind of thinking to be, limited and uninspiring and, especially when it demands the kind of ideological purity where I'm a traitor 'cause I wrote a book or was interested in a technology other than Bitcoin, and that's a cardinal sin. Somehow I shouldn't be reading about, learning about, or writing about technologies that aren't consistent with the maximalist view, which, you know, I'm sorry, but that- That's ridiculous. I'm still very much committed to Bitcoin. ninety percent of my work is in Bitcoin, and, you know, I don't have to prove my purity of ideology or thinking to anyone, and I can write and read and think about other things other than Bitcoin. I didn't sign up for a monogamous relationship with Bitcoin, put it that way. And I'm a bit annoyed with all of the maximalists going, \"Why are you looking at that blockchain?\" What has it got that I don't? It's like, we're not gonna play those games. anyway, so, you know, if you define maximalism, Stefan, as the mildest possible Pareto distribution with a long tail perhaps in eighty years if everything is a free market, sure, I mean, I can buy on to that. But, but that's kind of the mildest, less doctrinal maximalism, And, and it's like a cafeteria version of, of religion, right? it's like, yeah, okay, but, but I'm not dealing with those two. I'm dealing with the fundamentalists online, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:01", "start": 1260.64, "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "21:02", "start": 1261.57, "text": "And, and they're sending me threats. Literally, I, I've been threatened numerous times by people who take this maximalist position, who think that the mere act of being interested in or reading about anything else or speaking about anything else is- Is, you know, a violation of every principle that, that supposedly Bitcoin supports, and, and, and then challenge me and threaten to hurt me for saying these things. So, you know." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:31", "start": 1290.58, "text": "Yeah, sure. Look, I totally, Andreas, I totally appreciate. I mean, you've got half a million followers across, you know, your Twitter and your, your hundreds of thousands of subscribers. So obviously you're gonna have- All the statistics" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "21:41", "start": 1301.29, "text": "tell us that five thousand of those are gonna be sociopaths just because of the, because of the probabilities. So there you go. Right," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:48", "start": 1308.12, "text": "yeah, sure, absolutely. I, I, I grant you all of that. And I think, look, so yes, I think there are definitely a lot of crazies out there. but I Maybe the way I would, I would think of this is something, many of these projects, they, they're not necessarily going to become a money. And so in that sense, for, you know, for someone like me who's into it for the monetary component of it, I'm, I'm only interested in Bitcoin because I think that's, that's the most interesting thing and that's the best thing that we can be sort of working on and thinking about. Obviously, I, I wouldn't mandate that you must only, you know, you must must be faithful to Bitcoin and so on, and I would also suggest that we, we don't have to say everything must be built on Bitcoin, but I would just suggest that if it's going to become-- if somebody's trying to make a monetary token, then they should really be thinking long and hard about why they believe they could somehow displace the network effects and the liquidity That exists in Bitcoin, compe-- you know, compared to just any other coin, I mean, if you just look at the number, the amount of buy support, it's, it's, it's crazy, right? There's no chance-- well, okay, not no chance, but there's a very low chance that any other coin could just come through and become more of a money. And I think that's the other question as well, because-- Sorry, go on." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "23:17", "start": 1396.84, "text": "Yeah, but we're setting a very high bar here, which is this idea of displacement, which is, I think, one at the core of many of these, positions is this zero sum mentality that says that, one, one system can only win at the expense of another and by carefully carving out the pie into specific segments, right? So it's about Percentage of Pi and, and if something else comes in, it's, it's a threat, it's gonna displace or even replace, the granddaddy of the cryptocurrencies. Here's the thing, I don't believe this is zero sum game. I, I believe we're talking about a drop in the ocean of a very, very big ocean that this technology could radically transform society and, and quite honestly, Bitcoin has nothing to fear from competition, and differentiation across a variety of features, not all of which are monetary, because the vast majority of people don't act purely as rational actors on monetary characteristics. They act for a variety of reasons with a variety of motives, and so yes, you may think very well that this is monetary is the main application, the most important application. I happen to agree with that. I think we, we have to finish building a, a fungible, private, global, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant money, that is the currency of the internet, that is a robust store of value, because on top of that, we can then build a lot of- Freedom applications, which do other things, which aren't monetary necessarily in nature, but can give us a lot of other applications, you can't build a lot of those until you have the broad base of money. Totally agree with that. But the idea