Matthew Mežinskis on Bitcoin as Base Money

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“I would not deny that purely an ideological reason of keeping a currency decentralised, out of the hands of any government is absolutely a top reason why I would hold it, and a benefit would probably happen where it would accrue value anyway.”
— Matthew Mežinskis

Location: Skype
Date: Thursday, 3rd October
Project: Crypto Voices
Role: Host

The monetary base is the amount of currency in any one country. It is a combination of both the circulating supply and money held in reserve at the central bank. In the 1900s, the global base currency was gold; however, in 1971, the U.S severed all ties with the gold standard and the monetary base changed to being government-issued fiat currency. 

In a government-issued fiat-based monetary system, the government controls the printing and inflation of its currency. This allows governments to increase the monetary base at will. Whereas previous base money, gold, was hard to inflate, with fiat money it is easy. This leads to, for example, the U.S global base money rising from $100 billion to $19.2 trillion since 1970.

With Bitcoin, however, issuance and supply are fixed. There will only ever be 21 million created, with the issuance dropping every four years and no ability to inflate the supply. Could this lead to Bitcoin becoming the next global base money?

In this interview, I talk to Matthew Mezinskis from CryptoVoices. Matthew explains what base money is and if Bitcoin will ever become the worlds base money. We also discuss what money is, the gold standard, central banks holding Bitcoin and decentralisation.

TIMESTAMPS

00:04:21: Introductions 
00:07:02: Exploring what makes Bitcoin unique
00:11:18: Delving into money and monopolies and why they have an adverse impact on free markets
00:16:28: Touching on Matthew’s libertarian views and some of the downfalls of libertarianism
00:19:08: Discussing why Bitcoin potential forces governments to make better decisions with money
00:22:27: Exploring the history of the gold standard and why World War 2 was so significant for gold
00:30:41: Discussing whether governments could move to hold Bitcoin in the future
00:35:22: Delving into what base money is and why it is relevant for Bitcoin
00:38:08: Exploring key characteristic differences between base money and government fiat
00:45:05: Discussing quantitative easing and clarifying the economic purpose of the practise
00:49:00: Matthew’s thoughts on the spiralling debt crisis and the continuing practise of printing money
00:55:15: Exploring moving towards responsible monetary policies and away from floating currencies 
01:00:56: Delving into driving awareness of the impacts of printing money and quantitative easing
01:05:20: Discussing potential futures for Bitcoin, including PlanB’s stock to flow ratio model 
01:10:01: The benefits of Bitcoin and why it is the ideal tool to take decisions away from governments
01:13:34: Discussing why Bitcoin is base money and why it gives us hope for the future
01:17:19: Final comments and how to stay in touch

 

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TRANSCRIPTION

Peter McCormack: Hello Matthew, how you doing man?

Matthew Mežinskis: Hey Peter, thanks for having me on.

Peter McCormack: It was great to finally meet you out in Riga and have a drink with you.

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, I enjoyed it very much! We were just talking a little bit in the pre show about how you were doing well with some of those very specific Latvian black balsam shots. A lot of people are afraid to take them, but you were taking them like a champ!

Peter McCormack: Well thank you, thank you for giving me a bunch of them. The funny thing was I couldn't even remember it, but I do remember it now. But yeah, it was great to finally meet you. It's great to finally get your sexy voice on the podcast.

Matthew Mežinskis: You're too kind!

Peter McCormack: Can I ask you something? Do you know how everyone hates to hear their own voice? Is it different with you? Do you listen to you yours and go, "yeah, I've got a fucking sexy voice."

Matthew Mežinskis: Nope, it's the same, absolutely the same! I think it's something in our reptilian brains that we're just naturally averse to that. So it is not any different for me, but I do appreciate the nice words I guess.

Peter McCormack: Well I have voice envy, because now I do a podcast, my voice is essentially part of my business and every time I hear yours I'm like, "God, I've got voice envy." You know the film trailers, you could be that guy?

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah I have dabbled in some voice work over the years. Mostly boring economic textbooks and things, which is sort of up my alley. I've narrated "the history of money and banking", which was a long tome by Murray Rothbard, who's an Austrian economist. Some other shorter things and whatnot, but yeah, it's still sort of been hobby for me and the podcast is still up in that line of things.

I'm trying to try do more, but regular work gets in the way as well, but it's fine. The podcast that we do is mostly a bit more focused than yours. It's mostly on money, banking, economics and Bitcoin obviously and we'll see how much that expands or whatnot in the future. But it's going all right so far.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's good, I like your podcast. I also loved your presentation at Riga, it was one of the few I just sat there, watched the whole thing, was trying to take in every word and then I wrote down afterwards on my phone, I have a little notes thing, I was like, "must interview Matthew, got to work through this", because yeah, it was super fascinating. I've got the presentation open, I've also got my questions and I think the people who listen to my show, some of them are probably a little bit more light touch, maybe don't study economics to the level that you have or don't understand money.

So for me it was an eye opener, so hopefully for anyone listening it will be. So let's work through it. Like I said, I've got the presentation here, which I will share out in the show notes and I've got my questions, but we're going to do Bitcoin as base money, so let's go with it! So Bitcoin is unique. Let's kick it off, tell us why Bitcoin is unique?

Matthew Mežinskis: I guess just the genesis of this idea that we sort of, I don't really want to say popularized, because I definitely think people still don't really know what base money is economically, but it was a sort of a common thing that the cypherpunks were looking at back in the day, was how to create something that was like, this was the analogy, it was like a digital gold or something that was scarce, valuable and obviously it could be traded much easier online and have superior security properties than gold.

There actually is a term for that, there is a economic definition, it's not like something sort of aloof or out there or if you do read some economic works on this and papers, it's not a foreign term, it's a real term and it's called the monetary base or base money. So Fernando and I, during the course of our show, we usually ask questions regarding that to our guests, if they're economists or not, just what they think about the idea of Bitcoin becoming base money or having the characteristics of base money.

So that was what I was trying to do in the presentation, was explaining exactly what it was and we can go into that, but give the characteristics of what makes something a base money and just explain that those are precisely the characteristics that Bitcoin has. Then as a little sort of easy exercise, was show exactly the comparable money supplies in the fiat world today, which the fiat monetary bases around the world and then also just look briefly at gold and silver, those actual supplies in their native units, meaning not what gold is priced in dollars, but how many ounces are coming out of the ground. So there's a lot there when you talk about base money and it means more to some people than others.

But the idea was basically just to get it out there that there is a money supply in the economic world that compares with Bitcoin and it's the monetary base. Then just one more point I guess as well, another point of the genesis of why we started to talk about this on our show, was we just saw too much on Twitter where it's fun to do, people like to compare Bitcoin to other money supplies in the world, these are the so called M's. There's M1, M2, M3 and we can get into what those mean, but precisely for the reasons that those money supplies M1, M2, M3, they're narrow and broad money supplies in economic lingo, precisely because they don't share the characteristics of base money.

