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Saifedean Ammous on Understanding Bitcoin Economics

Peter McCormack
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Saifedean Ammous on Understanding Bitcoin Economics - WBD127 Peter McCormack

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Interview Location: Skype
Interview Date: Monday 15th, July
Company: saifedean.com
Role: Founder

When landing in the world of Bitcoin there are many concepts down the rabbit hole to get lost in, from technology to economics there is a wealth of information available. Within the world of economics, many will discover the theory of Austrian economics for the first time. 

Those who believe in Austrian Economics believe in free markets, the gold standard and minimal government intervention. So where does Bitcoin fit into this? Could it be the perfect tool to facilitate a free market Could it even become an improved and new gold standard? 

To find out more, I sat down with Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard and an Associate Professor in Economics at the Lebanese American University. Having recently launched his online academy it was a great time for Saifedean to teach me more about Austrian Economics and catch up on our mutual love for Liverpool FC. We discuss:

  • Is Austrian Economics the only economic model that Bitcoin fits into?

  • Is taxation theft?

  • What makes a market a free market?

  • What is money and is Bitcoin money?

  • Will fractional reserve banking occur with Bitcoin?

  • Will central banks adopt Bitcoin?

  • Will improved monetary policy kill Bitcoin?

  • Will Liverpool win the Premier League in ‘20?

TIMESTAMPS

00:05:19: Introductions
00:06:08: Touching on the background to Saifedean’s online courses on Bitcoin and economics
00:09:24: Delving into the basics surrounding Austrian Economics
00:15:41: Exploring whether any government has successfully implemented Austrian Economic policies
00:18:57: Discussing the grey area of political economic policies and how they relate to free markets
00:23:51: Exploring more left leaning policies within Austrian Economics including healthcare
00:31:46: Touching on the relationship between free markets and regulations and if this can be abused
00:40:13: Delving into the role of government in an Austrian Economic model
00:49:04: Discussing common misconceptions around money and how that relates to Bitcoin
00:54:42: Can we reap benefits from Austrian Economics if governments aren’t currently using it?
00:57:30: Touching on the possibility of fractional reserve banking with Bitcoin
00:59:50: Saifedean’s thoughts on Libra coin and where Libra fits into free markets
01:04:50: Discussing Saifedean’s perspective on Bitcoin development in the present day
01:07:35: Exploring whether Bitcoin can be killed?
01:11:33: Final comments, discussing Liverpool FC and how stay in touch

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TRANSCRIPTION

Peter McCormack: All right man. How are you doing Saife?

S. Ammous: I'm very good. Thank you for having me Peter.

Peter McCormack: Good to have you! So you're going to be teaching me about economics today?

S. Ammous: Hope so!

Peter McCormack: That's great! Probably quite a good day to do it with everything that's happened recently about the President tweeting about Bitcoin and Stephen Mnuchin, is that how you pronounce it?

S. Ammous: Mnuchin or something like that? I don't know. I'm no expert in pronunciation.

Peter McCormack: I think it's a good day to do it! So I think the way we should do this is, that you should just teach me. You teach me in this session about economics, what I don't know and I think that would be good starting point. Then hopefully we'll get a bunch of people to come and take your course or your courses... There's three I saw?

S. Ammous: Yes, well there's two being offered right now and there's a third that's going to start being offered soon.

Peter McCormack: So what's the background to this? How come you went into the courses?

S. Ammous: Well, the background for this is simply that after publishing my book, lots of people all over the world are curious about learning more about economics and Austrian Economics. Bitcoin has really ignited interest in this School of Economics because Austrian Economics is the only version of the universe in which Bitcoin works. All the other Schools of Economics, according to them, Bitcoin shouldn't exist. It flies in the face of all of everything they stand for; we need a government to issues the money, we need a central bank to regulate financial flows across borders and monitoring policy.

Without government setting up monetary policy, there won't be enough money and then bad things happen and children die. This is pretty much economic consensus amongst most Schools of Economics other than the Austrians. The Austrians are the only ones who will tell you, that it doesn't matter how much money there is, we could run the entire world's economy on a supply of $1, provided the Dollar can be divided into smaller and smaller units. You can run it on any amounts of numbers. It doesn't mean that, in other words, the total number of Dollars matches as much as the total number of inches in the universe or the number of meters in the universe.

The length of the metre itself is not what matters. What matters is that this unit compares towards others. So the total quantity of money itself does not matter, any quantity of money is sufficient. My favorite example of that is when Turkey got rid of six zeroes in their currency, they use the Turkish Lira. Then they moved to the new Turkish Lira and the way they did that, was that they knocked six zeroes out. So one day you had a hundred million Liras, the next morning it was a hundred Liras. So they knocked out and their money supply went down to a millionth of what it was overnight and yet people didn't become a millionth poorer, the Turkish economy continues to function normally. So the number itself doesn't matter.

What matters is the increase in the number. When the number of the supply of money increases, that has negative consequences. That's what the Austrians think and that's what nobody else thinks. So I think this is ultimately the driver of interest in curiosity in Austrian Economics. But once people start looking beyond that, once people start looking beyond the monetary policy in Austrian Economics, they start finding a lot of very interesting and fascinating things to think about and talk about. 

That's what has gotten a lot of people to be more interested in my work and it's driven me to think that, instead of spending my time teaching at a university where I'm teaching topics that aren't exactly what is interesting to me, there's a lot more demand out there, for people who want to learn about this stuff and that's stuff you can't really learn at universities. Austrian Economics is not something that many universities offer.

A lot of people around the world are interested in it and so I thought that the best thing for me to do in this case would be to utilize my time on teaching these courses to people from all over the world. What I'm doing is effectively disintermediating the university from the professors/student relationship. So I'm just dealing directly with the students,

Peter McCormack: The Saifedean university?

S. Ammous: Basically!

Peter McCormack: All right, so why are the Austrians right? Why should I believe you? Why should I trust you? I studied economics at school, I did A-level, I heard about this chap Keynesian a lot. It seems like a lot of governments trusted him and follow his economic theories. I've read about Marxism and socialism. I've read all of these different theories, but only till recently have I heard about Austrian Economics. Why should I trust it?

S. Ammous: Well, because let's face it, you know deep down inside that none of that stuff made sense, right? I mean you went through university and school and took those classes and I know so many people, successful, highly accomplished doctors, engineers, software engineers, people who have really mastered their fields and are capable of studying very complex topics.

They have very intelligent brains and enough discipline to master a topic and it's quite common how many of those people would tell you, "I took economics at university. I studied it, I got an A, I passed it, but I have no fucking idea what the hell this isn't talking about. That thing is so weird."