that nothing else can, can compete or should compete, absolutely there will be other things that compete, and they will compete by differentiating. And the tr-- the trick here to realize is that if they don't differentiate sufficiently, Bitcoin needs their lunch every single time. And they have to differentiate very strongly because of the things you talked about, network effect, branding, and all of the other strengths that Bitcoin already has. and then that's the conundrum because if they differentiate enough, then they're no longer competing with, with Bitcoin head on, right? because they make design trade-offs, and these design trade-offs will make them less and less, in direct competition with Bitcoin. A perfect example of that is Ethereum, which doesn't compete for the sound money position at all. I'm, I can hear the maximalist cackling of that, statement, because it doesn't have sound money. It's, it's very simple, it doesn't. But what it does have as a design trade-off is flexible, Turing-complete smart contracts that can do other interesting things other than money. And, you know, an Ethereum maximalist, who I get plenty of those too, will tell me Ethereum can do everything that Bitcoin can do, and, and we don't need it, right? I, I disagree I disagree with that too. These two systems have differentiated sufficiently. I speak of these two because I'm familiar with these two and I've done my research and my reading. But at least these two systems, I did a talk about the lion and the shark. They can be ap-- apex predators in their respective domains, and the respective domains don't overlap because each has made design trade-offs that automatically exclude the other domain. And so There's nothing wrong with having two apex predators in two different evolutionary niches. In fact, they work very, very well together. One feeds the other in terms of applications, users, knowledge, research, and network effect. So I, I don't think we're going to end up with just one money. I don't think the markets will lead us in that direction, and I'm okay with that. It still doesn't mean that Bitcoin isn't the most important. It absolutely is." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:18", "start": 1637.55, "text": "Right, okay. and I think the other question I would bring here is also the question on if something is a money versus something just being, you know, functionally the equivalent of a fifty-dollar Target voucher or a Kmart voucher or whatever shop, right? If it's something is just a gift voucher, then is it really a money or is it really just more like- Some po-sh, some, you know, token of a, of value that you can spend on something, but ultimately the money would be the thing that we denominate things in, and that would be the dominant kind of coming back to that idea that some of these- Tokens really, they, they have a value, but I guess if the monetary maximalist theory turns out to be right, then really we should be denominated the value of that, those tokens in satoshis, not US dollars. What are your thoughts there?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "28:09", "start": 1688.65, "text": "So I think that argument is the idea, to, to paraphrase a bit, if, if I may, just to see if I understand it correctly. What you're saying is that the money is really the unit of account function, and because that's the pinnacle, right? You have to achieve store value or medium of exchange roughly in parallel, but you don't get to unit of account until the store value and medium of exchange functions are so strong, the volatility is ground down to almost zero, and you have the stability. You need to do pricing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:40", "start": 1719.93, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a fair summary." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "28:42", "start": 1721.99, "text": "Yeah, so, and that's the only thing that is really money, and everything else is just, play tokens. you know, that may be the case. I, I think, I think the unit of account function itself is, is fascinating, because it's the culmination of the pinnacle of money. But I also think that at the moment, one of the problems we have is that we've defined these three functions, store value, Units of account, medium of exchange, and we think of them as parameters that emerge, from the design of the currency kind of features or attributes that emerge, and some monies do some of these things better than other monies because of the way they've been designed. I think we should start thinking about it the other way around and think about how do we engineer these as properties rather than watch them emerge as attributes of design. How do we tweak them? you know, which is the difference between picking three metals and making an alloy because you think that alloy will have the right strength and brittleness characteristics. Versus going in at the nanoscale and engineering a crystal to have the specific characteristics you designed it for. you don't take what's, what you have and just mix it together, you instead go in and change its nature. I think we've now created a form of money where we can actually engineer the properties of units of account, medium of exchange, and store value, and I think we've added a couple of properties that we haven't thought about. meaning that it's also, the first money that also has the property of universal ledger, which we didn't have before. So this money acts as more than those three things, and we can actually engineer the trade-offs and ratios of those capabilities in the money. So I think we've got a lot of experimentation to