We kept saying on our show and on Twitter, and then we do this monetary base update every quarter, like those money supplies do not have the characteristics of Bitcoin, so we shouldn't look first to those and certainly we shouldn't just look to like a US M1. A lot of people just look at like the US M1 money supply, which means checking accounts and then also physical currency in circulation. Put those together, you just look at that! Obviously Bitcoin is global, the US money supply is not.

So we can't just stop at the United States M1 money supply, we need to look globally. So that was another exercise that we had to do for this exhibit, was actually going and calculating the monetary base of all the other central bank currencies, because it's actually not been done. There's not really a good site that does this. Some websites like the IMF, the OECD websites, the Bank of International Settlements, they may give you a curve that shows narrow money, which again is these broader supplies which include checking accounts, savings accounts, so on and so forth.

But a lot of central banks, for whatever reason, they don't publish these curves easily. Some do, the US does, but they don't publish these curves easily. So anyway, long and short of it is, there's a lot of confusion around what the monetary base is. We've tried to make it less confusing and just explain exactly what it is and show exactly what it is, because it can be calculated.

Peter McCormack: I think one of the things where I've had had difficulty trying to get my friends interested in Bitcoin, probably similar to when I first discovered it, because I didn't really pay attention and then I got lucky on a second bull run, so kind of got involved in the market and then spent some time researching it. But I would say I still don't fully understand money, I've never been taught what money is or the meaning of money.

Money for me was always; I have a bank account, at the end of the month, some money goes in and during the month I spend it. But I never thought about what it is, what it means, what inflation means, what the supply means, how the government manipulates money, what interest means, what central banks are, it's a big, long, deep rabbit hole.

So trying to get my friends interested in it, it's very difficult beyond them also making a gain, by buying Bitcoin at the right time. Whereas I guess with someone like you and the cypherpunks, they've actually spent time studying money. So when they first heard about Bitcoin, it just kind of made sense and it clicked with them straight away. They didn't have to go through a process of making gains, they'd already done the work upfront.

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah absolutely and it takes time for everybody and people go through their whole lives not really thinking about what money is, so it's certainly not a crime if you don't understand money or if you take it for granted or if you don't have the same views as the cypherpunks or some hard money economists, so on and so forth. It is a complicated issue. I think before maybe we would go deeper into what describes base money, which I know you wanted to talk about, I would say one of the principles that I try to use when you look at money, is I try to look at it from the same free market bent that I have with other things in the market, other products and services that are offered in the market.

If you see that we don't really have a free market in money today, like we don't completely have a free market and other... I listened to your podcast the other day with Erik Voorhees talking about libertarianism and I agree very much with a lot of the points that he was making about markets basically. But I always look at it with one specific word actually and that word is monopoly. So a free market in an idealized, utopian world, which we may not ever see in our lifetime, but a truly free market would not have a monopoly.

But understanding what a monopoly is, you have to truly understand what money is and all these things, you have to understand, what a monopoly is. So a monopoly is not a big company that apparently is so good at providing goods and services that they have like 90%/95% of the market share like Google, Amazon and Apple. These companies are apparently so good and have so much of the market share, that they're a monopoly.

That is not the economic definition, that's not the definition that Adam Smith used, that's not the definition that Murray Rothbard used and many other economists. Monopoly is actually very simply, a firm that has special license from the government. So that's where I always start, is if the firm has special license from the government, there's probably going to be issues and you see that.

You see that with a lot of big ticket items and utilities today are monopolies, airlines are monopolies, airports are monopolies, healthcare institutions are often monopolies, they have special privilege from the government and then you have money. Money is the same thing. So if you actually look at it from this lens, you can cut through right to the core, in my view about where you do have some problems in money or anything else.

This is a pretty, hardcore and anarco-capitalist view, but if you see that there are some issues in an sector in the economy, that maybe it's not working as efficiently as it could or as well as it could, the biggest issue to look for is if there is this special license or special privilege from the government. That's where we are today with money. So money by definition has monopolized industry because only these institutions called central banks can print it.

That's like before you get anywhere else in money or talking about is it good or bad or well produced or not well produced, and again, money should just be like any other good, but we can see and we can observe that money is a highly monopolized industry. So that's one of the reasons why you need something like Bitcoin, because money is not working that efficiently, people can see that, people can see with price rises, inflation, so on and so forth.

They might not understand it, but if you just observe the very simple definition of, is there a special license or special privilege that this institution is receiving from the government, then you can see, "oh actually that's why this thing isn't performing that well, because they are a monopoly."

So that's what central banks are, they are monopolies and they have a special privilege from the government. Supposedly they're the only ones that know how to print money and obviously I don't agree with that. Other people, whether they might explain it that way or not, I imagine they don't agree with it as well.

Peter McCormack: So the libertarian side of things is really interesting because obviously I spent time with Erik and a few other libertarians. I've interviewed the Austrian economists, I've interviewed Stephan Livera and Saifedean Ammous and I really struggle with the full anarchist libertarian vision. Maybe it's because I've just lived and grown up essentially a statist, not realizing there's any other way of a society operating without government, but I do really struggle with the full libertarian anarchist view, because I struggle to see how 7 billion people can operate in a fully free market and I fear it actually quite a bit.

I actually prefer the idea of having almost libertarian goals, like a libertarian goal of reducing government I think is practical and is something achievable. But I think the full anarchist view, it's almost a distraction from actually trying to achieve something. Does that make sense?

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah! I don't know how deep we want to go in that issue regarding this topic, it definitely is a lot of rabbit holes you can go down and you can explore different sectors and I think you did that with Erik quite well on your show. So I understand. I call myself a lazy anarchist in fact, because though I really believe the principles, I really believe that if you had pure free markets, unencumbered by government monopolies, that you would have private enterprise providing goods services and that can include money by the way, it can.

But I also understand whether that's realistic or not in the short run or even practical or not in the short run and not all my friends are libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. At the end of the day, you just want to have good dinner conversation and have some good wine! I don't know, I call myself a lazy anarchist because I'm happy to engage in it, but I just tend to look towards the practical things and that's also why Bitcoin.

I mean Bitcoin is an amazingly practical outlet or escape hatch into something, that at least for now, is fairly unregulated and fairly free. I shouldn't even say fairly! I mean, it definitely is uncensorable and all the good words that we like to use in the Bitcoin community.

So that's probably why Bitcoin, for now and for us. It gets me more excited just talking about Bitcoin and the potential that Bitcoin can do to change the world, then even trying to say like, government should lower its debt or something. Unfortunately those things, I just don't see that happening at all in the short term.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I kind of like that actually, that lazy anarchist, because the thing I worry about is, I worry about human greed, I would worry about over pollution, I mean we see companies polluting as it is! I would worry over pollution without regulation, I would worry about an unregulated market for nuclear power stations, you only have to have a couple of cities blow up for it to be a major problem. I think the full anarchist libertarian view assumes that all humans will act in kindness and in fairness and I just don't think that's human nature.