The short answer, of course you shouldn't, but my opinion of why you should be curious at least about Austrian Economics is that, when you try and learn the other kinds of economics, you end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what those people want and trying to understand what they are trying to say. There are highly complex models that don't really help you in anything in the real world, they have no obligation in the real world. If you succeed in studying it and understanding it, you'll be able to understand the paper itself.

You'd be able to understand the economist and what the economist saying, but you won't be able to really... It won't give you any added insight onto the real world that will help you in real world. I think Austrian Economics is about understanding the real world, understanding how the world functions, understanding human decisions and human behavior and that's what is I find more practical and more interesting. So beyond the concept of money, , the issues that I'd like to get into in depth in the course that I'm going to be offering, things like time preference.

This is something that amongst the Austrians, it's a topic that people think of as a very important issue in economics. But amongst mainstream economic schools, it's not commonly discussed with the importance that I feel that it deserves. I think if there's anything economics can teach you or the most important lesson, is that you're constantly performing trade offs between yourself and your futures. Every moment of your life you're making decisions that benefits you at the expense of your future self or the other way around, and that's just an enormously powerful concept.

We study macroeconomics, we study microeconomics, we look at all of these aspects of economics that have to do with other people and of course that's important, but very, very little of economics has to do with the trade offs that an individual does with themselves. In reality, as I mentioned in my book and I think that was my favorite chapter in the book, and this is really ultimately the reason I'm extremely interested in the topic of money in Bitcoin, it's that fascinating link between money and time preference.

The thing that I find amazing about time preference, is that ultimately it's the traits that you perform with yourself, are the most important traits in your own life, because you trade with other people 1 time, 5 times, 10 times during a single day. You trade with yourself an infinite amount of times every day when you decide whether you go to sleep or wake up early and start getting after your work; that's a decision where you're prioritizing today, over tomorrow, over your career, your long term productivity.

So that I think is an enormously important concept and I think that the Austrians are the only ones who have studied it extensively. That work is all available online, people can read it and I think in my syllabus, I have links to all of my readings available freely online. What I'd like to do is to just help people as they go through those readings, as they study this material, because I've studied before and because I have some experience in teaching economics, I'd like to be their online teacher for this.

Peter McCormack: You're sat there in your Liverpool shirt and I think as we're both Liverpool fans, we've learned about time preference, right?

S. Ammous: Yes, we've had to! Many, many, many years! Every 15 years we get something, but it makes it worth it, right? I mean, Istanbul, you'd trade all the last 14 years of misery for another Istanbul wouldn't you?

Peter McCormack: Of course! But also, there is kind of an analogy there with football in the way that clubs spend money, they try and be successful and they end up bankrupt. There is a nice analogy there, don't you think?

S. Ammous: Absolutely. If you think about a coach like Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool's Messiah, probably the real Satoshi Nakamoto incidentally, although I'm sure people know that! But Jurgen Klopp and his approach towards team building is a very low time preference approach. He buys young players and he spends time perfecting them and he puts up with short run shortcomings of these players that cost the team points and goals, because it's going to pay off in the long run.

So you're looking at how that's worked out with players like Trent Alexander Arnold or Andy Robertson, they've improved immensely. Whereas, the high time preference approach is the one that you see at the clubs like say Man United at this point, Real Madrid to certain extent in eras like The Galacticos or PSG today

 The teams that have a lot of money and they want to buy success weekly, they go and they buy the superstars and it's hard to get the superstars to work well together, no matter how much money you pay and then the problem is that you're buying the superstars and in the peak and in a couple of years, they're not going to be at their peak. You then need to buy another superstar to maintain that level. So that's why Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp's approach paid off and now you're European champions.

Peter McCormack: European champions and hopefully next year, 31 years we will break the duck! Anyway, we can talk about football another time! Okay, so look, I get it. I do have an interest. You said people should be curious, I am curious! I'm curious because I've read your book, I'm curious because I've hung out with you a bunch of times and I follow you on Twitter.

I'm curious because I listened to Stephan Livera, so I do have a curiosity, but at the same time I have questions. So for example, has this been tested in the real world? Has any government ever implemented Austrian Economic policies?

S. Ammous: Well, I think that's not a very helpful way of asking the question because it's not a matter of Following one rule book. It's more really about the method of analysis of economics, rather than any specific recommendations. But in general, I think that the policy implications that come out of Austrian analysis, based on individual analysis, the ideas always come up towards concept of individual freedom, individual choice and individual responsibility. In that sense, that exists in every society.

Markets will always exist as long as human beings exist, people will trade. You put two people on a desert island, they will find a way to trade and cooperate and that's an economic decision. Of course, more importantly, as I was mentioning earlier, the individual trades that you do with yourself are economic trades that are taking place at any time at all places. So these rules and laws of economics happen at all times and then governments interfere in certain ways and prevent markets from functioning in certain times and certain places. Economics helps understand the consequences of these interventions.

So there's no such thing as the perfect free market utopia and nor do I think that we'll ever get to that. But we'll also never going to have a human society that doesn't have theft or murder, these things will always exist. So it doesn't matter if we ever get to that utopia or not. But I think the important thing to understand is, what are the implications of different ways in which this utopia goes wrong? So the closest examples we have of free markets that societies that have implemented and also specifically, I think most importantly, a free market in the capital market.

In other words, free market in money, are examples of countries that were on the gold standard. So we have Switzerland, which was on the gold standard until the 1970s, they don't seem to have done too badly with it. It doesn't seem to have hurt them. If you look at the actual statistics of Switzerland up until the 1970s, both inflation and unemployment were non-existent, both never went over 1%. There was no inflation. There was no one unemployment, Switzerland was one of the richest countries in the world and it had one of the freest markets in the world.

After they moved towards having a more inflationary monetary policy, now we see more and more unemployment after the 1970s and particularly after 1990s. So it's not about finding one poster child. It's about understanding the breadth of different ways in which governments can interfere and mess up people's lives economically.

Peter McCormack: It does sound to me a little bit like, and I'm not an expert on economics, but it does sound a little bit like when I look at the UK, we've got the Conservative Party and we also have the Labor Party. The Labor Party is traditionally more socialist, especially at the moment with Corbyn who is pretty much a Marxist. I guess Conservative policies seem to be a little bit closer to Austrian Economics, than say the socialist parties. Is that fair observation?

S. Ammous: Probably yes. I would argue so. However, I would say it's also the rhetoric of the Conservative parties, rather than the actual actions. In the same way that Tony Blair's Labour is probably closer to social rhetoric, than Conservatives, but really Conservatives and Labour are far closer to each other when push comes to shove. I don't pay much attention to politics, but even with Conservatives pay lip service to free markets ideas, but they still support a very strong role for government in many areas, particularly defense and foreign policy.

