Why Governments Will Never Let Physical Gold Be Money Again | Saifedean Ammous

The math of the 2026 economy is reaching a breaking point. Economist and author Saifedean Ammous joins Kitco News Anchor Jeremy Szafron to expose the structural fractures currently paralyzing the global financial system. From the government’s refusal to audit Fort Knox to the "Paper Trap" that prevents physical gold from ever returning as a true medium of exchange, this interview reveals why the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.

Ammous breaks down why the 10-year Treasury yield hitting 4.5% is the ultimate "trigger" for the war machine and why your traditional S&P 500 portfolio is effectively a "melting ice cube" in an era of rapid debasement. We dive into the uncomfortable truth about stablecoins "bailing out" the Federal Reserve and why the banking monopoly has successfully neutralized gold's monetary role for over a century.

Whether you are protecting your wealth with physical metals or institutional Bitcoin, this conversation provides the raw, data-driven roadmap for the monetary endgame.

Recorded March 25 2026

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Chapters:
00:00 Monetary Stress Setup 
01:00 Bitcoin Goes Institutional 
02:56 Fed Choices and Hard Money 
05:07 Gold Peg and Fort Knox 
07:08 War Shocks vs Debasement 
13:32 Gold Limits and Bitcoin Edge 
18:24 Paper Gold and Price Discovery 
23:13 Mining Economics and Difficulty 
29:23 Sovereigns and Bitcoin Reserves 
30:36 Nation States Stacking 
31:27 Spendable Reserves Reality 
33:54 Stablecoins Dollar Boost 
37:15 Tether Demand Reality 
39:26 Fiat Money Fuels War 
48:00 War Costs Hit Markets 
49:02 Treasury Yields Warning 
54:19 Sane Hard Money Plan 
58:07 Alternative History Pitch 
59:41 Wrap Up 

#Gold #Bitcoin #Macro #KitcoNews #Finance #Economics #GoldStandard #Investing #FederalReserve #SaifedeanAmmous
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Disclaimer:  
The videos are not intended to provide trading advice, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. Kitco News, its anchors, producers, and reporters are not responsible in any way for the performance or actions of any sponsor, advertiser or affiliate of Kitco News. In no event will Kitco and its employees be held liable for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of the content in this video.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In Focus with Jeremy Saffron is brought to you by Swan, the real Bitcoin company.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Staffron. Markets are dealing with a real monetary stress right now. We have roughly$10 trillion in U.S. government debt set to mature over the next year. Treasury yields remain elevated, and digital assets are being pulled deeper into the traditional institutional system through ETF, stable coins, and tokenized products. And at the same time, physical gold has been under extreme pressure this March, while Bitcoin is held steady in the low 70,000s despite war headlines and some pretty sharp volatility. I say this because today is not just a conversation about Bitcoin's price. It's about whether money is becoming harder, more digital, or simply more controlled. So where is the real safe haven when debt, liquidity, and trust in the system are all being tested at once? Joining me to break this all down is Dr. Stefine Amus, Austrian economist and author of the Bitcoin standard, the Fiat Standard, and his newest book, The Gold Standard. Stef Dean, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for making the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Thank you for having me, Jimmy. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I want to start a little bit going backwards for a moment because back in 2022, I mean, your framework was mostly built on, you know, first principles, but we fast forward to 2026, and Bitcoin is much more institutional. It's more financialized and it seems wrapped into the traditional system through ETFs, you know, corporate treasury strategies, the stablecoin rails. Has this new reality strengthened your thesis or has it complicated it?

SPEAKER_02 1:35

No, I think it's uh everything's going according to plan, if you were to ask me. I think um uh probably if you asked me five years ago, I wouldn't have expected to have this much institutional adoption. I would have expected more individual adoption. Uh seems I was wrong about that. It seems that a lot of people just uh um aren't uh going to get into it uh uh individually, they're going to get into it through institutions, but I think that's normal and predictable. And uh if you remember in the Bitcoin standard in my first book, I looked at the numbers for Bitcoin scaling and I just said the demand for Bitcoin as hard money, as money that resists inflation, is far larger than the demand than the uh supply of Bitcoin block space. So it's going to be impossible for everybody to be able to get their own uh coffee transaction on-chain for Bitcoin. But everybody's gonna want to have a piece of the Bitcoin action. So inevitably, the majority of people are going to end up using second-layer solutions in order to use Bitcoin. And one of these second layer solutions, in a sense, is uh institutional adoption by um buying an ETF, you're effectively getting exposure to Bitcoin without uh having to use it yourself. Of course, it has its drawdowns. I don't recommend it personally, I don't buy ETFs myself, but it works for some people, and I think it's going to continue to be the case. There's uh that there's no use fighting it. It's a it's a it's a great financial asset that has beaten pretty much all financial assets over the last 10 years or so. Everybody's gonna want a piece of the action.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

You know, I mean, if we kind of look at the actual math driving some of this right now, I mean, you know, from an Austrian perspective, what does this$10 trillion debt refinancing wall suggest the Fed is likely to do, you know, this year? On the flip side, I mean, what would Jerome Powell have to do if he, you know, if his real goal was to protect the dollar's credibility rather than just propping up the system's short-term stability?