Also I think the thing is that we are an evolution from animals and we do organize ourselves, whether you go into the jungle and look at the lions or whether you go and see the tribes in the Amazonian jungle, we are people who tend to organize ourselves and we have leaders and followers and I just don't see it working. But I do like the goal and I'm with you on Bitcoin, because I see with Bitcoin you have these small achievable goals.

You have this ability to potentially start taking away from the state and that while the state could tax Bitcoin, if Bitcoin becomes a circular economy and more people are using it, then the government are going to be forced to make better decisions with their money.

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah and then looking at it another way, even perhaps to maybe support in some ways what you're saying, but to counter some of the other things is that the presence of government, going back to what I said about monopoly, even if some of it's not realistic to cut back or so on and so forth, what I observe and I think a lot of libertarians, Austrian economists and so forth, what you do observe is, the presence of government in these industries that are monopolized, meaning the corporations and the evil corporations especially, if they have that license from government, pretty much you can always look to things happening in a worse way.

So I wouldn't actually look at it the way you do where, if we had like anarchy and energy, things would blow up. I would look at it more like, the more government we have, usually it shows that that's more inefficient and more bad. You can extrapolate that fully to where I'm sitting right now in the former Soviet Union. They said the Soviet Union was the second biggest economy in the world for 50 years and it collapsed overnight, it was all a charade. Usually communism is surrounded by paranoiac ideas such as what Stalin had, literally tens of millions of people die at the hand of communist dictators, as Erik pointed out as well

With China, they had their 70th anniversary this week. I was watching the news and you watch those parades and things and the fancy colors and the uniforms and they're all choreographed and all these people marching down the squares. It's not the first time we've seen this in the history of the world and it usually doesn't end well. So centralized states, top-down communist authoritarian regimes, they scare me more than anything else and I do think that Bitcoin is one of the best ways to fight them.

Then actually one thing I wanted to say, maybe just to sort of bring it back to the discussion about base money or gold or Bitcoin, one of the things with gold that's interesting and a lot of people have said this and recognize this, but it really can make no argument that the centralization of gold from a government perspective, pretty much ended that standard. In World War 1, we had the gold standard, governments as they usually do, they print money, they go off of the hard money standard and they did that in World War 1.

They might have been able to get back on it, had it not been for literally one man and that was Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, started arming up that his nation, in a very top-down fashion, centralizing etc and a lot of people obviously understand this and have written about this as well. He centralized the formerly decentralized nation and the story of gold in Europe is incredible because in the 1930s, the US had maybe something like 30% of all the gold reserves sitting in the New York Fed and by the end of World War 2, it had over 70% and the reason was European nations were scrambling to get their gold out of the hands of Hitler.

When Hitler did his Anschluss into Austria, the first thing he did, act one, was go to the Austrian central bank and take the gold. When he moved in Czechoslovakia, the first thing he did was to take the gold. Poland actually had an amazing story. Poland was just destroyed in September 1939, like basically the start of World War 2, but no one really was paying attention and they fell in like a month. It's an amazing story if you read about the history of some of the way the gold moved in World War 2, they had unmarked buses, like 10 of them and they drove down from Poland.

It was sort of decentralized and a couple of different banks in Poland and they all met at the border. They drove into Romania, which was like Ukraine-Romania at the time, and then got to the Black Sea, put it on a boat, got to Constantinople and the Germans were waiting for them, they were on to them that they had their gold there. Somehow they got it onto a train in Turkey, it went all the way down to Lebanon and then they sent it on a French ship and it went to France, Polish gold. It was like all the gold, just to get it away from Hitler!

Then eventually that went to Africa and then from Africa, it went to the New York Fed. Most of the gold actually found its way to the United States precisely because governments in Europe were afraid of letting it fall into Hitler's hands and that was the story of World War 2. How did Hitler build up such as supreme army, military apparatus? It was literally from going into countries, taking their gold and using it to pay for weapons.

So that's actually the tragedy of the gold standard where I don't see it will ever come back in a meaningful way. First of all, most of its sitting in the US, either in the New York Fed or in Fort Knox. It's earmarked to other countries, like countries say they have gold that's in their name, but I just don't see the security of gold really working and it's precisely because of belligerent governments fucking with each other, that eventually brought down something like the gold standard.

Famously, the French actually didn't want all of it to go to the Fed, they had some of it in the Caribbean, they had some of it in Africa and they eventually got it out of Africa and back to the Fed. So the French famously ended the last vestiges of the gold standard I should say, in Bretton woods in 1971. But all of these things are just illustrations of how something that is supposed to be secure or how something is supposed to hold value, it just got centralized over the years and governments were in control of that. Can you imagine like... The book is escaping me where I read about the Polish gold.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I need to read this!

Matthew Mežinskis: It's called "Chasing Gold", I definitely recommend it. There's a lot of these stories about how gold is basically moving out of Europe, the Dutch gold, Belgian gold, Norwegian gold, it's basically making its way to the UK or France and then eventually to the US. Then France sometimes try to keep it out of the US and keep it like in the Caribbean and stuff.

But the actual events that they describe, like the captains of these warships, the admirals of these war ships that are bringing it out of these countries, there's like one central banker on board from Poland, who hung around the whole time. That gold went out of Poland, on land, through the Black Sea, through Turkey, so on and so forth. Could you imagine how many fuck ups can happen from just one banker trying to guard like a hundred tons of a nation's basically base money, their only wealth.

It's just asking for disaster and it definitely was, because a lot of it sunk and some of it was in planes that was shot down. If you actually look at the mechanics, the fundamentals of how gold has been moved around in the last a hundred years, it just shows that it's precisely government intervention that destroyed the gold standard and probably World War 2 was the best example of that.

Like I said, if we say that gold was decentralized before World War 2, it was not after, all of it from Europe basically went to the US and then the US eventually closed the gold standard because France was trying to get some of it back in the 1960s. I know it wasn't a full gold standard then, but it was the last vestiges of governments being able to claim gold on each other.

Peter McCormack: Also you're highlighting how much trust there has to be between nations and the quality of relationships that are required. I think at the moment the UK is holding a significant amount of gold on behalf of Venezuela and Merida wanted it back and we declined to give it to them.

Matthew Mežinskis: Exactly. Maybe there's good reasons there, obviously for what's happening in Venezuela, but yeah, the system is not... There's no real way to manage it effectively, especially when it's so centralized at that top level. There were good examples as well, if you want to call them good examples like the Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, they had very small amounts of gold, a couple tons each, maybe up to 10 tons.