Ultimately it's the same thing. The damages from those things are mostly concentrated to people abroad, there is of course a blow back, but Conservatives want to expand on the state abroad, socialists want to expand the state at home and then they all compromise and agree to expand the state abroad and at home and then everybody wins. That's really, if you look at it in US politics and British politics over the past few decades, this is how it goes. It doesn't matter if it's Blair or Bush or left or right, in business there's always more funding for more and more.

There's always more funding for more domestic programs, ultimately government and that's really what you can see from understanding the economic incentives that people in government face, the only thing that benefits them is the expansion of the power of government and the expansion of the bending ability of government. So they may oppose ideas in principle to get elected, but when push comes to shove, any idea that increases their power will be good for them.

Peter McCormack: I was listening to a Tom Woods show recently, I've become a little bit of an addict too actually. I really enjoy his approach. I've heard him break down a lot of issues with socialist policies and there was a recent show about the socialist manifesto.

One of the interesting things in there, he brought up as an example, he was talking about having caps for interest rates on credit cards and he was explaining that caps for interest rates on credit cards don't actually work and that actually, I think he was saying that there's a market at every interest rate for somebody to use a credit card at. When you start introducing caps, you're actually destroying the free market because you're removing people from having the ability to actually get credit at certain rate. Is that a good example?

S. Ammous: Yeah, because ultimately the intervention is naive mentality. Just looks at something that they don't like and they say, "we pass a law and we make this illegal and then it stops happening." Once you understand economic incentives, once you study economics from the Austrian perspective, once you understand that the market for loans or for apples or for TVs or for cars or for anything else, whatever these things are, they are all created by men and humans who are acting. It's our evaluation in our mind that creates those things and brings them to life. So the market for interest is no different.

We hear that apples are expensive, "that's not nice, children should be able to get apples at a lower price. Let's make it so the price of apples is lower." Then in the Keynesian or Marxist mind, it just seems that this is good intentions, so therefore it will translate to good consequences. But in reality, all that happens is that you've now made it illegal for people to buy an apple at the market price. So all that happens is that the people who are going to be buying apples at that market price, are going to become criminals.

A lot of people are going to think that the cost of becoming a criminal is going to be worth it. People are going to get into black markets. Then of course you're going to have the cost of enforcing the black market. So you end up with a massive costs to society for the fact that people are producing fewer apples, because they can't sell them at the price in play.

The fact that people are buying fewer apples because they can't afford it and then you have the black market, which is wasting all of the time and energy of people on just securing the trade. So it leads to criminal activity being directed at providing this and with the interest rates, if people don't get the high interest rates from their local bank, they're going to get it from their local loan shark and it's going to be much worse.

Peter McCormack: So we're really talking about the human action part of what you're teaching then, right?

S. Ammous: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Is there any space for any forms of socialist policies within Austrian Economics? So for example, in the UK we have the NHS and you know what, for all its wrongs, there's a lot to like about the NHS as well, especially when you speak to people when I'm out in the US talking about healthcare out here. Is there any space for any socialist policies, any helping of the worst off in society, or does Austrian Economics, is it all down to personal responsibility?

S. Ammous: Of course there's a lot about helping others in society, but the key distinction is that you help them yourself. You don't hold a gun to other people's head, in order to help others and that's really the key idea. So obviously nobody's saying that helping the poor should be bad and this kind of caricature I would say is more accurate for people, I would say maybe like the Ayn Rand objectivists, they would lean more towards these kinds of... I'm not familiar with her work, so I may be mischaracterizing it, but they talk about the virtues of selfishness and so on.

I think within Austrian Economics, there's no value judgment in economics, there's no what is right and what is wrong, it's just analyzing the consequences. So the issue in terms of whether you should or shouldn't help the poor people, of course the moral issue is down to you. The problem Austrian Economics has with socialist ideas, is that it's not that they're helping the poor, it's that they are a very inefficient way of making these institutions work, because ultimately everybody knows that the main problem with socialism is the issue incentives. If nobody can make money or if everybody makes the same amount of money, then nobody has an incentive to excel.

While there's some truth to that, that really is not the problem with socialism and what the Austrian Economists have been saying for a century now, even before socialism failed, Mises wrote a book in 1922 I think, or 1921 called Socialism, in which he analyzed why socialism cannot work. What he identified was, called the problem of calculation. It's an enormously important question that people should study, because it is really the only serious economic treatment of socialism that has been written and it just analyzes the problem with socialism, aside from the incentive problem.

Even assuming that the NHS is staffed by the most intelligent and well-meaning angels who cannot do any wrong, any kind of entity that is controlled by the government, is by virtue of being a government monopoly, by virtue of it owning the means of production, immediately ends the presence of a free market in the means of production in the capitol. That's ultimately the problem that socialism faces, when there's no market in the capital goods and Mises identifies that, as the absence of a stock market. So social society is a society that doesn't have a stock market.

A capitalist society is one that has a stock market, that's really the clearest definition we have with those two terms. Because if you have a stock market, that means you and I can buy and sell capital in a free market. If you don't have a stock market, then the capital is owned by one entity that decides where all of the capital goes. So if one entity owns all the capital and owns all of the resources, how will that entity figure out where to allocate the resources most efficiently?

In a market, these resources are allocated based on prices. So price signals tell us what people are valuing things at, how people are valued, and then what different valuations are attached to them. It shows us what different production methodologies cost and then it shows us which one is better, which one fails. But once you prevent a market in capital from emerging, and this is the intellectual error of socialism.

This is not because socialists are evil or whatever, this has been intellectually analysed and Mises explained it very, very clearly. The intellectual is to think that, just because we own all of the things, we can use them efficiently. When the only way that they can be used efficiently, is if prices are allocated. So when you look at the NHS, sure a lot of sick people walk into the NHS and come out cured, but medicine in England did exist before the NHS. Medicine in England and most of the hospitals in England and most of the medical schools in England existed long before the NHS.

So it's not like the government just came one day and waved its magic wand and there was healthcare. Healthcare has been developing in England for many hundreds of years and has been improving and governments simply came and took it over and took over its management over the last 50 years. By destroying the price signals, we end up in this world today where you see the real impact of it, is that the NHS faces no real budget constraints, costs are always spiraling out of control, doctors are complaining about not getting paid enough, patients are complaining about being expensive and everybody somehow thinks that all of that is because of free markets and if we just had it all owned by the government, then we'd have universal healthcare.

But in reality, I think the really sad thing about the NHS is, we can get into endless arguments about the kinds of treatments they offered, but just look at their diet websites. Just look at the recommendations they tell people about what to eat. I remember looking at their website, they tell you that you need to eat yourself 6 to 10 ratios of grain every day and that is really a very, very effective recipe for developing metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

It's truly perverse that they will say something like this, but because it is a government law, it faces no consequences to its actions and it's easy for corporations to co-opt it and for industrial food manufacturers to continue to shape their guidelines in a way that helps them and of course it also drums up business for the NHS.