SPEAKER_02 3:31

Well, that's a very uh difficult question to answer. If he really wanted dollar stability, you know, the answer is a lot more radical than uh what he studied in his grad school. I think if uh if he really actually wanted dollar stability, he'd peg the dollar to something that wasn't a Ponzi scheme like the dollar, and he'd make it redeemable in it. So gold or Bitcoin are the only two choices as far as I'm concerned. And uh then that would limit inflation and that would actually provide the credibility for the dollar. But uh if they don't do that, then of course they're not gonna do that because of the political realities of uh democratic politics. People want the free lunch, people think they can get the free lunch, and they're gonna always vote for the um con artist who tells them they can have the free lunch. And uh the uh the the realities of just democratic politics are always going to mean that there will be inflation. So given that there is inflation, uh, you know, the I I uh I wish them the best of luck, but uh there's no way to make a dollar uh stable uh while continuing with inflation. I mean, they can try all these um uh fiat economics tricks of managing the price level, managing the money supply, but in the long run, all of these things lead to the destruction of the value of fiat money. Uh it's it's it's all uh rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If you zoom out and look at the long term, the dollar loses 90% of its value every 20, 30 years or so. And there's no stopping that train. There's going to be more government spending, there's going to be more inflation, and it's only a matter of, you know, politics is the matter of moving around winnings from this inflationary system to benefit some people at the expense of others. But I think the only radical solution ultimately is hard money, gold or bitcoin.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Yeah, well said. Uh I mean, we've had Judy Shelton on the show, obviously. We've talked a little bit about what that could possibly look like. Would it would a gold peg, you know, restore monetary discipline or would it just expose how mispriced the dollar already is relative to real asset, uh real reserves?

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Uh it'll do both. I think, you know, if you wanted to peg the dollar to gold, that would necessarily require a large revaluation of the dollar. You could say revaluation of gold, depending on how you look at it, but I think it's more accurate to say it's a revaluation of the dollar. Um, you're gonna have to basically, I mean, you can back the current dollar supply with the current gold supply at a much higher price of gold. I don't I haven't run the numbers recently, but I presume it's going to be at least$10,000 an ounce of gold at that kind of price levels, with the supposed, I should say supposed uh gold reserves that the US government supposedly has. Apparently, there's this crazy conspiracy theory that the US government has 8,000 tons of gold. Um, but you know, I don't I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories, so I'm not so sure about it. I'd like to see an audit, but you know, apparently audits are uh are are crazy. Are hard to come by conspiracy theory. Yeah. So presuming they have the gold, which is a very big if, uh, then they could probably balance the um that they could go into the hard hard money standard if they revalue the gold at a price that backs a sufficient amount of the dollars that they have issued, preferably all of the dollars, in order to have a proper gold standard. And if that were to happen, I mean I think it's going to be a painful adjustment for the first few months. Uh, a lot of uh people are gonna get um wrecked in a certain way. Um there will be a massive uh monetary adjustment over a few months, but I think after that we would get on a sound footing and the world economy would be a lot better. And of course, the politics would be very different because governments wouldn't be able to print money. They'd have to get taxation, and that makes politics a lot more complicated for them and a lot better for people.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Well said, Sabijen. I mean, you know, you look at today, and I'm kind of bringing this up in a more macro picture. We'll kind of get into more specifics, but I mean, we're we're watching global markets suffer extreme whiplash this week. I mean, we saw a brief rally on ceasefire hopes, but this morning Iran outright rejected the U.S. proposal, laid out a list of demands, and Brent Crude has popped right back over$100 a barrel. I mean, for the average investor watching their portfolio whip around on these escalating geopolitical headlines, how do you practically distinguish between a violent geopolitical supply shock and actual fiat debasement?