When the Soviets rolled in... So Hitler and Stalin had secretly cut up Eastern Europe literally days before Poland was invaded and Poland fell. They didn't go into the Baltics until 1940 and then when they went in, form each country, there was three messages to both the bank of international settlements, which is in Switzerland and to the Fed in New York, which both of them held gold for the Baltics. They said, "please send your gold to Moscow", because the Soviets rolled into the Baltics in 1940 and the messages were actually so related to one another and you could tell it was like basically under duress, that they didn't send it.

So interestingly, the Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian gold stayed in the New York Fed all the way until the fall of the Berlin wall, all the way until 1990 and then eventually went back. How much is back in Latvia, I don't know now, but if you think about who is executing these trades, who's executing these orders to ship gold across a sea or across an ocean, it's so centralized, so inefficient and it could just come down to one person making a right decision or not and that is really the tragedy of the gold standard

But it's precisely illustrating the problem of governments running shit and that's the problem with gold and money unfortunately.

Peter McCormack: Have you considered scenarios where governments moved to holding Bitcoin? It's not going to be something that's going to happen quickly, it's not something that's going to replace gold, I don't stand with these Bitcoiners who deride gold and say "Bitcoin is so much better", I see both having a role to play. But have you even considered what it will be like if governments started holding Bitcoin instead?

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, so again, I would say I certainly have no problem with gold. I like gold, I want to hold more gold, I understand its value in the market. The point of what I was just saying before was obviously to show the shortcomings in its security, but regarding Bitcoin, we've seen news that Venezuela has some Bitcoins now under their control and North Korea obviously has been mining and things like that. It's a weird thing, Fernando quotes his professor who called central banks even holding gold, I believe the quote was, "something like the virgin prostitute" or something.

It's a strange thing that doesn't really make a lot of sense. If they're supposed to be the ones managing efficiently the money supply of the country, why would you hold Bitcoin? Then on the other hand, obviously the bullish case for Bitcoin is like, "well whoever wants to hold it, it's great, let them hold it." But I think the key thing to recognize with central banks holding Bitcoin, is we certainly don't want to get to the point where they're the only ones validating.

Again, this goes back to the old block size debates and so on and so forth. You have to keep the system decentralized where everyone can validate, or at least at most everybody has the ability to validate where you can truly keep this thing from getting back into central bank hands, because that's really the problem, is once it's in central bank hands, the record with gold and now the record with fiat is usually nothing good.

I mean it's mismanaged, there's more claims that are issued against the money, we can start talking about that if you want, getting back to the base money argument. But I don't necessarily have any comfort in hearing that central banks hold gold, although I do understand it's sort of a bullish case, to say, "okay, well these guys apparently know something about money and they recognize that Bitcoin is a viable asset that they want to hold as reserve." But it's an oxymoron having central banks hold Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: All right man, well listen look, let's get into the base money side of things. Like I say, I don't think people really understand money, so if you explain what base money is, but kind of explain it in a way that helps us better understand Bitcoin.

Matthew Mežinskis: Sure. So the most important thing about base money I would say, as I put in the characteristics of base money slide, is basically that it's final settlement, there's no further claim, there's no IOU, there's no third party that's involved in a base money transaction, it's literally at its most basic level. So when you have gold, when you have Bitcoin, even when you're holding a dollar bill in your wallet, there's actually no counterparty there.

There's no VISA, there's no MasterCard, there's no PayPal, there's no check, there's literally no other party that you have to worry about settling throughout the financial system, no other layers. You can make that transaction, you can buy that coffee or so on and so forth. Of course that proverbial coffee transaction confuses the issue because no one buys! Even if gold were money, no one would buy their coffee with a gold coin.

No one buys coffee with Bitcoin, but they do buy coffee with government fiat. So this is where it gets a little bit confusing, because you have... So base money, it tends to be some sort of a centralized, sorry centralized is the wrong word, some sort of a big ticket item, like something that needs to sit in your treasury, something that at the end of the day you either have it or you don't. If someone steals it from you, if you lose it, then you just don't have base money anymore, it's a bearer instrument.

It just is its own thing and that's what the monetary base is. So in the case of gold and silver, it literally is gold that has been mined throughout the centuries and then Bitcoin obviously its mined every 10 minutes. But Bitcoin is unique because it has a fixed supply of 21 million, everybody knows that and that's a very unique characteristic of base money, because usually base money can keep being mined or printed. Then in the case of government fiat, it literally is those paper notes that are in your wallet.

So I don't know, we can keep going on those descriptions, I don't know where you want to go from there, but basically it's final settlement, there's no check, there's no VISA, there's no MasterCard, there's no other third party you have to worry about entering into the picture, when you're talking about base money. Literally you, an individual, can handle it and you can hold it and you can secure it. That's why Bitcoin works just like base money.

Peter McCormack: Well I think what would be helpful to understand, is the differences between the key characteristic differences. Because base money in terms of gold, silver and paper, it tends to be government issued or government held. But you've also then talked about Bitcoin and you worry about Bitcoin being government held. So there are some key differences.

Matthew Mežinskis: Yes and as I mentioned in the presentation, I totally would admit government fiat is very squirrely, when it comes to what they can do with their base money. In the last 10 years, they have actually paid banks not to lend their base money, that is a very unique thing that has never happened, ever! Even during a full fiat standard in the 80s, in the 90s when they could do whatever they want, they never paid banks interest on their base money reserves and they do that now. 

So it gets a bit squirrely when you look at the government of fiat based money supply. But yeah, gold, silver and Bitcoin, as fundamental characteristics, they have the most in common. They're naturally assets, you can hold them and like I said, there's typically no interest. There's definitely no interest applied in a natural state, like if you hold a gold coin in a chest, if you hold a Bitcoin on your node or in your wallet, if you hold government fiat dollar bills in a safe, it just sits there, doesn't pay interest.

So they have a lot of characteristics that are the same. But yeah, government fiat is a bit squirrely. I guess the most squirrelly one or the most confusing one is that central banks bring base money into existence as a liability. I don't know how much we want to start talking about accounting on this podcast, but it is important to understand that it's between assets and liabilities. So as I mentioned, the basic accounting identity assets equals liabilities plus equity. An easy way to think about that is think about your home, your home is your asset on your own personal balance sheet.

You probably have a loan against it, that's a liability and then you probably have some home equity built up as well, that's your equity. So your asset will equal your debt plus equity in the market, it will always equal. Gold, silver and Bitcoin are naturally assets, so no matter what anybody tells you, some people actually try to argue different, but gold, silver and Bitcoin are just pure assets. If you hold them naturally on your own balance sheet, it's 100% your asset and 100% your equity, there's no debt, there's no counterparty involved. Government fiat is completely different.

So government fiat such as yen, euros, dollars, when a central bank prints that, a lot of people just like to stop at printing or they like to say it's "debt-based" and so on and so forth. The reality is they can actually print whatever they want, it's just they match their printing with an asset. So the typical one is government fiat... Actually, I didn't finish the thought I guess, but government fiat is not like gold, silver and Bitcoin, because government fiat is naturally a liability.