The more sick people you have from eating grains, the more people need to go into the NHS and then the more funding you would have in the NHS. Of course a lot of the funding for the NHS goes towards all the publicity and the marketing that they do that makes English people especially so emotionally attached to this institution, in a way that is quite unnerving to be honest.

Peter McCormack: All right, so what you're basically saying then, is because of humans and human actions and the way humans behave, that a free market will end up being the most efficient market?

S. Ammous: I don't like the term efficient to be honest. I think the term efficient is useful in describing an engine, but a market is not efficient because the market... The engine is efficient compared to a theoretical optimum towards which it can perform, but human society and human ends and humans economic activity, has no well-defined optimum that we see to go towards. What is an efficient British economy?

I mean the perspective of efficiency is a statist centralized vision of looking at society, like a farm of cows that we need to milk efficiently. So we have 10,000 cows, how many liters of milk can we make per day? That's kind of how Keynesian economists look at your country; we've got 60 million cows in this country. How do we milk them so that we make the most taxes and the most GDP and the best government statistics that we care about, whatever the hell it is these days?

But ultimately economics is about individuals and so it's about you maximizing your own individual freedom. So it's not about efficiency, it's about you being able to act in the way that you want, in the way that you know is best for you and that necessarily has to follow from you having the freedom to do those things, because anything that demeans that, essentially coerces you and can only do that through violence or through the threat of violence.

Peter McCormack: So tax is theft then, as I keep reading?

S. Ammous: Tax is theft!

Peter McCormack: Okay, so a free market. Does a free market come without regulations?

S. Ammous: I think by definition, yes. A free market is a market in which a free market transaction is one in which two people who carry out the transaction, do so consensually based on their own rules and that any person who is not a party in the transaction, cannot enforce rules on the others.

That's for me what a free market is, and so if you and I exchanged $10 for a book, that's a sale. Any kind of intervention that says, "no, you can't sell this for less than $20" or" you can't sell this for more than $5" or "you have to take $5 out of the $10 and give them to somebody else", that is by definition... I think that is not a free market.

Peter McCormack: But then doesn't this open up to abuse? So let's flip to say the healthcare system in the US.

S. Ammous: Can I just clarify just to be clear, it's not that it doesn't have regulation, its that it doesn't have government regulation. Of course there will be all kinds of free market institutions for regulating those things. So in the same sense that you have free market agency today, that go around giving ratings to cars and ratings to different entities or restaurants or whatever, there's no reason why you wouldn't have rating and regulations from free market entities that established their name in this business.

Your business is to go around and check people's online universities for economics and verify it and then you build the credibility for that. So there's no reason why regulation oversight can't be a market, that is provided by the market and we have seen it done in many, many ways.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm going to flip the example of healthcare and bring it to the US, which is one of the things I notice and a huge difference when I come here. So if I'm watching TV and there's advertising, I learn about all new conditions I did not know existed and pills you can take. I also see a massive problem with oxytocin here. There are people massively addicted to oxytocin. So do we not run a risk, of a free market leading to the abuse of people for personal gain?

S. Ammous: Well, the thing is the pharmaceutical industry is a far cry from what the free market is. The pharmaceutical industry is essentially a bunch of lawyers and businessmen prying on sick people and on researchers, but continuously finding excuses to put pills into people, when people don't need them. But of course that ultimately goes back to the monopoly position that is granted to that industry by government regulations. So if you think about drug development.

It has become a massively profitable industry for companies and for the lawyers in those companies, but not really for scientists to develop the drugs, because ultimately it's entirely regulated. This is the thing that people miss when they talk about regulation, they think of it as just being the magic wand that you wave and then we just put some guy in an office and he'll figure out what works and what doesn't and then he'll pass a law. Well, no, we now have an FDA process that takes around 10 years and $1 billion to get a drug on the market and these numbers are pretty old, so it might be much higher now.

So if you and I concoct a drug right now that can cure disease and we know that it works, we've tried it on ourselves or others, we can't sell it until we get FDA approval, which can take many, many years. So there will be people who would be willing to take it, because they are happy to take it, but the FDA wouldn't approve it. You and I can't get it onto the market unless we spend 10 years and $1 billion doing that.

So of course we can't do that, so it's going to be a pharmaceutical company that does that and that's why the researchers that work on these things make very little compared to how much money is spent on it. The entire thing is a monopoly in terms of, the government oversight and regulation on the medical establishment, started with the monopoly granting power to the American Medical Association in terms of it deciding what works and what doesn't work and all of these medical agencies in the government that decide those things. 

That is the problem. So you can't use that as an example of what happens if you have free market, as that's a very far cry from what a free market would look like.

Peter McCormack: Okay, say you and I come up with a cure for the disease of supporting Manchester United. We come up with the cure, right? But we don't have to go through a 10 year FDA approval and people start taking this cure and they start dying. Is that just part of the free market? Do we just accept that?

S. Ammous: Well there's arsenic on the streets and there's rat poison in the supermarket. You can take that and die. But just because I make something and I put it out for sale, doesn't mean that people have to go and ingest it and eat it. I think this silly notion that government is there to protect us, that just makes people think that anything that is put on a supermarket shelf... If it's on the supermarket shelf and it's not illegal, that clearly it's good for you and that's how people end up eating things like Pringles and Doritos.

That stuff is not good for you even though it's perfectly legal, it's very bad for you. There are a lot of very bad things and of course what determines the damage that certain things do to you, is entirely up to you as an individual and the dose that you take and what is in it and your conditions or whatever. You can't legislate that, you can't make a law that says these are the good things that are allowed and these are things that are not allowed and this is the disease that works with this.

But in a free market, people who don't want to take a risk, who don't need to take a risk, won't take a drug that could kill them. The people who will take it, will be the people who can afford to take the risk and you'll have trials and you have all of the institutions that you would want to build around, can be provided with free market regulations.

Peter McCormack: Is there any form of government in a Austrian Economic model?

S. Ammous: It depends who you ask. Again, economic analysis, it's analysis, it's not so much prescriptive. But I would say that Murray Rothbard, my favorite economist, developed the concept of Anarcho-capitalism and the idea is that the purest expression of capitalism is anarchism and the purest expression of anarchism is capitalism.

The idea of anarchism is being chaos and being people in hoods going around smashing windows, that's not what anarchism is. Anarchism is the absence of rulers, it is not the absence of rules. It is not the absence of society. It is a normal, human, peaceful society, where people don't initiate aggression against each other, that's ultimately what it comes down to. So I think the question ultimately is an individual one. So the question for you is, what do you view as the correct role for government in your life and what is the correct role for you to govern others?