do, and in that experimentation, I think we're gonna see many different alternatives to the various ratios of medium of exchange store value Units of account, as well as other capabilities that we d-invent and discover. And, I think we need to broaden our concept of money. I, I think the artificial barrier, the kind of gatekeeping barrier between the thing that's used as units of account versus is the only real money and everything else is just loyalty points and tokens, i-is fine from a theoretical perspective, it doesn't give us any actionable results though, because I think In a social context among people, the way people behave with different forms of money isn't as clear cut, and the way they choose to treat different forms of money from mileage accounts with your airline carrier to Chuck E. Cheese tokens to subway cards to dollar bills to physical gold to whatever, it's not as clear cut, and the human behavior doesn't Easily slice these things into distinct categories. So I think we are going to see a very interesting tapestry of monies emerge. I do think units of account is a key function and might be held by one, but there are other possibilities, including the unit of account being a basket. that's something that was even pursued by the International Monetary Fund in the beginning before the Bretton Woods Agreement, where the dollar took that place. Most of the other discussions were about using Using a basket of currencies. Now, with fiat currencies, there are a lot of big disadvantages and counterparty risks, but the idea of using a basket or index, as your unit of account across multiple different monies that have different mixture of store value and medium of exchange, I think is fascinating. So I'm not ready to close the door on that and say, \"Hey, it's done, it's over, Bitcoin is it, I'm not interested in anything else.\" No, there, we've opened the door to so many other possibilities. I don't see why we have to To close those doors." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:49", "start": 1968.56, "text": "Okay, so a couple points I might just raise there, Andreas. So first of all, I think the Austrian view is essentially one around marketability or salableness, and I think one area where an Austrian might critique this basket idea is that Ultimately, that entire basket considered together as a whole could never be as saleable or as the most saleable component from that basket. I think that's one point, and the other point is, I think maybe we're trying to distinguish or kind of split apart these different functions of money, so store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, but I think ultimately And this part, this partly comes back to some of the debate around, you know, what's the best money and so on. But ultimately, it's more like which one is the best medium of exchange, that is the ultimate form of money, and then these other kind of characteristics, so store of value, unit of, unit of account, I think of them more like they just come alongside, but ultimately the main- thing, the main reason we even use the money is the fact that it is a medium of exchange, and in, I guess, in my kind of more maximalist view, it's, it's really more that you would have Or at least one best overall one, maybe that's only eighty percent, but yeah, I suppose that, that's, that's the way I think through it. What, what are your thoughts there?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "34:21", "start": 2061.3, "text": "I, I think that we have moved past the concepts of money that Austrian economists analyzed in the past. And I think programmable, completely digital, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant money, especially when linked together in an ecosystem of cryptocurrencies. With programmable logic above them, with intelligent wallets that are doing routing, with layer two technologies that allow frictionless, instantaneous, exchange from one to another Creates completely new monetary characteristics. We're, we're in unexplored territory, and I think that we are going to discover more about money that we didn't know in the past, and we are going to discover more complicated and interesting ways of Managing these questions. So I don't think medium of exchange is the be-all and all in fully digital programmable online money. I think the-- one of the fascinating things about tokens in general, and this includes Bitcoin, but any kind of cryptographically secured token, is the fact that it is a multi-dimensional thing. It, it can act as a medium of exchange, it can represent, shareholders' equity, it can represent voting rights, it can represent ownership attestation, it can represent access to resources, it can represent," }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "35:58", "start": 2157.91, "text": "loyalty token, some kind of earnable thing, it can represent many different things, not all of which are money, but they coexist in a single token. And that kind of multidimensional token, I don't think can simply be- Abstracted down to medium of exchange and everything else is irrelevant in its salability or its, its nature and behavior. And so I, I don't know what we can do with a basket, and I don't know if the parameter that matters the most is the most salable Item in that basket is better than the salability of the basket as a whole. I, I don't know if other characteristics matter, in that. And, and, but we'll see, right? We'll find out. I think it's really interesting the possibility that we can actually disaggregate the three functions. One of the fundamental characteristics of Austrian economics, which I think is bound very much to