Naturally when it's on the balance sheet, you want to see where you're going to find the monetary base on the central bank balance sheet, it's under the liability section. People confuse that though with "money is debt" and "debt is money", so on and so forth. It is true that most of the money that government central banks bring into existence, finances their own debt. So they actually bring the money into existence, it's just an accounting stroke or printing it, it's a liability on their balance sheet.

The matching entry on the other side of the book is typically a government bond, it's an asset for the central bank, it sits on their books as an asset and of course it's a liability for the treasurer, it's a liability for the state to pay that back. It doesn't have to be that way though. A key thing, Murray Rothbard wrote about this as well, which I think is an important point, they can buy anything that they want.

The Central Bank of Switzerland has Apple stock, they literally have printed money as a liability and then they didn't buy Swiss government bonds, they bought stock in Apple and I think Facebook as well. Same with the Bank of Japan. The Bank of Japan has been doing this for a long time. They are buying a variety of stocks and they're actually holding a lot of equity in the Japanese stock market. Why do they do that?

They do that because they don't want their currency to become too strong, which makes more sense for the Swiss central bank, than it does for Japan. But we just become addicted to money printing and literally they can print and buy anything they want, it doesn't have to be debt. So this is an important point, it doesn't have to be a government bond that they buy. They can buy real estate, they can buy equities, stocks, they can buy whatever.

But I don't want to get too much in the weeds about that, but the important point is that the money supply proper in a government fiat world, is that it is naturally a liability. So the central bank brings it into existence as a liability and then it's their job to sort of stead the currency, that's what it is, it's a liability for the central bank. Think about it as like, they're trying to guide this currency throughout society.

Typically they don't do a good job, but they can buy with that money anything they want. They could buy, like I said, they can buy real estate, stocks and bonds and they could buy Bitcoin, so that's another thing. They have bought gold in the past. Gold still sits as a reserve on most central banks, some central banks make a bigger deal of that than others. Like the Bank of Sweden for example, I mentioned this in the last podcast we did with a Sergei Kotlier, but the Swedish central bank is a free-floating currency, they can print whatever they want, they can print however many Swedish krona they want, but they make it sort of a big deal that they have these foreign currency reserves on their balance shee

They also have gold on their balance sheet and they sort of make it try to seem like they're a very safe currency by the way, that's their strategy. The Fed doesn't do that at all. The European central bank doesn't do that at all, they just admit openly that the money that they print, they might not say it this way, but the money that they print goes most of the time to financing the government deficit.

Most of the time it goes to covering shortfalls that the government can't pay for by taxes. It's like Erik said as well during his interview, they can tax, borrow or print and that printing portion is exactly reflected in the monetary base. So that's sort of how it all fits together. It's a big topic and I like to go on a lot of tangents with this stuff.

Peter McCormack: It's good man, keep going!

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, I don't know if you have any other questions regarding like the characteristics?

Peter McCormack: Most of the time, you know me as somebody who doesn't have this experience, most of the time I see money printing as quantitative easing. It happens at a time where the economy is faltering and the government is trying to inject money back into the economy. So I've not heard of it in terms of the way you've explained it. So what's going on there?

Matthew Mežinskis: Well quantitative easing is printing money primarily digitally, only digitally and it's that ledger entry. So what I didn't quite describe yet is that the monetary base, I said this in the presentation, but the monetary base is comprised of two things. The first is what we all sort of know and understand, that's the paper notes, those bank notes, federal reserve note, that pound sterling note, euros, yen, the actual physical currency.

So that's part of the monetary base and globally, as I mentioned, it's about 35% of the pie. 65% of the pie is this digital balance and that is a little bit hard to understand, but basically just think about it as each bank's account with the central bank. So Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, they each have one account, it's called a master account with the central bank and there lies what they call reserves. It's called the reserves with the central bank and it's just counting fiction, I mean it's at the behest of the central bank.

If the central bank wants to add reserves to those banks for liquidity reasons or flexibility reasons, they can. If they want to take them away, they can do that as well. How they do that in the market is by buying or selling assets. So it goes back to what we said, mostly now it's government bonds in Europe and the US, so that is, as I mentioned in the presentation as well, that actually is the definition of quantitative easing, is it's a manipulation of the monetary base. People never talk about the monetary base though because they talk only about the asset side.

They talk about how many government bonds the fed owns. For example, just to give you a concrete number, let's just say government debt in the US is something like $20 trillion and the monetary base is $3.3 trillion. So obviously money is not debt and debt is not money, it's not that the federal reserve has all of that. The rest of that debt is owned by investors, pension funds, people that believe that the government will pay its debt back. It never will, but some people believe that.

Then even that $3.3 trillion, $1.5 trillion, actually close to $2 trillion is in physical paper. So you're only at the portion of the government debt that the federal reserve owns, is something like $1.5 trillion. So that's quantitative easing, that means that it's basically filling the shortfall in the market. So if Bank of America, if Goldman Sachs, if these banks don't want to hold government bonds, then the federal reserve will step in and buy them themselves.

That's the definition of quantitative easing, it's increasing the money supply outstanding by... It's the act of buying bonds, but really what they're doing is they're increasing the monetary base, they're increasing base money. It's just how it works. I know it sounds squirrely and this is definitely what gets people excited about Bitcoin, that you can't do this, this is what gets people talking about inflation, talking about everything else.

But that's what is happening in the quantitative easing mechanics, is that the central bank is bringing digital money into existence and buying government bonds with that money.

Peter McCormack: So if the debt in the US is around $20 trillion, I don't know the exact figures, but I know over the last few years that's accelerated and the government is printing money to pay off debt, it sounds like they're almost getting themselves into their own kind of death spiral and at some point, they won't be able to continue this practice because the rate of which they'll print in... It's almost like what we've seen in Venezuela. The inflation will be so high that... How does this all play out?

Matthew Mežinskis: So first of all, I like to ask my guests that question. I usually don't like to answer that question because it's hard to make that prediction! But I will say a couple things here. So first of all, it's $22 trillion, I just got it. So the US is a good one to use as an example, because again, in the past 50 years when we're on this pure fiat standard, Nixon broke the gold standard in its entirety in 1971, we've had 50 years, I'll just give you a pattern and pattern is a loose word to use here, but I'll give you a sense of where that number has been.

So government debt in 1970 was only about $60/$70 billion and the monetary base was about 16% of that. On the eve of the financial crisis, government debt was $8 trillion and the monetary base was about 9% of that. So debt actually grew faster than the monetary base at that time. Now government debt is $22 trillion and the monetary base is about 15% of that. So we're back up to the same ratio back in 1970, but the debt has exploded.

The reason I gave you those numbers is, it's sort of a working thesis that I have and I have some more to come on this on our website, we release this base money update every quarter, which we can talk about more, but I'm actually not sure that there's any pattern to any of this.