In other words, what aspects of your life do you need others to tell you what to do? Do you need people to tell you what to eat and drink and smoke and buy, or do you need to be telling people what to eat or drink or smoke or buy? I think it is, in my mind honestly, I view it as a sign of maturity to be able to understand the concept of anarchism as just being an individual decision of not wanting to control others, not wanting to be controlled by others. That's ultimately what it is about.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that's the bit I like and that makes me automatically then think to a passion subject of mine, which is the illegal drug industry, let's say, the social drug scene. As a former addict, somebody who doesn't take drugs anymore, I never would. I would advise people to avoid them. At the same time, I don't have a problem if anyone wants to, that's your choice.

So be it, if you want to put something in your body, you should be able to and certainly the many years of cannabis being banned is entirely ludicrous and we're seeing a lot of benefits from that. So that's starting to make me kind of think of that. But at the same time, I struggle to imagine a world under kind of these Austrian Economic theories. I think what would happen to schooling, and I guess it's because we're so entrenched in the current structure of society, that it's virtually impossible to imagine something different.

S. Ammous: Yeah and you wonder about schooling, because you spent too much time in schooling being told mainly how important schooling is and how you should pay more attention towards the people who are running your schools. That's ultimately what public schooling is about. Like any government institution because it doesn't have to be accountable to the consumer, because the consumer doesn't have a choice in paying or not paying, the people who benefit from it are the people who run it, not the people who receive services.

So I think public education hopefully is going down the drain and I think hopefully schooling itself has been very, very significantly influenced and shaped over the last century by the growth in government control over education around the world. I think we're going to see that begin to change. I personally lean towards moving towards homeschooling myself. I think in the future I'd like to home school, I don't think it makes sense to send your children into these industrial facilities or mass production of chemistry and geography and government propaganda lessons.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's funny you should say that. I had a conversation with my son recently about this because he doesn't enjoy sciences. He's not very good at them. It was a friend of mine, I think it was my friend Rich Roll, who has a podcast and he said, "we send people to school to learn facts, when they carry around a supercomputer in their pocket and facts of things that aren't useful to them." So saying to my son, I did a deal with him, it was like "what subjects do you like?" 

He likes religious education, because religious education in school isn't just learning about the different religions. It actually covers a lot of philosophy and just quite interesting moral subjects. He loves art. He loves drama. He loves anything creative. I said, " do you know what boy, you don't have do well in these subjects you don't like. You don't have to, I don't care. As long as you don't waste your talent in your creative subjects."

So if you don't want to, I kind of got in trouble, but I said, "look, if you don't want to do your biology homework don't. But don't then use that time just to sit on your Playstation, do some of your creative work." I looked at homeschooling, but he loves the social aspect of school. So I kind of look for alternative schools and there are private alternative schools starting to pop up that focus maybe more on creativity and less on these academic subjects that teach people to work in a factory in Victorian Times!

S. Ammous: Yeah, absolutely. I think the key idea is that state education and the traditional model of education is top down and it's driven from above. So there's a schedule where at 9:00 AM you're going to do math and then in 45 minutes the bell is going to ring and then you've got to move towards chemistry and then it's going to be French or whatever it is.

You move from one class to the other or the teacher comes to the class and it's just a complete interruption of any kind of flow or being able to build any kind of long-term ability to focus on a subject for long, because if you actually start studying something and you get into it and you start liking it, you're liking the math problems, you could spend 3, 4 hours and make enormous progress in that. But because you keep splitting it, because it's not run by the internal schedule of the person who's learning, but it's run by the need to organize everybody's schedule so that everybody comes and goes home the same time, it ends up basically not being about what the student wants.

I think the key is for it to be self-driven, for it to be about the child figuring out what they want, what they care about, and then wanting to learn about it. In a sense that is kind of what I'm doing with my online courses. People are interested in Bitcoin and in order to understand Bitcoin, they're realizing that Austrian Economics is helping them and so therefore that drives the curiosity towards learning more about Austrian Economics.

So I think this is really the approach that education should be taking in the future and with the Internet, it's absurd not to do so. I think what I would urge you to do, is just let the child explore and do the things they want and then let that drive what they want to learn. When they figure out what interests them, whether they like cars, want to build cars, well if you like to build cars, if you want to work in cars, it would help you to learn math and here's why. So then they're going to have a real motivation for learning math.

Peter McCormack: It's interesting you should say that. Okay, so I've got two examples. There's a school in England where my friend's son recently got, and it's a great story actually! He loves cars, just like you said, he's absolute car mad. I think he's 10 or 11 and there's a specialist school where you can go and learn about cars, how to build cars, be a car mechanic. What they do is every subject, they apply it to cars. So if you're doing math, it's about the math of the engineering of the car.

If it's physics, it's about the physics of the car and I think it's like every year, they fully build a car as a team. The great story about it is though he got rejected from his application, so he ended up himself writing to them and they received the letter and they allowed him in, which itself was brilliant. The other example, there's a school here in LA and I think it's run by James Cameron's wife, the film director, or it's James Cameron and his wife and the way they're set up as a school, is every term you pick a subject and that's all you do.

If you come in and you say, "I want to learn about Italian cooking", that's all you do all term, you focus on Italian cooking. If you want to learn about Austrian Economics, that's all you would do and you just do that for the whole term, but you still have the social interaction of being in a school, surrounded by other kids and making friends, which to me sounds like a really nice balance.

S. Ammous: Yeah, I think the common misconception is the idea that if kids don't go to school, then they won't have a social life and I think it's the exact opposite. If kids are not stuck in a cage with 40 other or 25 other kids for 12 years, 5 days a week, they would have much more of a social life. I mean, if you think back into your childhood, the vast majority of the interesting things used to happen in the summer, because that's when you actually got to live your childhood.

I think there's plenty of time with homeschooling or with small schooling groups and self directed learning, there's plenty of time for children to meet many different groups of children and many different activities, sports activities, the hobbies, the nature, all sorts of activities they would have time for, if they weren't stuck in the conveyor belt of industrial assembly line education.

Peter McCormack: All right man, well listen. The other thing we have in common alongside Liverpool is Bitcoin. This all comes back to Bitcoin, the shows about Bitcoin. You've dedicated your life to the economics of Bitcoin. So let's get into that. Let's talk a bit about... Teach me about money. I think of money as what I get out of the bank, what I earn each month, it goes into my bank account and then I use that to spend.

That's all I think about money. But there's so many different views or opinions on what money is. Sometimes people say Bitcoin is money, sometimes they say it isn't money. What do people get wrong about money?

S. Ammous: So there are a lot of ways of looking at any animal and identifying it and talking about it. So we can say an eagle is a bird, but an eagle is also a carnivore and an eagle has also got feathers. So we can focus on many different aspects of them and you can run definitions in many different ways. I don't like to spend much time on definitions because, most the discussions on definitions ended up in just semantics. I like to think of things functionally. I did engineering as an undergraduate, it helps me think practically about things.