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Yeah, I mean, um it's it's difficult to distinguish between the two because both of them are taking place at the same time. So the dollar is always being devalued. Uh I think that's just the uh that's almost like the water in which we swim as fish. We don't even realize that we're in water because all we've ever experienced is water. So we're just normalized uh the idea that money loses its value. But uh yeah, the geopolitical shock can of course be real. And this one I think is very, very real. And I think uh the market reaction so far has probably, if you ask me by my opinion, it's probably been understated compared to where I think things could go. But uh, I mean, it seems uh in initially, it's you know, initially the reaction was all right, the the Iranian regime is gonna be decapitated, they're not gonna be able to do anything. This is going to be like Venezuela, it'll be over in three, four days. That didn't work out. Then there was the idea that, well, they're not going to be able to close Hormuz, their military capacity is done. Turns out that they managed to close it. And after two, three weeks of government propaganda and the media lies and just absolutely hilarious uh uh cope and seething by the administration about it. Well, you know, the whole strait is open, it's just that Iran might shoot you if you go there. But we recommend that you go there and try. We're not gonna send the navy, obviously, because we don't want them to get shot, but you know, all these commercial tankers should go and uh all these uh other countries should send their navy. Well, then it became clear, you know, after all the um uh delusions and lies died down, it became clear no, the hormones is actually closed and they have an iron grip on it. Uh so that looked like it was a problem. I think now things are being resolved as we speak right now, or I would say the price is probably nowhere near as high as it uh could be, because it seems clear that a lot of boats are uh leaving the Straits of Hormuz because they have struck a deal with the Iranian regime. So the Iranian regime has effectively installed a toll booth on uh the Strait of Hormuz, which seems to be charging about 1% of the market value of the oil on tankers based on early estimates that we've seen. So if this uh sticks, and if this continues, I mean it's not going, it's it's going to cause very little disruption in the long term because it's just a 1% tax. Obviously, there's been a lot of disruption over the past few weeks because of uh the destruction of infrastructure. So that's going to likely affect the markets for a while. And you know, the the the conflict is not really over. But if the Iranians succeed in in imposing this toll booth, then likely the oil market normalizes. Um prices will remain high for a while, but it'll likely be normalized over time. But uh it's a uh it's it's a big question if they can keep it up. I mean, I think militarily they have a very good case because they have all these distributed drones all over and they just need to hit one tanker a week to scare away, or maybe one tanker a month to scare away all the other tankers. And it's a very, very, very complicated military operation for the US to try and stop all of these drones. Likely, I would think probably it would require the largest military deployment by the US since World War II to try and conquer Iran completely, comb all of the coastline, clear it from drones and missiles, and make it safe enough that commercial uh tankers can cross without paying the Iranian toll. It's not an easy thing. It's an extremely difficult thing to see. So it's difficult to tell. And I would say, I mean, um, I I follow this because I happen to live in the region. The rockets are flying over uh my house and the signs are uh bursting out uh several times every day. Uh so of course I'm very into uh following what's going on, but I think financially I'm generally not a fan of uh trading the news, I'm not a fan of uh sitting on watching TV, reading the internet, and then um managing your portfolio actively based on that stuff. And of course, if you're in the fiat markets, you have to do that because the fiat markets are all about the news and it's all manipulated and it's all about what the Federal Reserve says and does. So you have no choice but to basically be a part-time hedge fund manager, no matter what you do. You need to pay attention to all of these things that are going on. But that's why I like being in Bitcoin. Yeah, Bitcoin is completely immune to all of this bullshit. Uh, you just buy Bitcoin, you wait five years, and you look back five years later, and all of this stuff is noise, you know. I remember, for instance, when the um Russian-Ukrainian war started, and it was four years ago, and there was so much discussion about what Bitcoin is going to do and how is Bitcoin going to react and is going to go up or is it going to go down? And uh, and you know, depending on the time frame, if you looked at the first day it crashed, or then the next first week it went up, then the first month it went down, or something like that. I don't remember the exact specifics, but there was a huge debate about well, it's it's going to rise, it's going to go down. Doesn't matter ultimately what was the effect of the Russian-Ukrainian war on Bitcoin? I don't know. What was the effect of this uh uh Iranian uh Israeli uh US war on uh Bitcoin? I have no idea. I think in the long run, Bitcoin just marches to its own drumbeat. I think it's still too small to be uh a um a macro asset that is affected by macro movements. I still think the uh dynamics of Bitcoin supply and the psychology of Bitcoin holders, particularly the old-time holders who held it for a long time, I think these are probably far more effective to price determination in the Bitcoin market than uh geopolitical events.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Yeah, that's interesting because we're gonna kind of pivot there. I mean, how how these assets actually behave under stress. I mean, uh, you know, you talked about four-year cycle with me, kind of coming before uh before coming on air. And I wanted to ask you, because I mean, if Bitcoin still trades a little bit with macro risk sentiment during these geopolitical shocks, like we saw maybe this week, why should gold investors treat it as a true safe haven right now?