the physical nature of, of our pa-- past money Is the idea that these three characteristics are emergent characteristics which are predetermined by the physical characteristics, for example, stock versus flow in the case of gold, or things like that. These innate, intrinsic characteristics of the form of money we use, basically inform what characteristics it will have as medium of exchange, store of value, units of account, and whether it will be suitable for those functions and how strongly it will be suited to those functions. the, the difference between having an intrinsic, characteristics that caused the, the, the behavior of money to emerge versus engineering the behavior of money and perhaps disaggregating it and, and being comfortable with the idea that you can have a different thing for units of account than you have for store of value and/or medium of exchange, possibly three different- Different things, which may be very strongly related, and tradable, but, but operate differently. I don't know, I think we are going to find out. So I'm not ready to close the door on that and say, \"Listen, this question has already been answered. We answered it twenty, thirty years ago, and this is gonna behave exactly like the things we knew in the past.\" Well, I'm sorry, it's not. And, and I would, I would say, once again, the, the data that I'm seeing in the market It, validates my initial hypothesis, that we're not going to see consolidation into one thing, but rather the opposite. We're more likely to see a very long period of fragmentation, experimentation, an explosion, Cambrian explosion as s-some people have called it, of different, of different projects, all of which explore different niches, some of which are dodos and dead ends and platypuses, you know? you know, they're the weirdos of- evolution and, and, and just die off, and, and some which are very successful in an unexpected way. But, but I, I'm not gonna start calling shots on something that is evolving in a very chaotic nature and interacting with society as a whole and is subject to many, many more variables than a simple academic analysis would, would suggest." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:25", "start": 2364.88, "text": "okay. So I think probably a couple things I might disagree, like the main one is I think you can't really separate store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account. But, look, I think we've almost done 40 minutes just on maximalism, so I think- I love it." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "39:40", "start": 2379.72, "text": "Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:40", "start": 2379.96, "text": "I mean," }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "39:41", "start": 2380.72, "text": "when, when you say you can't, there's someone out there who is saying, \"Let's see, maybe you can.\" And, and when it comes to things like that, I, I think I don't have the certainty. To, to make a call like that, I, I, I, I, I don't have a basis to say you can or you can't. The fact that we haven't before, it's very difficult because when you say you can't, you're, you're, you're trying to prove a negative, right? And, and you only need one counterfactual to invalidate that hypothesis, one demonstration of, but maybe you can, at least just a bit, and your argument is gone. So I'm not gonna make I, I don't think we can make strong statements like that. I don't think we have enough knowledge, at this point in the game to make strong statements like that. And I don't see why it matters anyway. We're all gonna find out sooner or later." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:37", "start": 2436.9, "text": "True, true. Oh, look, I think, I think you could do it maybe in certain small examples, but not on like a broad scale. That's kind of more what I was getting at there. But look, like I said, yeah," }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "40:47", "start": 2446.55, "text": "you just invalidated your can't." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:50", "start": 2450.13, "text": "Well, I, I meant more in the sense of like the, like if we're talking like global money here, not like, 'cause you could probably come up with, you know, some example where people use a different method of payment, but it's actually denominated in, you know, something else, but that might be localized to a certain area, whereas what we're talking about is, you know, the global, what's likely to happen in, you know, the long term kind of aspect is what I had in my mind. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I can't" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "41:20", "start": 2479.81, "text": "argue with that because we simply don't know, and we're going to find out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:25", "start": 2485.0, "text": "Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, look, I think, I think we've done enough on the kind of maximalist idea. I think another idea I was keen to get your thoughts on, because- Obviously there's some slight differences in the views of Bitcoiners. So those of us who come from the Austrian viewpoint tend to believe and want Bitcoin basically to challenge central banking and government monetary intervention. But I suppose Andreas, in your view, does Bitcoin challenge banking generally, or does it more specifically challenge central banking?