The only thing that we can really, and this is where I think economics is sort of bunk in a lot of ways, unless you're talking about just basic principles like supply and demand and free markets and what does monopoly do, on a macro level, again to think that one board can do this, like the Federal reserve, to think that one group of people has the information to know where money should be in relation to government debt, how much of government debt they should buy with printing money, these are very, very hubristic questions to ask and answer.

Friedrich Hayek said that's the pretence of knowledge, that's what the road to serfdom was about. How can one planning board, plan the economy? That's what the Soviet Union did. They thought that they knew how much timber should be cut and how much concrete should be poured. They tried to plan it via quotas and from a centralized top-down way. They didn't plan it, they didn't let it happen in an emergent free market fashion where supply and demand can work themselves out.

So that's I think the main point to say about that. Then the second point to say is when you mentioned, "where does this all go?" I genuinely do not know and I genuinely think it can go longer than we think. So the example I like to use, is in 1970 we went off the gold standard entirely, any remnants of any sort of connection to gold as I mentioned in 1971. By 1980, gold was $800 an ounce and it was there for like 10 seconds, then it fell back down.

But it was $35 bucks an ounce in 1971 as the fixed sort of base money price and then by 1980, it was completely off the gold standard, so we had a market again for gold, it could be bought and sold, sort of reflected inflation was $800 bucks an ounce, less than 10 years later. If you were a hard money goldbug in 1980, you would have thought, "it's game on! I made it! My principles of sound money worked, this is it. If we're not going back to gold, everybody's going to recognize gold. Gold is sound money, gold is good money, gold is the best money, it's just game on, I made it!"

Then Paul Volcker did a drastic thing and he raised interest rates like 20%, pricked the gold bubble and then Greenspan got the benefits of that, the next Fed chair and gold basically fell from $800 an ounce, to $200 an ounce over the next 20 years. So in 1980, you could have thought that your principals were going to change the world and gold was sound money, everybody would recognize it. But no one did. Central banks made some drastic moves in the 70s and 80s, particularly the US Fed, sort of pricked this gold bubble and then went on back down to easy money for 20 more years and eventually that led to the dot-com and bust and then the financial crisis.

But here we are, 50 years later after the end of gold and I have no idea if governments might return to that, it seems very, very unlikely. It seems more that they might try to do some digital standard, might get some Bitcoin, might use this Libra idea to have this basket of currencies. They're just going to keep coming up with these ideas. This could go on for 20 more years. I genuinely wish I had the answer to that question, but I think the key thing to caution Bitcoiners on, is that the will of centralized bureaucrats, particularly when they have the monopoly of the printing press is strong and they're going to protect it.

I started this sort of hard money odyssey I guess about 10 years ago and it was the financial crisis that sort of turned me to Austrian economics and libertarianism, so on and so forth. I've heard it for 10 years, people thought that the vindicating moment was the financial crisis and then things were even going to get worse or we are going to have turns for the good. maybe gold would have more of a higher status in monetary society. Nothing of the kind has happened. If anything the big surprise in the last 10 years has been Bitcoin. So how's that for an answer?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's pretty solid. A couple of couple of key points, when you talked about the price of gold essentially having a 20 year bear market and we're here as Bitcoiners moaning about 18 months of the bear market is kind of funny! But one of the things that just kind of stands out for me is there seems to be no incentives for governments to operate with a better monetary policy for a couple of reasons. Firstly, every politician's lifecycle career is very short.

They're trying to make decisions which affect them over the next kind of 1-4 year cycle. Whereas it seems like these financial cycles are a lot longer. If you talk about 2008, we're on our third presidential term since then, so there's little incentive there. But also the other thing that kind of stands out to me, is that we have a global economy now. Every country is competing with each other. Everyone's kind of fucking with their currency, we even saw Trump tweeting about it recently.

So it's almost like who's going to go first? Which countries are going to implement their responsible monetary policy first and kind of suffer the... Because I talked to Giacomo Zucco about this and he was saying, "look, it's like a heroin addiction. The longer you take to come off it, the harder the withdrawal is going to be" and that seems to be the problem is that we're building up, or governments are building up these problems, but everyone's too scared to deal with it, because the withdrawal is going to be too difficult.

Matthew Mežinskis: I think another point there is that the race to the bottom, they use this phrase a lot or Jim Rickards popularized the term "currency wars", that that won't let up for sure. Where that ends, I just do not know. So we released this top 30 floating currencies, which we're calling the global monetary base, a key is that again, if a currency can float and a central bank can print it at will, then it's definitely based money in the world today.

I mean gold is demonetized, even though central banks hold gold, it doesn't have any effect on their decision making of printing. You can argue that, okay the price of gold rises, maybe they're going to think about it and there's a whole other topic about if there's gold price suppression and so on and so forth, but let's leave all that aside. They are independent in their decision to print. Even if gold screams, "you're printing too much", they can make the decision themselves.

So the point is, that is a decision that governments love. They love to have that power to make that decision. So there's the top 30 floating currencies, which we had the map of that on the presentation. I actually just posted the presentation this week, but it's the usual suspects you might suspect; the dollar, the Euro, the yen and the yuen are the top four big ones. Then you have the South Korean won, the Russian rouble, the Brazilian real, the Swiss franc.

Those are the biggest currencies in the world, these floating, and if you get the top 30, that's 90% of global GDP. So that trend, by the way was probably small. I don't know the exact number, but the top 30 floating currencies, 50 years ago was probably much less than 90%. We may have not even had 30% floating currencies 50 years ago. Many were probably pegged to the dollar. many were very dependent on the dollar, the point I'm making is that it's increasing. There's no way.. China now has been market, they're sort of pegged and there's some confusion there.

They have a lot of dollars, euros and yen in reserve because they were pegged hard pre-2005. Post 2005 they've started to float. They're not fully floating, but they're definitely market. There's no way in hell China is going to go back and peg its currency. No way! I mean, as much as the US Federal reserve might love to have more control over China, China is going to love the power to print its own money on the market and there's just no reason why they would not want that, if you're there, especially as a communist, very top down nation that they are. So the trend is to try to have your currency float if you're a government. Most small countries fail at this a la Zimbabwe, Belarus, Venezuela.

Most small countries fail at this, but some big countries are doing okay and China is an example of the next one up. This is why you have all this talk about, "oh maybe the Libra is a good idea" or "maybe we need this". We interviewed George Selgin who's a good monetary historian a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about that he was in Jackson hole, which is the big Fed conference and Mark Carney, who is the governor of the Bank of England, he talked about the need for some virtual digital currency that's backed by a basket of government currencies and that we need to sort of move power away from the dollar.

But if you read the tea leaves, what he's actually saying is he does not want too much power to go to the UN. He doesn't want too much of the Chinese and the Asian currencies to get too much power, too much of that basket of value. So yeah, I guess that's my answer to that, which is governments will always try to make their currency float.