So for me, what I, and not just for me, but the Austrian view as well, is what defines money is that it is a medium exchange, that's the function of money. Money is something that you own, not for its own sake, but for the sake of exchanging it for something else later on. So this is why anything can the money. If you buy a t-shirt with the aim of selling it on next year as a store of value, you did a job and somebody gave you a t-shirt in return and you said, "okay, I'll sell this and eat one day", you used that t-shirt as a medium of exchange and it's not illegal, nobody can stop you.

You can barter things all the time. So anything can be used as money. The point that I like to make in my book, is that putting aside what should or shouldn't or what your favorite color of money is or what you think is the best kind of money, the key point about what I think makes something money, is what is called the stock to flow ratio. The ratio of the existing stockpile of a good, to the annual production of that good. When that ratio is high, that means that the total supply of the good on the markets, the total amount of liquidity in the market, that has been bought and sold every day, is much larger than the new production that is being added everyday.

So the new production in the market is tiny compared to the liquidity that's actually changing hands. That in my opinion is what makes for a good money and that's why I think gold became money. I think anybody who doesn't like this theory needs to explain to me why it was gold that was the money of the world by the end of the 19th century. That is because gold has the highest stock to flow ratio of anything that the world had ever seen, until Bitcoin in a couple of years. Not yet, it's still higher than Bitcoin, so let's not start the victory laps yet over gold. So gold supplies are much larger than its annual production, because of the fact that gold doesn't ruin, doesn't rust.

So for thousands of years we've been piling up gold and it's sitting around somewhere. The gold that was worn by Nefertiti thousands of years ago might today be in your iPhone or whatever. So gold is always continuing to pile up. New gold is always insignificant compared to the old gold and therefore the market for gold is ultimately a market for gold as money and new supply barely affects that.

That means that as the price of gold continues to go up, because people are using it more as a medium for exchange, in other words they're storing more value in it, then the price of it goes up. It's not really easy for miners to flood the quantity and bring the price down. That's the key concept.

So that is true in the case of gold and I think it's also true in the case of Bitcoin, and that's what really drew me to that Bitcoin, because it has this property that means that no matter how many people want to use Bitcoin, we're not going to make more than 21 million, deal with it!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you know what though, the thing is, I'll get down the pub on a Friday night, I'll be there with my mates and I'll be saying to them, "the school system is wrong, it's a waste of time. We teach them bad concepts. We shouldn't have a government. Tax is bad. We need to have a world based on Bitcoin" and they just think I'm a fucking weirdo Saife. They think I'm so weird! I struggle get these concepts across. What's the starting point? How do we even make progress? This is way out of people's normal life. These are such alien concepts to people.

S. Ammous: Well, I think the way we make progress is you introduce me to your friends and then they'll think you're normal in comparison!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you're an intellect, you can explain it in a much more articulate way than I can!

S. Ammous: Yeah, but also much more weird. Honestly, I genuinely don't have much of a missionary zeal or a evangelical zeal about those things. I write about this stuff because people read my stuff and pay me to write about, it's a productive job. I don't call myself a Bitcoin evangelist, I don't want to spread those ideas around. I'm not using my Twitter as a propaganda outlet. I use it because it's fun. I've learned all these things and I like all of the things that I've learned from and the community that I interact with and it's a job for me.

Ultimately it's up to people to make their own choices and if people are happy with the current choices, that's their lot. If your current lot is not working out for you very well, then you start asking questions and maybe that is the answer. So I think I try and stay away from evangelism and telling people and it just makes life much easier.

Peter McCormack: So we have options with Bitcoin now. You can use it, I can use it, I can hold it and keep it. If I wanted to buy a hundred copies of your book, I could turn around and go, " Saife, can I pay you in Bitcoin?" You'd probably accept it. So do we have the ability right now to benefit from certain parts of Austrian Economic theory, even though the governments of the world aren't using it? Do we have to rely on the government to change their policies to have benefits?

S. Ammous: No, absolutely not! That's the whole point, that it's not a matter of government policy. I think ultimately individually it's about understanding how these things affect you and making your own choices. That's really what it comes down to. For me I don't find it to be particularly productive use of one's time to obsess about politics or what's going to happen with politics, because you have very little control of it, very few people have any control on it.

It's an insane system that nobody's really in charge of and trying understand how it affects you and make your own decisions, that's ultimately what it comes down to. I think Austrian Economics is individual in its methodology and it's also individual in its conclusions I think, in terms of what you come at. For me it's, sort your own house out and stop worrying about politics and all that nonsense.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I guess so, because some of your key concepts, for example, scarcity, understanding scarcity, I understand that now with regards to Bitcoin and before where I've spent Bitcoin, now I'm really considered about when I do. I do very occasionally.

But I'm really considerate, because I think about the future. You talk about time preferences and opportunity costs. I spend less these days, which I know isn't great for the government, but I spend less these days and the time preferences about what I want in life and the decisions I make. So I guess I'm already benefiting from some of these concepts anyway.

S. Ammous: Yeah, it's amazing how many people have told me the same thing on Bitcoin. Even before I wrote my book, I'd heard so many people who would say the same thing, that once they started having Bitcoin and having the ability to put their money in a reliable store of value that begins to appreciate over time, they started finally understanding the meaning of saving.

I think most people my age have not, well I don't know most, but a lot of people my age maybe more than any generation recently, have no conception of saving. You go through your childhood, you don't save a penny, you spend everything your parents give you and then you go to college and you get into debt, you get out of college, then you get into more debt for a house and a car and a wedding and maybe you pay it off before you die or maybe your kid's are burdened with it and life goes on.

If you make more money, you just take on more debt. It's amazing! If you think about it, that's just part of the reason that many people are so miserable, because they're constantly with that worry of debt, "what if I miss this payment" or "what if I miss that payment?”

Peter McCormack: All right, so let's get a bit more on the Bitcoin stuff. So we've talked about this before, but let's talk about Bitcoin, central banking, fractional reserve banking, it's from your syllabus. Could fractional reserve banking happen with Bitcoin?

S. Ammous: I think if it would happen, it would cause the people who try it to go bankrupt very quickly.

Peter McCormack: Good! So that's a good thing then?

S. Ammous: Yeah, I think it's just very, very hard to be able to do it with Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is so liquid and the ability to move a Bitcoin around the world is so cheap, that effectively the Bitcoin system has far more full nodes than a gold system. So on the gold system, you think about ultimately because gold is so expensive to transport and move around, you end up with gold being centralized in volts with one central bank per country and then one central bank for the whole world.