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Well, I mean, it's it's difficult to tell uh with uh gold. I I used to be a big gold bug before I got into Bitcoin. I was a massive gold bug. I uh rode the gold uh bubble in around, I think it was 2008 to 2011. And then there was a big crash after that. And um that crash forced me to reconsider and revise my assumptions about what was going on, and that's how I discovered Bitcoin and I opened uh my mind up to Bitcoin and became a Bitcoiner. So it's a difficult question for me to ascertain what's happening with gold. I would say you know, the recent run in gold caught me by surprise. I did not expect it to be this quick and this um uh the this fast, uh the this big of a rise. And um it's um it's I guess for me the question is what happens next. My honest opinion, I I I can't feel comfortable recommending that people hold gold for the long term because I think the um, you know, you look at 2011, the price went from 1900, crashed down, only recovered, I think in 2020 or something like that, maybe 21. So, you know, there's a nine, 10-year bear market in gold uh that you have to sit through if you buy uh at a very high rate. And then yeah, on 1980, in the year I was born, the gold price hit 800 and then it crashed and only got back to 800 in 2008. So that's a 28-year bear market, that's a whole generation. So I don't feel comfortable telling people to buy gold anymore as I used to when I was a gold bug. I think ultimately the fact that governments control gold clearance, the fact that they don't allow the creation of gold banks is almost a uh fatal uh hit to gold's monetary role. It's just as long as you can't have a bank account in gold and you can't just send gold uh directly, you can't use it to settle payments, you can't uh run your accounts with gold because you have to run it with your local uh national uh currency, then gold's monetary role is always going to be limited. People are going to buy into it and out of it, and uh they're going to incur significant transaction fees every selling they do that, and that will likely uh just undermine the saleability because ultimately what money is the most important property of money is its saleability. So if people aren't able to accept it as payment, if people aren't able to trade it with one another directly, that's going to massively undermine its saleability. And it looks like for me, that's why uh you know gold didn't recover from the bull market in 1980. I think this is the difference with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just, in a sense, a more advanced monetary technology because it has the uh halving. So in 1980, when gold hit$800 or something like that, it crashed down. Now imagine if in 1982 annual production of gold dropped by half, the bull market in gold would have returned a lot quicker. But instead, in physical gold, in 1982, probably that was the time when production was ramping up because of all of the investment that was made into gold mining in 1977, 8, 9, and 80 during the big bubble. So people overinvest in mining, and then that results in a lot more uh production coming on at the time uh when the bubble bursts, and that's why the thing can stay dead for uh a significant amount of time. So with the difficulty adjustment, uh, sorry, with the halving, Bitcoin fixes that because it uh ends up uh making sure that the supply drops every four years. So even if the demand doesn't go up, the fact that the marginal supply declines causes a uh an increase in the price.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Right, right. So I mean if if gold can still store value but cannot move freely or settle kind of globally or you know, escape those custody checkpoints, uh then you you're really saying Bitcoin is not replacing gold's theory, but solving, I guess, the political weakness of gold.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

Exactly. So if you were to ask me, all right, so what do you do about gold? How do you use it? Well, I I I don't know. I mean, if you can shut down your local central bank or force them to take gold, then by all means go ahead. But the only practical solution we have, the only accessible solution, the only realistic solution for the products of gold is Bitcoin. It's something that recreates the monetary properties of gold, but makes it digital and there and then improves upon it by introducing the having, by introducing the difficulty adjustments, which ensures that we're always going to get a declining uh supply growth rate, and that more mining cannot result in more production taking place. That for me is the case for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the gold that is built to defeat governments. And that's a flaw that physical gold doesn't have, unfortunately. Governments have managed to kill it.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Here's a question for you. As a former gold bug, you know, just I'm sure that you've been paying attention a little bit to COMEX, the price discovery, you know, this paper market. I mean, when we when we look at the current mechanics of the paper gold markets, do they actually help liquidity and price discovery, or do they weaken gold's function as a monetary signal by creating, you know, leverage that can just swap the physical market?

SPEAKER_02 18:52

It's uh it's that's a great question. I don't quite have strong opinions on this question. I think you know, initially when I used to be a gold bug, I um was very much on board with this idea that these uh futures markets are being manipulated, and that's how the fiat system survives because naturally everybody wants to buy gold. Everybody would buy if everybody buys gold, there's no way of printing more gold. So the price of gold goes up, eventually gold dominates cash balances. The fact that it's not doing it suggests that there's some manipulation going on. And you know, gold bugs have spoken about this for many, many years. Uh as time has gone by, I've uh I have less confidence in that. The uh hypothesis. I would say the reason is the reason that gold doesn't go up might not necessarily be the uh paper market manipulation, it's the fact that it can't trade, that you can't use gold for direct payment. And so therefore you're always switching in and out of it, and therefore you're always incurring um transaction fees, which is essentially undermining the role of gold. So since if if that were really the problem, then it might be the case that the futures market is not really the guilty party that is causing uh the problems of uh gold and and preventing gold from uh monetizing. But it could be um it could it could also be seen as uh the um uh another way of looking at this is that you know within these futures markets, ultimately the only way that you're able to essentially m manipulate the price is if there's some kind of monopolization of the movement of physical gold. And this is what we have with gold, because there is no easy, large, clearly transparent, liquid market for people to be selling and buying physical gold in the same way that the LBMA is supposed to function, but it functions in a very opaque way. So if we have a hundred LBMAs all over the world where people are able to get physical uh gold for their paper almost seamlessly, then it would be a lot harder for uh shenanigans in the futures market to affect the price because ultimately there's a day in which you need to deliver physical and uh you can only screw around with paper so long before you get called out with the physical. But if you run the rails on which the physical settles, and if you have a monopoly on these rails, if you have a monopoly on the banking system, and if you have a banking license that allows you effectively to print money, well then that can allow you to rig the game, and that can really change how the entire game is played. So I think the uh this is this is this for me ultimately is another flaw of gold that Bitcoin fixes, which is that by being digitally native, Bitcoin allows for the large liquid market for people to settle with one another directly in Bitcoin to be uh huge and liquid and available 24 7 all over the world, which makes futures markets shenanigans a lot more difficult.

unknown 21:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

I mean, do you believe that the US gold is is fully there, fully kind of accessible, truly usable for modern monetary. Recent, or do you think Fort Knox is kind of more as a symbol than a credible monetary box top?