They would not like to have their currency pegged, because once you float, you have pretty much carte blanche to do exactly that third thing that Erik mentioned, is print the deficit. You don't have to worry about taxing and barring, but you can print the deficit. So again, is that going to go for 10 more years? Will we get to this sort of digital backed currency? I don't know the answer.

Peter McCormack: The thing is, I'm going to hit the pub tonight, I'm going to go down and meet a couple of my friends and they're going to ask me how that Bitcoin thing is doing, as they always do, "how's that Bitcoin thing doing Pete?" I'm like, "yeah, it's doing okay." They're like, "oh is it dead yet?" And I'm like, "no, no, no!" And I'm going to ask to them like, "have you bought any yet? Have you considered it?" 

They'll be like, "no", and we're going to have the same conversation and I'll be like, "well, why? Governments are printing money, it's essentially a tax, inflation is essentially a secret tax, they're eroding your savings, this is like insurance," like I'm telling them the same things over and over again and you never really convinced them. But all this stuff you've told me here, what is the implication for the average Joe? What are the things they don't understand what's going on here?

Matthew Mežinskis: Good question. I think it depends on where you live, depends on your local environment, obviously Bitcoin is more important for some of these nations that are a basket case in the way that they print and the way that the trust lies in their currency. Certainly probably less so in, as we know, the more developing and I guess "stable currencies" like the dollar and the Euro in the short to mid-term, it will be less important. That's my short answer there. The long answer I think goes back to how big Bitcoin actually becomes as a proportion of the monetary base. So right now it is extremely small.

As I mentioned, $20 trillion is about the global monetary base if you add up all of these floating currencies in the world. Bitcoin is falling now, but it's what $150 billion in market cap roughly. So $150 billion versus $20 trillion, it's extremely small, many multiples less than all of the government currencies combined. It's not even on the map. It's starting to be on the map of central banks and they're talking about it more, but it's not on the map of the average Joe at all. Many people are just thinking about paycheck to paycheck or whatever and the common tropes of just providing for your family, whatever it might be.

There's just no time to think about saving in Bitcoin and here's the hard part too, is I really hesitate to say in the long-term there comes a point, I say this a lot as well in the podcast and when I give lectures and stuff, I just don't know when there comes a point, I mean even sound money Austrian economists have said this for years and years and years.

Here we are 50 years later, the proportions are blown out in some ways with quantitative easing, the proportions of some things. In some ways they're not so out of proportion, like I mentioned with government debt. If there's one pattern that sort of holds with the monetary base and other things, it's government debt so they can keep doing this presumably as long as people and other investors still buy the debt, the markets may have some hiccups here and there, but they might still go on

But the other thing, and again this is why I'm definitely not an economist, Fernando is our trained economists on the show, I just read! But all the other patterns that I see that I can see, I've looked at these money supplies, I've looked at the debt ratios, there just isn't a pattern. If there was a pattern, it has been blown out of the water since the financial crisis. Everything, pre-crisis looks different on a chart to everything post-crisis. I just don't see a pattern! 

How long it can work, it's sort of one of these things like the Soviet Union, no matter what anybody says, some people start to say they predicted the end of the Soviet Union or whatnot, certainly Mises predicted in the 20s that the Soviet Union couldn't work, or maybe it was early 30s when he made that prediction. But in any event, no one knew the time and literally people were scared and people thought that the Soviet Union was this all powerful mighty nation, second biggest economy in the world, up until the 80s.

Then just literally overnight, it collapsed, luckily, relatively peacefully. There is still plenty of overhang and aggression from Russia and everything else, but again, how are we going to solve that on this podcast? At the end of the day, this brings me back to lazy anarchism, like I can see that I can change it personally with Bitcoin. Other than that, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: There's certainly a chance with Bitcoin though, there's certainly a chance. You said at the moment, it's not really on the map. But I've got an interview with PlanB coming out today and he was talking to me about stock to flow, talking about the halvings and how relevant they are, the impact on the valuation of Bitcoin and you could get to a point where after the next halving, it might be $1 trillion, so you're talking about 5%.

Perhaps in a couple of halvings' times, perhaps maybe in a decade, Bitcoin might be on the map. Say Bitcoin does have a $5 trillion market cap, it suddenly starts to become serious. So do you see it like him? Do you see there is a chance that as the supply restricts... It's almost like a game of patients, there's a number of things that have to fall into place.

Technology has to improve, more people have to become aware of Bitcoin, more people have to use it, governments perhaps need to adopt it in some way, perhaps institutions get involved, but a whole number of things may happen over the next decade alongside essentially three more halvings, which will potentially increase the total value and then things start to change.

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, well I love the idea of some patterns emerging with stock the flow. I think that's a very interesting analysis that he does and like I said before, if there's no patterns with the way that the monetary base works with GDP or population, all these things that economists act like they can somehow control or understand, I don't see much pattern there, but if there is a pattern, the one pattern that seems to hold is Bitcoin's price.

Generally, if you look at that on that log scale or log/log, you see these nice power trends and stock to flow shows that as well in terms of how much with supply, the rate of increase is decreasing. So both of those things I think are very interesting predictions though. Again, I don't know, I think it's hard to do. There's the whole security side of Bitcoin which is still... I'm an amateur to say when and where if governments mine in secret or if they do certain things, if they could really hijack the market over a short period of time, I have no idea about those things.

Peter McCormack: I think rather than predictions, something more like, how would you like to see it play out, as somebody who wants a healthy monetary system across the world, how would you like to see it ideally play out?

Matthew Mežinskis: Well, I'm definitely not someone who hopes for catastrophe to see sort of this Phoenix rise from the ashes. I don't think that would be good. That is exactly what ended the gold standard both in World War One and World War 2, like any chance was absolute catastrophe and just mismanagement from governments. So that that would not be ideal. Is that the only way that it can happen? Sometimes it almost seems like that.

I mean pre-2008, maybe everybody thought the economy was going fine, the level of money printing was going fine, maybe some debt levels were getting a bit high, but then shit hit the fan. The problem is after the crisis, you only get more government coming in, more financial regulations happened precisely after the crisis, ignoring the fact that it was those government regulations, those monopolized decisions that were causing the distortion in the first place!

So it's really hard and this goes back to the lazy anarchist thing, it's really hard to think or put any hope or trust that the people at the top are going to make the right decision.

Peter McCormack: But this is why we like Bitcoin because it takes the decisions away from them or forces their hands in a way, if enough people adopt Bitcoin and enough people use it, then it just forces their hands. It goes back to those unique properties of Bitcoin that you talk about.

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, that's the hope! I think at the present moment, that's why we're in the game. I wouldn't be interested in Bitcoin where it not for those properties and I certainly think it has a better chance of any disruption in the monetary order, than something like gold, which again as we just talked about, literally the how one person can screw with the mechanics of this gold security. It was pretty much evident by World War 2 and I just see no chance of that coming back.