That just means that that central bank's ability to issue credit backed by its gold, becomes money rather than the gold itself, because that central bank can stop you from getting the gold that you think is yours, because they have guns. Bitcoin is much harder. If you try and pass off Bitcoin substitutes or credit backing Bitcoin, it's very easy for people to take the Bitcoin that is underlying and it's very easy for people to speculate against you.

I think it would not be sustainable. Unless you're able to offer people some kind of value for why they would accept a discount on their Bitcoins. Perhaps for instance, say, let's imagine hypothetically that Facebook uses Bitcoin as their reserve currency for Libra. So now if you buy a Facebook Bitcoin, then you have Bitcoin that you don't own, you don't have the private key for it, but you're able to pay Bitcoin to anybody else on Facebook.

You might be effectively willing to pay a premium for that. You might be willing to pay a premium for the Bitcoins that you get, because that has much higher liquidity. I think that kind of power, is what allowed central banks to issue Fiat money based on gold, because gold is very hard to clear. But I think something like this, would have a much harder time for an offering, much bigger premium effectively or much bigger discount on the gold. So I don't think so.

Peter McCormack: What do you think of Libra coin?

S. Ammous: I think it's interesting. It's an interesting question. I'm really excited about seeing how it unfolds because it has put the issue of money and money controls front and center to everybody's mind, because everyone's always obsessed with Facebook for whatever reason in that, they like it or hate it. Suddenly there we go, the biggest, evilest, baddest behemoth corporate creep of them all, wants to be in charge of all of your money.

I think it's amazing watching all of these things unfold and I think that it's going to drive people closer towards the realization of the importance of Bitcoin's value proposition, because we're going to see, "alright well Facebook can do it, so maybe Google can do it? Maybe all of these companies will have their own shitcoin" and then wouldn't it be great if I could pay somebody from my Facebook account to their Apple or Google account or whatever it is.

Wouldn't it be great if these things were all interoperable? Wouldn't it be great if all of these companies could agree on a neutral protocol for transfer of value? But we don't need the companies or governments to agree, we already have the protocol and then they would all individually prefer to have their own protocol obviously. Facebook would like to issue the world's reserve currency, as would the US government, as would the Chinese government, as would Google, as would you and I who, wouldn't?

But the second best option for you is that you go towards a reserve currency that nobody controls, rather than some something that somebody else controls. That is I think Bitcoin's value proposition and Libra is helping drive that forward.

Peter McCormack: Isn't Libra though like a free market for money? The creation of Libra is essentially the privatization of money in some ways?

S. Ammous: It could be, but there's a reason why we've not had these things before. We didn't need Bitcoin's technology for companies to be able to do something like this. A centralized currency like Libra doesn't need a Blockchain, it doesn't need Bitcoin. It was Bitcoin and the altcoin explosion really that made it thinkable for people to do something like this.

But I think if a company, and we have examples and Eagles tried to do something like this in the 90s and it was closed down. So I think Bitcoin really pushed the limits of the overtone window when it comes to private money. But ultimately I can't see Facebook succeeding in this, because governments are just not going to, maybe some governments won't have a choice, but ultimately the US government isn’t going to give up because of Mark Zuckerberg.

Peter McCormack: But the way I'm thinking about it Saife is that the shit coins are a free market for money and what they've done for me over a transitional period of time, which you've watched and witnessed, and finally followed me on Twitter after I went Bitcoin only, it kind of improved my understanding of Bitcoin. So when you talk about free markets, I kind of think, the existence of shit coins, for me has been a good thing. I know people got scammed and all that, but they've been good for me to help me better understand Bitcoin.

S. Ammous: Sure I agree. I think Pierre Rochard said that overall, many people complain that shit coins take demand from Bitcoin, but I think Pierre makes a very good point, that each shit coin has a massive marketing army for itself and they bring a lot of people into the space who otherwise wouldn't. They have active PR, Bitcoin doesn't have active PR.

It has a bunch of people posting memes on the Internet, but these shit coins have professional PR armies and they're attracting people towards this stuff. Most people come and they hear about Ethereum or Ripple or whatever, but then they stick around and they see, "oh wait", well maybe not most, but some people for sure end up sticking around and seeing that, "oh okay, well maybe there's something in Bitcoin there."

Peter McCormack: Yeah, some of them can't change their minds though. Some of them are still stuck with Ethereum and SV and Cash hoping and waiting and whatever. Okay, another thing you've talked about is you talk about why central banks won't adopt Bitcoin, but do you think they should?

S. Ammous: I think ultimately it comes down to a question about what is it that central banks serve? Are central banks there to serve their people or are central banks there as a mechanism for having the people serve the people in power, the governments. I happen to lean towards the second scenario and that's why I think they would not lead towards Bitcoin.

I think Bitcoin takes from them the ability to conduct monetary policy, it takes from them the ability to take away wealth from their people and finance their operations and I think governments are just going to be afraid of that. But I could be wrong.

Peter McCormack: It's the lack of control. The inability to print new money to fight wars.

S. Ammous: Exactly! Having said that, I have no special insight on this. I am not a central bank. I've never worked at a central bank and I don't get invited to central banker parties, so I have no idea what they talk about or how they think, but my guess is that it's not happening.

Peter McCormack: All right, well look, last couple of concepts I want to go through with you or ask you about. So where do you think we are in the growth of Bitcoin, in the development of Bitcoin? You've talked before about Bitcoin becoming global money and how it can become global money. Where are we at and what are the steps that need to come next?

S. Ammous: I think we're still still very, very early. I think people who are very excited about it happening over the next couple of years are probably getting ahead of themselves. I think it's not a failure of Bitcoin, it's not a limitation of Bitcoin and it's not the technical limitation. Bitcoin is scaling technically I think, quite successfully. The main issue, the way that I see it, is a matter of liquidity.

Bitcoin needs to build up liquidity and that's just not something that can happen overnight, because the way that it's going to happen is that first people need to hear about Bitcoin. Then people need to understand why it is and then they need to learn how it functions. Then they need to find a way to buy and that's just not easy. So I remember 2013, lots of people heard about Bitcoin, we're trying to buy Bitcoin and couldn't.

I couldn't buy at this point, as back then I was in Lebanon and it takes a lot of time for people to find somebody who has Bitcoin to be able to connect with them and to buy from them. So then that process needs to take time for people to spread it and for Bitcoin to continue to operate successfully and for its values to go up, to attract more people, to bring in more people.

So we're now at a point where we have maybe maximum 1% of the world's population own Bitcoin I would say. There's still a lot of people and a lot of money to go. It can't just happen overnight. Also, because people are not just going to go and dump everything and put it into Bitcoin, that would be foolish. Although I'm sure many of your listeners have done it, so sorry! It depends on the time, so it's probably worked out well for you, but it might have been catastrophic.