SPEAKER_02 22:06

I mean, fortunately, I don't have to answer that question because I'm I'm in no position to be answering. I don't know. I I wasn't the one who put it there, and I don't have access to the keys. So I have no idea. But you know, if you asked me to get, if you asked me to bet, I'd say it's not there. Just, I mean, saying we can't have an audit is just an admission of uh theft, essentially. So something fishy is going on. And of course, you know, the way that uh Elon Musk was just completely lobotomized about this topic, and it was just it was almost like you know, they removed the software from his brain and then he was never allowed to talk about it ever again after he brought it up, doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. That's not what people who have 8,000 tons of gold would be doing. You know, if they actually had the 8,000 tons of gold, they'd have tours open for Americans to go and see the 8,000 tons of gold.

SPEAKER_03 22:58

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

It's an enormous sum of gold. America should be very proud of it. They should have it on display, they should have it in several different uh vaults across the country, and people come and see it, and people should be able to redeem it. The fact that they don't, I think, speaks volumes.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

But what do I know? I hear you. Uh we'll we'll continue to ask all of our guests. Um, okay, well, let's move on to kind of miners' margins a little bit on Wall Street because um, you know, uh the economic stress inside the Bitcoin mining industry is is interesting. And we saw reports in in mid-March estimating average production cost near 88,000 per Bitcoin while the spot price was sitting in the low 70s. How does this network sustain itself economically when a large part of the mining base is underwater at the current prices?

SPEAKER_02 23:43

Oh, it doesn't matter. It's a problem for the miners. The network will continue. Um, it it it it it um in a sense, you can think about it in gold terms. There's gold that's being circulated and used monetarily. And if uh an earthquake happens that um harms one of the miners and puts one of the miners out of business, that's just going to mean that a little bit less new gold is going to come on the market, uh, but it's not going to affect the function of gold um uh as a as a money that is being used every day in coins and bars. With Bitcoin, it's even less because with Bitcoin, the new supply that is going to come on will be the same regardless of what happens to the miners. So if we have uh$10 billion of capital mining Bitcoin, or if we have$10 of capital mining Bitcoin, we're only going to be getting, I think it is where what are we now?$450? No, I think we dropped by half 225 uh new coins a day, or maybe it's 450, I forget. Anyways, uh, but we'll be getting the fixed number of uh Bitcoin every day, and regardless of what happens with the mining industry. Um, now generally you look at Bitcoin cycles. This is generally the time where uh Bitcoin miners uh start hurting a lot because a lot of uh miners uh get um overexcited and they start over investing during the bear during the bull market when Bitcoin's price is going up. And at that point, you know, the price is going up and uh mining bitcoin looks like a no-brainer, and uh it seems like it's a great idea. You have great margins, but then of course, the key thing with Bitcoin is the difficulty adjustment. The difficulty of mining goes up, so the cost of mining a bitcoin goes up, and generally it's always going up to catch up with the price of Bitcoin, and then it declines roughly if the price of Bitcoin declines. So um after they've overinvested in the bull market, then there comes the crash, which you know we had we we had the top in October. It's been five months now, we've crashed, and I think uh we'll uh you know we may be getting another few more months of sideways or downward action, which is going to be very stressful for the miners because they invested uh they the ones that were investing during the bull market, they bought their equipment at high premiums because the equipment was in high demand at that time, and at that point the difficulty was relatively low. Price goes up, difficulty goes up, more and more capital comes along, more and more investment comes along. So, this is the point of maximum pain. We're coming up to the maximum pain point for miners, which is price is declining, difficulty is still going up because a lot of miners are uh still um coming online because of the investments they made in the bull market. So this becomes the most brutal time for Bitcoin miners. And generally, I generally just uh think as with gold, I I have a strong, very strong opinion on the idea that you should just stay out of Bitcoin mining and gold mining. I think uh, you know, if you if you have some kind of technical uh understanding of the industry, if you have some advantage that allows you access to say very cheap energy, then maybe you should consider mining Bitcoin. If you have some engineering or capital uh advantage that allows you to buy uh to mine gold, then maybe you should get into it. But that I think misses the point. In other words, the maybe the mining part of gold or Bitcoin is by design supposed to be uh trifling insignificant. And the real use case is the money, it's the trading. That's in fact, as I explained in the Bitcoin standard, the whole reason that gold becomes money, and by extension, the whole reason why I think Bitcoin becomes money is precisely because mining is inconsequential, it's small, and it's unprofitable usually, and it doesn't grow. If mining was profitable, if if mining gold and Bitcoin was usually profitable, then we'd have inflation and it would suck as money. But it's designed to be a zero-sum game with Bitcoin, and it's close to a zero-sum game in gold because it's very difficult to find gold, and then the more that you uh invest, the more expensive it becomes, and then it becomes difficult to find um significant enough margins. So my advice is money is made for spending and holding, not for mining. Mining is uh it's supposed to be an unprofitable business for those monies to work very well. And I think if you if you follow the gold industry, you know, gold miners have been uh uh complaining, and people who invest in gold miners have basically been complaining about it forever. Gold mining has underperformed Bitcoin. Uh sorry, gold mining has underperformed gold. And I think Bitcoin mining has likely underperformed Bitcoin. I ran a poll on my Twitter once where uh something like 5,000 people answered. And the question was if you've mined Bitcoin for more than five years and calculated all the expenses that you incurred, would you have been better off just putting all the expenses into buying Bitcoin instead of uh going through the mining? And something like 78% said yes, they would have been better off just buying Bitcoin. So you're getting into a massive headache and um introducing all kinds of risks. And there's a 78% chance that it's going to give you fewer Satoshis than you would have had otherwise. And I would probably say it's actually likely higher than 78%, because I think uh people are not very good at calculating uh opportunity cost and calculating all the costs that they've incurred. So probably among those 22% who think they outperformed holding, I think if you count all the costs, particularly the time invested in mining, I think a lot of them would uh realize they would have been better off just holding Bitcoin. So interesting. Yeah, hold, don't mine.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Yeah, hold, don't mine. Uh I mean, your thesis since the beginning has been somewhat of the same. I mean, um, you know, on this, I guess we could kind of talk about the sovereigns too, because you frequently advise on building digital treasuries, but we're tracking reports this year that Bhutan has has been actively selling off portions of its Bitcoin holdings. Are more sovereign states looking to build these reserves? And what are you seeing here?