Peter McCormack: This is like you said earlier, it's more evidence why someone like Roger Ver is wrong or faketoshi is wrong, where they talk about block size and they don't really care for the decentralization. Maximum decentralization, whatever that is as a measure or a benchmark is the target because we've got to keep this out of the control of people who can manipulate things.

All the stories you've told me today, every bad example has been where the government has had an opportunity to manipulate the market or steal or there's trust issues, whether it's gold or whether it's with fiat, but we have Bitcoin. Bitcoin is trustless, it's permissionless, it's decentralized, it has this fixed limit, it has all the properties or something whereby we kind of take the decisions away from the government and force their hands, which is the thing I like. I don't know how it will play out.

I don't know if it will play out how people want, but when I hear somebody like Erik Voorhees explain to me that the natural curve of this is, tax receipts can come from Bitcoin, but over time, as more people move to Bitcoin, less people are using fiat, the government's ability to print money to dig them out holes becomes limited. Therefore they're forced to make new decisions.

They're forced to say, "okay, we've got a limited budget, where are we going to spend it because we can't print more money." That's the kind of romantic side I really like, is that they are restricted and that's what excites me more than anything, actually way more than personal gain! I don't know about you, like obviously if the price goes up it's great, but I'm kind of over that now in some ways.

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, well it's always going to be there. I think it's probably natural and human nature to want to speculate, that's part of it. But I would not deny that the purely ideological reason of keeping a currency decentralized out of the hands of any government, is absolutely a top reason why I would hold it. Again, a benefit would probably happen where it would accrue value anyway, as a result of that good feature.

So I think it's pivotal that the system has to... You hear it a lot in the Bitcoin space, it has to say decentralized, it has to hold this security model of close to trustless verification, trust minimization, where you just don't have to rely on that one bad actor or potential bad actor to make it work. So yeah, that to me is definitely the key thing. As to what you said about sort of gradually, nicely, what's the word they use in the libertarian movement, maybe starving the beast or whatever, like slowly, gradually having the government get more responsible...

Peter McCormack: Boiling the frog!

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah I hope so. I hope it works, but just turn on the TV and watch some of the leaders speak, rationality is just in very, very short supply there. It's just not part of the... Politics by its nature is adversarial. No one really talks about like, "okay, this is how you're going to pull yourself up. This is how you're going to protect your family. This is how you can do it." Just by its nature, it's us against them and I don't have much interest in it. I hope it works the way that you say, like this sort of gradual starve the beast, but I'm not hanging my hat on it.

Peter McCormack: Alright man, we're going for quite a sombre ending here!

Matthew Mežinskis: Well, how else? Let's try to put it on a positive note!

Peter McCormack: I'm conscious of time. Let's go out with a bang, give me something positive?

Matthew Mežinskis: At the end of the day, I think the reason that you wanted to have me on here, we try to do the best we can to give some economic angles of how Bitcoin works. Interestingly with Bitcoin, the way its money supply grows, the way that it functions in the economy, very interestingly it has characteristics of something that has long been known in the economic world, as I said, the monetary base. Everything else is a claim basically. So it can function as money, like your checking account can function as money, a PayPal account can function as money, a paper check can function as money, but at the end of the day, all of those things are claims and you're trusting a third party to make it happen.

I have no problem with the way that the system scales in the absence of a central bank and the absence of monopoly power, who knows how it might've scale. Maybe we wouldn't even have a need for Bitcoin. I don't say we definitely wouldn't have a need for Bitcoin, but the fact remains we have had this centralizing, monopolistic trend in certain sectors, banking and money is one of them. If you're going to talk about claims in those systems like checks, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, they may work to some extent, they may work for some people but they don't work the way that base money works.

Base money is like true, free, unencumbered money where no one can tell you what to do with it and no one can stop you. You may have some security issues moving it around, as a lot of governments learned in World War 2, but even at that point, if I say the word "governments moved it around", we're already well past the average Joe having any control of their money. I mean it was governments, it was for Kings and Queens, by the way, it definitely was for a lot of those mid-20th century monarchies, a lot of that gold.

But in any event, base money is something that can be controlled by the individual, literally unencumbered by any other party, Bitcoin exactly fits the bill there. That is precisely what Bitcoin is. So this is why we try to make the characteristics or provide these characteristics of base money and show that Bitcoin fulfils them and if you want to see, as sort of a nice comparison, how that compares to other base monies, we do that.

Just a little plug here, we call it the Crypto Voices monetary base, we release it every quarter. It usually takes about a month because a lot of central banks don't release all the data immediately. We just ended third quarter, you can look out for that and probably in a month we'll release it. But that is the point, there is such a thing as free and unencumbered money that's not in control by any other party, any other government and that is what base money is. So Bitcoin is base money.

Peter McCormack: Well also, I've got a positive ending, Bitcoin is kind of hope, right? So imagine Bitcoin hadn't been invented, there was no Bitcoin, I don't know what the hell I'd be doing with my life, but there was no Bitcoin, it hadn't been created, we would still have the same problems, but we wouldn't have a tool or an opportunity to fight back, we wouldn't have this hope.

At least with Bitcoin, we have this hope, we have this thing that if enough people adopt because they understand what's happening with money, then we do have this hope. So I'm positive because we have this gift, that it seems to be so fortunately well designed in so many ways. Yes, it has its problems, but it seems to be so fortunately well designed, that we have a hope. So I'm pretty positive man!

Matthew Mežinskis: Completely concur and agree! It's a positive development in the world for sure. That's why we do the podcast.

Peter McCormack: Well listen look, obviously thank you for coming on. I can't wait to hang out with you again, probably in Riga again next year. I don't know if you ever come to London, but if you come to London, your my guest and I will look after you. Actually I've got to come back out because I've got to come see Max for something, so we will hang out again in Riga. But before we go, plug everything, tell everyone where they can find you, how they can hear your amazing show.

Matthew Mežinskis: Well likewise, thanks again for having me on, I appreciate it. So cryptovoices.com is where you can find our exhibits, the monetary base, some other pricing and charts on Bitcoin as well. We plan on expanding it, plan on building it out a bit more in the future. That's mostly what we focus on, is the economic angle and my co-host, my buddy Fernando, he lives in Brazil and we do a podcast precisely on these topics.

So money, banking and economics, trying to keep it maybe a bit more focused in our little corner of the Bitcoin space. But it's what we have time to do and it's what we like to do, so if anyone hasn't listened and wants to check it out, you can find everything at cryptovoices.com.

Peter McCormack: Yes, definitely listen to it, it's amazing! Alright listen, Matt, appreciate it, hopefully we'll hang out soon. Take care!

Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, it would be great to catch up in Riga or London for sure. Thanks!

PodcastPeter McCormackComment