Generally, I wouldn't recommend it. So people aren't just going to put all their money, all at once. They're going to put a small amount and then when it goes up in value, they're going to have to sell because it's going to become life changing money at some point and they're going to be selling. So we're going to go through all of those phases of early adopters selling off and then new adopters taking it up, until the liquidity is spread out all over the world.

So that would take an enormous amount of time and it's not something that Bitcoin Core engineers can hasten. It's not something that if we had kept Roger Ver or whatever, then he would have done it for us. It's about 7 million people individually finding, not necessarily individually, but about a critical massive wealth migrating to Bitcoin. That's going to be awhile.

Peter McCormack: All right, so last thing on this, can Bitcoin be killed? I know you've written about this, you've talked about three scenarios; software bugs, government bans and the failure of fees to generate enough security. How do you feel about all these now? Can it be killed? I mean it's under the spotlight now of the US government.

S. Ammous: I'm not going to say yes or no decisively or definitively. I would say that I don't know if it's going to be killed. But I would say that after research since writing my book, my opinion of the likelihood of its survival have declined a little bit, in that there is more possibility that I think it could be killed, than I did before and that is mainly because, not because of any kind of technical attack. So I think the kind of scenarios that are usually offered by no-coiners about, "let's kill Bitcoin by turning off the electricity and then the Bitcoiners won't know what to do" or some stupid shit like that.

That's nothing going to happen. We can use radio, we can use satellites, we will use mesh networks, antennas, whatever. We're going to figure out how to make a new block every 10 minutes. I think if people want to do Bitcoin, they're going to figure out how to make a new block every 10 minutes and to reach consensus on it. So that, I don't think would kill it. However, I think the thing that would really kill it, would be the improvement in monetary policy.

If monetary policy improves, if we go towards a gold standard, if we have more of a better monetary policy around the world, that just doesn't mean the US and Europe. It also means Venezuela and all of these places, then fewer and fewer people want to move to Bitcoin and then that I think would undermine demand for Bitcoin. I didn't mention this in the bulletin, but occurred to me after I wrote it and this might make many Bitcoiners nervous. I hope you guys don't hate me, but if you think about it, Bittorrent wasn't killed, it still operates and I still use it.

However, it's nowhere near as popular as it was, at least for piracy purposes, as it was about 10 years ago. The reason is back in the 90s, the record label industry was absolutely horrific in how they manufactured and sold things and they made it really expensive for people to listen to music. Piracy offered an enormously cheaper, much better technology for doing that and Bittorrent allowed people to get all that music for free.

So when that existed, when you have to pay an exorbitant amount of money for an album or just downloading it in a few seconds, Bittorrent was massively popular. But then the movie and music industry had to basically reform. Artists put most of their music on SoundCloud and YouTube for free and things like Netflix and all of these subscription models, they have become enormously cheaper than what it used to be before and now it's far more reasonable for people.

So now very few people or far fewer people will pirate today as opposed to a few years ago, because you just buy a Netflix subscription, you buy a Spotify subscription and so on. So I think the bad news here for Bitcoin is that, Bitcoin is optimized for avoiding state control. Bitcoin is optimized for avoiding control by government and so the more government tries to control Bitcoin, the more governments start to strip Bitcoin, the more incentive people have to run Bitcoin, the more Bitcoin thrives.

That's kind of good news, if you're in the whole situation where people are hostile to Bitcoin. But if Bitcoin continues to grow to the point where it massively undermines monetary policy and causes monetary policy to become much better, well then maybe Bitcoin undermines the reason for its own existence, just like Bittorrent. Bittorrent didn't end up taking over the world, but it did destroy the record label industry and forced them to reshape their business model. 

Maybe this is what Bitcoin will end up doing central banks, it'll be the competition that gets them in shape and brings them back to a sound monetary system.

Peter McCormack: That's very interesting. I've never even heard that as an example. All right, listen Saife, last thing, we've got to finish on one thing. We've got to talk about football man. Give me your prediction for next season! By the way, we haven't really signed anyone and I know we have a good squad and I know we've got the Ox coming back and we've got a couple of young lads coming through, but how are you feeling about next season?

S. Ammous: Until pre-season I was thinking we should maybe sign a few players, but I think there are so many good young players and they're getting a full pre-season them with Klopp because so many of the senior players are away on international duty, that I think so many of them are going to be making a step up and they look really promising.

We definitely need a backup left back and ideally I think we should probably get rid of Lallana and get another attacking player in his place. I think possibly Coutinho coming back might not be a bad idea.

Peter McCormack: Well it would make your shirt relevant again that you're wearing now!

S. Ammous: Yeah, well I was hoping you wouldn't notice!

Peter McCormack: Yeah I like Coutinho. You know the other one I thought we should've gone for is Wilf Zaha. I thought he would offer us something different, someone with a bit of flair. Look, I'd love us to win the league. I think it's going to be down to us and City again.

S. Ammous: It is. The rest are pretty far behind, I can't see any of them catching up. The good news is the City squad is older. A lot of their players are not going to be the same level. David Silva and Fernandinho were extremely important for them last season and when they were injured and when they had their dip in form, that's when the team was performing very badly.

So I can't see them putting in a season, as good as the one that they put in last year. I'm quite hopeful! Also Klopp has got to Guardiola. Guardiola is rattled by Klopp! He's done to Guardiola what Guardiola did to Mourinho I think.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I'm actually quite interested to see what Lampard does with Chelsea, because I like Lampard. I think he's a good guy, very dedicated to Chelsea and I'll be interested, but they can't sign anyone. So maybe they've got some problems there. Arsenal I think they are going to have a terrible season. Tottenham could be a threat again?

S. Ammous: I doubt it. I think they're still going to sell some players and they still have a thin squad. I can't see them competing.

Peter McCormack: We'll see, fingers crossed we'll win the title! I don't know how old you are, I'm 40, so I was 9 when we last won the league.

S. Ammous: I'm 38.

Peter McCormack: So you know what it's like, it's a long time. Do you even remember when we last won the league?

S. Ammous: Not really, no!

Peter McCormack: All right Saife, it's always to talk to you and it was good to see you recently out in Germany and I'm sure I'll bump into you soon. Good luck with the course! Before we go, tell people about it, how they find out more.

S. Ammous: Well the course is on my website saifedean.com and currently I'm offering one course on my book, where I'm giving lectures based on my book, 10 lectures, one hour a week for 10 weeks. Then I'm also offering a course on the research bulletins, which are the papers that I've written since publishing my book, which I'm going to work into another book eventually.

I'm also going to soon start offering an economics 101 course, an introduction to Austrian Economics. These will be offered as live lectures as well as the seminars, where you can join a discussion seminar to discuss these in small groups of students. So go to saifedean.com and sign up!

Peter McCormack: Awesome man! All right Saife, take care. See you soon!

S. Ammous: Cheers, thanks a lot Peter!

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