SPEAKER_02 29:49

Uh yeah, Bhutan, uh, I I have no particular insight into what they're doing, but they seem to have made a ton of um uh Bitcoin out of mining. They have a lot of uh stranded energy there, they've invested in mining Bitcoin over uh the several years. They've accumulated a significant stash. And uh, I mean it was an investment, so yeah, you need to liquidate the investment. They have salaries to pay, but they've accumulated this very significant sum. I mean, Bhutan is a very small country and it's not very rich. So they've accumulated, I think, more than a billion dollars worth of uh Bitcoin at a certain point. I don't know what it is now and how much they've sold, and with the price going down, it's probably declined, but that's a lot of money because the entire GDP of the country is a tiny uh number. So this is a significant chunk of their GDP. Um obviously you shouldn't compare flows in stocks, but uh it's it's it's still um quite instructive. Uh and uh other than that, I mean uh El Salvador is still stacking Bitcoin, they just keep buying, they don't care, and they've been doing it for five years, and it's netted them hundreds of thousands hundreds of millions of dollars worth of profit. And I expect them to continue to do that. Now, other than that, I don't really have uh much particular insight into um nation-state adoption. I know Abu Dhabi, one of the sovereign ones, uh sovereign wealth funds in Abu Dhabi, uh had been mining Bitcoin for a while, and they did really well uh with that, and it's uh becoming more and more popular. Um, you know, we had all the uh Trump circus about uh using a strategic Bitcoin reserve, but then he ended up buying pesos to bail out Millet and launched his own shit coin. Um so uh glad I never uh got my hopes up on that one.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

You know, it's a fair point. I mean, Bataan is effectively monetized part of its Bitcoin position when they needed it. I mean, but does that prove Bitcoin kind of worked as a treasury asset, or does it prove that even sovereign holders still treat it as something to sell into fiat when when real-world obligations hit them?

SPEAKER_02 31:48

Yeah, I mean, uh everything is uh I mean, uh money is made to be spent. So this notion that you just stack Bitcoin forever, I mean, it's uh it I I think there's that there's mimetic value in it, and it's good to drive the point home, particularly to new Bitcoiners, to just uh explain that you know you're missing the point if you're just buying Bitcoin from Coinbase and then spending it the next day on your coffee and pizza and then having to buy bit uh Coinbase again. You're just paying extra fees to Coinbase and then paying extra fees at the terminal and just wasting your time and you're not benefiting from what actually Bitcoin allows you, which is uh protecting yourself from inflation.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

I mean, we can go into we could go into it more. It was mostly about you know, if central banks are ever going to start seeing Bitcoin as kind of a strategic reserve, much like they look at gold, right?