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "41:59", "start": 2518.76, "text": "it, it's, it maximally challenges central banking. It maximally challenges the preconceptions of money that we have, the, the nation state money system we have, in its entirety. but as a trickle down effect, it, it most certainly also challenges retail banking, all the way down the line from, from how we do payments. Clearly, I think as a payment network, it obliterates the existing payment networks. Within short term. And, it also will start filling roles such as lending and reputation building and Many other things that traditional retail banking offers. We are going to see the deinstitutionalization of banking. Banking will turn into an app, it will turn into software, it will turn into a routing algorithm that, that banks for you and makes decisions as to optimize your payments, your lending, your, assets, whatever that may be. so retail banking and central banking both get disrupted majorly." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:08", "start": 2587.94, "text": "But I suppose in my- I, I see a, a case for banking still existing, but just Bitcoin compatible, right? You might have a Bitcoin, Bitcoin lending, right? We would still see a function for credit intermediation." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "43:21", "start": 2601.19, "text": "No, I, I think this intermediation is the strongest effect here. So, if for banking to continue to exist, that means that we have needs for intermediaries. And yes, there will be cases, there will be narrow, narrow domains where slivers of banking will survive because we haven't sucked the oxygen Decision completely out of that. We haven't replaced everything with a Python script on day one, but, you know, payments is first to go. with payments comes a very big problem because unless you're using the bank for payments, you're not going to need to store most of your values there. for many people, their cash flow account is the majority of their net worth, sad to say. But what that means is if you remove the payment function of banks, you're also taking away their depository base, which- Severely damages their ability to do lending, and then you offer better alternative lending systems, and, and down the line we go, and all of these things get disintermediated, the, the banks get moved into more and more niche, bespoke, custom, regulatory-bound, government-related things. Like a fax machine, they still exist. They lurk in the shadows of bureaucracies and hospitals and tax- offices, you know, surrounded by internet devices, including a few emulators pretending to be fax machines on their behalf, but they're still there, right? So yes, banking will be disrupted, but that doesn't mean banks go away, it simply means they atrophy and shrivel into tiny niches that they can barely defend for a short period of time. And eventually, software eats them, just like it eats everything else." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:07", "start": 2706.78, "text": "Right. I think so, I can agree more so on the payments side, I suppose, but wouldn't you believe then that, okay, an example might be, what if, say, Zapper becomes a new bank, a Bitcoin bank, something like that?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "45:24", "start": 2724.29, "text": "Well, again, the, the, the point is, what is the purpose of the intermediary? You know, the purpose of the intermediary is to offer security services. really, that's one of the unavoidable uses of an intermediary. Pretty much everything else we can remove the intermediary, whether it's, order book creation, market matching, market making, reputation management, identification, KYC, all of these functions Functions can be done in a variety of other ways that aren't institutional and can be done more effectively by algorithms. So what does that leave? What it leaves is the desire of people to have a third party be responsible for their security, the desire of people to say, \"Listen, I, I can't deal with this. I can't do the twenty-four English words on a piece of paper in a safe deposit box and all of-- I, I'd have just, listen, I'll just give it to you, you hold it for me.\" That function is gonna continue to exist. It's our, it's our job to make that as narrow as possible by giving people great tools that are easy to use with great security, so they can become first-class Bitcoin users with full control over their own keys and hopefully a validating appliance in their home that does blockchain validation for them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:46", "start": 2806.45, "text": "Yeah, no, I go-- obviously. Yeah, obviously great, but," }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "46:50", "start": 2810.43, "text": "but there will still be people who want the face coins of the world and the, you know, the Google coins and even the custodial Bitcoin. Right. those will exist. But hey We're talking about taking a hundred and forty trillion dollar industry and shrinking it down by two orders of magnitude and removing all of its most powerful capabilities. And what is left is a shriveled little thing. So it's a bit like saying, \"But the dinosaurs don't go away.\" No, they turn into chickens, and we sacrificially, eat one of their children every day for breakfast. So that's the revenge of the mammals. The dinosaurs are still here. They're now just our feathered slaves, and we eat them. Their children to punish them for six hundred and fifty million years of dominance. Now, the thing is, the banks are still gonna be around, but they're gonna be about as scary as a chicken." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:44", "start": 2863.64, "text": "So I think I might take a slightly different view. I think obviously I agree with your points around the ability to use algorithms to do some of those functions, but I think there might still be a need for somebody to, you know, to code that, to tune that, to be the owner of that system. Would not the owner of that system be considered the credit- Intermediary. So a quick, quick example, I, I'm a, I agree that in a, you know, obviously the Austrians believe in a sound money view world, we would have a lot less credit, right? But we still believe there would be some credit, and who is the one best place to do credit assessment and credit, like to check somebody to assess creditworthiness? Definitely the" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "48:24", "start": 2903.96, "text": "crowd." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:25", "start": 2905.48, "text": "You think it'll all be crowdsourced?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "48:27", "start": 2907.17, "text": "Absolutely, it will be crowdsourced. It's a thousand times better in terms of the quality of data you get. Our credit reporting and credit rating system sucks, completely sucks, top to bottom. It is, it is rigid, centralized, corrupt, and it doesn't produce good data as evidenced by every single round of, defaults where, you know, gold-rated, platinum-rated credit falls over as if it's made of papier-mâché, because it is. I, I can't imagine that we can't build better systems, of reputation scoring and rating and metrics that we can collect on the centralized blockchain without putting someone in charge of telling us who is worth, sending money to. I, the other thing is our existing rating system also fails completely to account for risk, And which goes to your point of who gets disrupted first, that's why we need to disrupt the central banks. As long as money costs zero to acquire, the credit risk problem continues to amplify because there's no incentive to properly risk, investments. I-if they go to shit, you get bailed out by the taxpayer. So, and, and in the meantime, the risk you took was zero 'cause the interest rates is near zero. So, with, with money like that Risk management stops existing, right? Because the only risk you have is, is the Fed's raising rates or lowering rates. That's the only customer you have, that's the only risk you have. It's not capitalism anymore. the if you disrupt that, then the incentives to create good risk management, because if you default, you eat that loan and no one's bailing you out, and there's no layers of insurance up to AIG, you know, then We have a market for risk management, to which point I can't imagine we can't build better applications than three private companies, the, the privacy rapists all over the web, in order to extract data that doesn't even predict risk well. I'm sure we can do better than that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:31", "start": 3030.82, "text": "Okay, so yeah, fair points on the privacy and so on. I, I, the only point I would sort of look-- I, I, I think I holistically agree that there might be a potential to turn some of these things into algorithms and to crowdsource and crowdfund some of these sorts of mechanisms for doing things. However, I think it, it may not be accurate to paint the current ratings model as though that would be what would exist in a, you know, in a truly free market, like in our view, in the Austrian sort of free market view. The, the, the, the way those ratings agencies were driven was again a function of central bank excesses. Exactly." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "51:08", "start": 3067.64, "text": "Absolutely. We agree on that. And, you know, but the thing is, I really start seeing fewer and fewer niches for banks, even with the current state of technology, and given the massive imbalance in innovation and creativity, they're in deep, deep trouble here, Stefan. I mean, given just what, what Lightning Network, c-can be demonstrated today to do, pay- Payments are, are done. you know, it's just a matter of polishing that up to production level. It may take fifteen years, but I mean, there's a point at which systems like this will be able to do trillions of transactions per second, at which point the entire payment system has scaled five orders of magnitude greater than Visa. that's the thing about exponential innovation here, is that one day we can do half of Visa, but the day we can do all of Visa, we're six months away from From doing ten times Visa, one year away from doing a hundred times Visa, and the exponential curve keeps growing. We're talking about treating this technology on a different scale. They're only going to do ten percent more each year, because that's what a centralized system can do. You turn it into a peer-peer system, which is decoupled like Lightning Network, there is basically no limit to how much that can scale, both in terms of time granularity, payment granularity, and settlement time. Now, that demolishes Payments. There, there's not even any comparison. We can start doing applications that are unthinkable today on a scale that's unthinkable. And then, you know, the, the opportunity to do lending intelligently through various things, including some of the things that are already happening with smart contracts on Ethereum, I think are fascinating. You know, I'm not gonna mention specific products because I, projects, because I don't like endorsing projects, especially if I haven't studied them very, very carefully. But the thing is, already people are building DApps that allow you to collateralize and, and build, stable coins backed by some cryptocurrency or basket of cryptocurrencies, including potentially Bitcoin, and then use that to have collateralization and leverage and lending. Now, there's no, there's no reason why that can't at least compete with traditional financial institutions, but I think it can outcompete, not this iteration, but twenty iterations down the road Banks haven't changed how they do lending for a century and a half, and this technology changes every, every two months. So, you know, at that pace I fail to see any niche that banking can maintain other than the custodian third-party security role." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:52", "start": 3231.94, "text": "Right. Okay. Yeah, look, I mean, personally, I'm, I'm more of a skeptic of Ethereum, but, you know, I think maybe the jury's out on whether something like that could exist in a long time, you know, a long time away from now. I think just one more topic I was hoping to just get your views on, just around this concept of pro-- Bitcoin's protocol ossifying and that potentially the so-called window, let's call it, to get confidential transactions on chain may be closing. But then the other component there is the aspect around having more assurance on the twenty-one million cap, which For, for many, is part of why they invested in Bitcoin to begin with. So can we have your comments there, Andreas?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "54:36", "start": 3275.74, "text": "Yeah, that's a, that's a troubling topic. I, I think I'm the person who coined the term ossification in relation at least to Bitcoin and started talking about this window closing. I started expressing these concerns as far early as my first talk at the San Jose conference in twenty thirteen, when I talked about how these protocols would gradually ossify and we would have to make some very- Very important choices about preserving fungibility, neutrality, and privacy as core principles. And you've identified a really big problem, which is that privacy comes with a trade-off, and as we've seen recently with the Zcash bug, One of those trade-offs may be, more exposure or more attack surface for, inflation bugs in the base layer that aren't detected ever or aren't detected soon enough before they cause damage. And so to explain to our listeners, the idea here is that if you have a technology that allows you to encrypt the values, even if that technology says, \"Listen, I can assure you that...\" The, the value in all of the inputs of this transaction minus the value in all of the outputs is zero, so it's all balanced. there may be bugs in that calculation, and if there are bugs in that calculation, what you can do is you can start sneaking new currency into each transaction, basically it's like having a leak, like a memory leak, and you basically are inflating the supply slowly, transaction by transaction. this is obviously a big risk I, I don't know how we resolve that. I think, I think we're actually far from implementing confidential transactions because that technology isn't standing still. some of the latest innovations around bullet proofs, which are, much shortened ranges for doing the cryptographic proof that allows you to show That the side A and the side B of the equation, the inputs and the outputs, add up to zero, so therefore, it's, it's a valid transaction. That range proof has now been improved with bullet proofs, but we don't know the security characteristics of that. We're gonna have to look very carefully. At that, and it's the kind of technology that, that needs to be tested a lot more. I think what we're gonna see in the next year to year and a half is the introduction of, two or three important technologies at the same time, including Schnorr signatures, with the possibility of sig-nus-signature aggregation across transactions and perhaps even across the whole block, as well as, Taproot or and/or Graffroot, which are obfuscation technologies that allow you to, basically create a A scriptless script that looks like a public key payment, you minimize the privacy leak of scripts and bump the SegWit version and, and introduce mAsT, which is Merkleized Abstract Syntax Trees that give you another level of privacy. You know, between those three technologies, we can really move the, the needle on privacy and fungibility in the base layer even without confidential transactions, and they kind of set the stage for confidential transactions a bit later with another SegWit version bump. I think that's the f- Further out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:52", "start": 3472.22, "text": "Fantastic summary, yeah. Okay," }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "57:56", "start": 3475.63, "text": "one, one little added thought on that. aren't we lucky that Zcash exists? Because You know, the thing is that because of the existence of the five or six privacy-focused currencies that emerged after twenty fourteen, from Monero, Dash, you know, the various, crypto notes deliver- derivatives, and of course, then, Zcash and, and other zk-SNARK implementations, what we've seen is a massive amount of research, as well as, up- Applied research in a production environment with real adversarial conditions and real money at stake, which is the only research that matters in this kind of security. And what that's given us is a whole bucket of bugs that have taught us a lot about the security, of these things, which have been not only fixed, but have taught everybody else who follows what things to be very careful about. So we're now having this conversation about Bitcoin. That, to me, summarizes the entire value of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and why it's important to Not just put all your focus on one system and why it's important to explore, other feature sets and other approaches and, and learn the lessons in those. I think Bitcoin benefits from that, competition, and also You know, very synergistic innovation that happens in open source communities." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:28", "start": 3567.84, "text": "Look, I think it's a great point you make that we wanna try and learn the mistakes and not make the mistakes made by other teams or other projects, and in so doing, even other pro-projects and teams and other people can learn from the mistakes that, you know, that you or I make, that kind of thing. It's a good idea." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "59:46", "start": 3585.91, "text": "It's the open source ethos, and it works great, and it's actually one of the strongest tools we have to compete against the central banks and the banks. That's the differentiation, that's the one thing they can't buy. You know, we're competing with the biggest, concentrations of money in the world. We're not gonna beat them just with money. you know, one of the-- so they can buy more things than we can. what they can't buy is creativity, what they can't buy is passion, what they can't buy is the principled commitment of people in this industry who are like I am committed to this because I understand the underlying principles, because I'm defending those underlying principles, because I believe this will empower people and give them freedom and choice and independence in their lives. And as long as people like that exist, and I count you as one of them, Stefan, I hope I represent on that fact too, talk strongly about privacy. As long as we have that and we have the creativity that comes from this vibrant open source environment, I mean, that's what tells me ultimately that the banks are screwed. That's why software eats the world. world because it has a superior methodology, scientific culture, and execution, than closed corporate systems. That's why we win. it's not just a monetary policy. You can do a monetary policy and fuck everything else up and it wouldn't, it wouldn't get adopted by anyone." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:05", "start": 3665.88, "text": "Right, right. Yeah, no, look, I think, that's-- It's been a, it's been a very fast hour. So I was really hoping to get through more topics, but honestly, it's been a very, interesting and really- Fascinating discussion. Obviously, we disagree on many points, but a fascinating discussion nonetheless. Andreas, perhaps you, you just wanna tell the listeners if you've got anything coming up that you would like them to, look out for, any products or anything else?" }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "01:01:31", "start": 3691.55, "text": "Yeah. All of my work is, Creative Commons license, and so you can find everything I do is available for free, it's available to share, and in many cases also to derive and commercially, reuse. that includes my books, my videos, my presentations, my articles, and you can find all of that on YouTube, on my channel, as well as on my website aantonoop dot com, on Twitter aantonoop, on YouTube aantonoop. and, yeah, thank you all for your support. It's, it's, it's really quite amazing how, this community's creativity and passion can support so many different vibrant projects, and I, I count myself among those as running a, a free education project for the entire cryptocurrency environment, and I couldn't do that without the support of hundreds and hundreds Hundreds of volunteers, who are contributing work, who are editing and polishing and fixing, as well as translating and, even sometimes mashing up with music. If you wanna hear \"Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins\" to dubstep, there's a channel on YouTube that has that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:55", "start": 3775.09, "text": "look, that's, fantastic, Andreas. I just wanted to say again, thank you very much for all the work you tirelessly do to educate people, particularly on Bitcoin. You have a particular skill and, you know, just talent in, in, in your way of inspiring and motivating people to want to learn more about Bitcoin. So I just wanted to say thank you for that. And, thank-look, just thanks for coming on the show." }, { "speaker": "andreas_m_antonopoulos", "time": "01:03:18", "start": 3798.34, "text": "That's very kind of you, Stefan. Thank you for your kind words. I, I've really enjoyed watching, several interviews you've done in the past, and so keep up the good work. I hope I'll be back, hopefully one day soon." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:32", "start": 3812.26, "text": "So what did you think of that? Do you believe in a tendency towards one most marketable good or money? Do you believe that Bitcoin ultimately challenges central banks more so than banking generally, or do you think Andreas' position is more likely on these? These are good questions to consider. Let me know your thoughts via Twitter direct message, my handle is at Stephan Livera, or via the contact page on my website, Stephan Livera dot com. You can also find the show notes there. Even though we disagreed, I think Andreas and I got on reasonably well. Well, as it was a respectful disagreement, let me know if there's more topics you'd like to hear me cover with Andreas, and I can get him on the show again in future. If you enjoyed that, subscribe to the podcast by searching Stephan Livera podcast on your podcast platform, Apple, PocketCasts, Podbean, Spotify, etcetera. Don't forget to share it around with friends or on social media. That's it from me, thanks guys, and I'll speak to you soon." } ] }