SPEAKER_02 32:35

Yeah, so I was saying, yeah, so you should yeah, but but but in in the in reality, I mean everybody needs to spend their money, so it's not there to be held. And you know, when you make an investment into mining or when you make an investment into buying Bitcoin, you've foregone spending. So you could have bought a new car, but you decide, all right, I'm not gonna buy a new car, I'm gonna stay with my old car so that I can buy Bitcoin, and then in three years' time, I'll revisit. Well, three years' time later, three years later, your Bitcoin is appreciated significantly. So now what do you do? Well, now your old car is a lot older, so you still need to buy it. And that's okay. You're gonna have to sell some of your Bitcoin at some point, and that's fine. So I think that that also applies for governments. You know, the Bhutan government invested significant amounts of capital in order to make this happen. And if they can't get spending, uh increased spending out of this, then um uh how how useful are just reserves that you're never going to be using? It's useful to be able to use them. So, you know, I I think uh I don't know what they're doing, but I would hope that they understand the long-term value proposition and accumulate some of the Bitcoin, but of course I understand that they're gonna have to spend some of it.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Yeah, I'm glad that you said that. I mean, a lot of people they just kind of stack, see these drawdowns. But I mean, you know, that four or five-year kind of um uh cycle, as you talked about, is important to understand. I I wanted to ask you about stable coins too. I mean, they're there's some of the largest buyers of short-term U.S. paper in the digital asset system right now. So are they really undermining Fiat or are they just kind of extending the dollar's dominance through, you know, these new digital rails?

SPEAKER_02 34:08

Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's the the obvious answer is they are extending it because they're allowing more and more people around the world to buy more dollars, and then they are buying treasuries. So essentially they are buying the US government's bags, they're bailing out the U.S. government. They are essentially the um a holder of last resort, in a sense, because they are currently one of the biggest buyers of treasuries in the world. They're buying more than most central banks. So, in a sense, it is increasing demand for treasuries. However, I would make the counterpoint, um, I'd say the significant uh evidence to the contrary. Number one, uh a lot of this new demand for USDT and uh stable coins is derived from the fact that uh well, I should say it's it's displacing existing uh dollar demand. So when somebody in Turkey decides to stop using their bank account uh for trading and starts using USDT, well their bank account you may have been either in Turkish liras or in US dollars, whichever one there's going to be backing it US dollars and treasuries. So when you dump your uh Turkish liter bank account or US dollar bank account in Turkey and you start using USDT instead, that's not all new demand for dollars and USDT and US treasuries. That's uh displacing some demand that has already existed. And I think if you run the numbers on it, I think even with the most optimistic scenario for the growth of uh tether, I don't see it making a dent in the fiscal situation in the US. And I gave a talk in the Bitcoin conference last year about this topic, and you know, that was before the war in Iran, but even uh even just uh assuming that we went uh uh on with the same kind of projections of how spending was going over the past 10 years, projected into the next 10 years, and you see that the the budgets are just going to grow enormously, the debt is going to grow enormously, and whatever little amount of purchases that USDTs are going to produce is not going to make a big difference in the grand scheme of things. However, where it will make a big difference in the grand scheme of things is with the small fraction of their profits that they use to buy Bitcoin. Because even though it's a lot less than the treasuries that they buy, it's a lot bigger as a percentage of the Bitcoin total market capitalization. And so, even if of course they're gonna be buying more treasuries because they're offering a treasury uh stablecoin, they're not offering a Bitcoin stablecoin. So they have no business use for buying Bitcoin for their operations, they buy it as a treasury asset. So, of course, they're gonna be buying a lot more uh treasury bonds than Bitcoin, however, they're buying a smaller percentage of the treasury market than of the Bitcoin market because the treasury market is a lot bigger than Bitcoin. So I think that the net effect, as long as Theta keeps buying Bitcoin, the net effect is going to be that it will likely pump Bitcoin and kill the dollar got winning.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

Interesting.

unknown 37:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

Because I mean, you know, obviously there's a big difference between creating fresh structural demand for US debt and simply moving existing demand for dollars onto faster rails, which is kind of what you're saying. I mean, what which one do you do you think is is actually happening?

SPEAKER_02 37:27

I think it's both, uh almost certainly both. Uh the uh but I would just say that since some of that is displaced demand, so when we look at Tether and we say it's a hundred and eighty billion dollar um new demand for treasuries, I don't think that's accurate. I think some number significantly smaller than 180 is likely the extra demand. So let's say it's 100 billion dollars, give or take a few dozen dollars, a few dozen billion dollars. So it's 100 billion dollars, that's peanuts when you're talking about the US government's insolvency. I mean, that's just uh that that that's a couple of weeks of the war in Iran. When you count in all of the costs, they're talking about 200 billion dollars now, but you know, they were talking about a hundred billion dollars for Iraq, and that ended up costing 100 times that. So uh expect something similar to happen here. There's going to be massive expenditure, there's going to be massive, massive pressure on the dollar. And I think um, I mean, I think the world is getting sick of the US, the world's getting sick of Trump, the world's getting sick of the dollar, and more and more people are likely going to be switching away from it to Bitcoin. But I also think uh even you know, from within the USDT world, I think USDT has introduced the new uh XAUT, which is a gold stable coin, and I think that's going to start eating into the demand for USDT. I think um a lot of people all over the world are going to realize gold is just a much better um money than the dollar, and you'd rather not be financing the US government as it does all of these crazy, insane, criminal uh things around the world. So I think we'll see more demand for XAUT, we'll see more demand for Bitcoin in the coming years. And uh, you know, whatever we cannot do as Bitcoin and gold marketers, don't worry. We've got the US government on our side destroying the dollar for us. We can count on them.

SPEAKER_00 39:22

You know, to this point, I mean, our time's going too fast, Safety. But in your newest book, you explore an alternative, you know, kind of history when where sound money prevents World War I. But, you know, looking at modern warfare, if you take away the ability to print and lever money, does that really restrain a modern war? Or does the conflict just shift into sanctions, blockades, and and you know, financial coercion?

SPEAKER_02 39:48

No, I think it's it's it's no coincidence that the century of total war was the century of central banking. And in the fiat standard and the gold standard, I focus a lot on this very pivotal moment in human history of 1914 specifically. That was the year in which the world went into World War I, and that was the year in which fiat money came into existence, really. That was when we went off the gold standard. Most people think of 1971, and in a sense, you could say that because there was still some kind of redemption of gold taking place until 1971. Central banks could redeem gold from the US Federal Reserve up until 1971. But the real gold standard of the 19th century really ended in 1914 with World War I and it never and it was never really resumed in the same uh kind of uh shape and form that it took before World War I. And so that really was the turning point. And I think that was the most important thing about World War I. We'd had wars before, but this was the war in which all the belligerents had access to a money printer, and so previously wars could only last for as long as the government had money, and the government had to take a hard look at its own treasury, which was, you know, in the good old days, it was an actual physical room where piles of gold uh were um uh sitting. So you'd look at that and you'd think about the war, and you think about the expenses of the war, and you think about your odds of winning, and you're very, very careful because if you run out of gold in that big giant treasury room, it is game over for you. You're no longer king. Somebody else is gonna come and take your throne, and uh, you know, foreigners might invade your country. So you need to really watch that. And the people who are reckless with their gold stashes in that kind of world, the people who act like they have a gold printer are not gonna be in the business of running countries for a long time. They're going to be wiped out by people who know how to manage uh uh how to manage cash balance without a money printer. But all of that is uh completely changed when you move to a world with fiat money because now governments don't just have to uh the now governments don't aren't restricted by the quantity of wealth that they have or the quantity of money that they have, they are restricted by the total quantity of wealth held by everybody holding on to their currency. They don't need to go to people and tell them, give us your money so that we can pay the soldiers. They just print money, devalues the money in people's pockets, and people find themselves paying for the soldiers without wondering. And then this is really for me the most infuriating thing in the world, which is that and and and it's sad, and you know, the poor people are the stupid people and poor people are being told all constantly it's uh not gonna cost us anything, it's a good investment, it's a you know, war, it's it's it's important, don't worry about the cost. There's all these uh there are all these fallacies that are constantly being uh promoted about how government spending is good and government spending is basically costless. So when you think of these, you know, most people just don't draw the connection between the fact that their grocery store is becoming more expensive and that their government is fighting a war. And it's just so tragic. I mean, if you ask probably Americans what was the economic impact of the Iraq war, I don't think 20% of them would say inflation. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think a large number of Americans would say that this is what caused prices to rise. I think they don't draw the connection. They think prices rise because of evil, greedy capitalists or republicans or deregulation or uh Democrats or regulations or whatever ideological thing you want to believe in. But really, it's war. It's money printing and it's war. It's war that's robbing you. And um it's destructive and it's terrible. And if you had to actually pay upfront for the war, it would be very difficult. So currently, you know, some estimates are that let's say that the Iran war was a 200 billion is going to cost 200 billion dollars. They're going to ask the Congress for that. Um, first of all, that's a tiny fraction of the true cost because a lot of the costs are not things that are going to require appropriations from Congress, they're just baked in. There's Medicaid and then and um Social Security and uh all of these. Things that need to be paid for the soldiers and all of the expenses that are part of the um budget of the Department of Defense and all the ammunition that's been run down and all the bases that have been destroyed that are going to need rebuilding, all of these things, you know, you have them$200 billion going to look like a rounding era by the time this thing is over. Yeah. But so let's let's say, you know, uh if if you lived in a world in which you had hard money, you couldn't move the troops anywhere. You couldn't start the bombing without having the cash ready, without having to pay them up front. So you'd need to collect the tax, you'd need to pay the soldiers, and you'd need to know that you have all of the money you need for the campaign. So we'd have none of this idiotic garbage that uh Trump is doing right now. It's oh, I don't know, maybe it's gonna be three, four days, or maybe it'll be three, thirty days, or maybe we'll they'll open hormones, or maybe they won't, maybe we're gonna destroy their power plant, or maybe we're having uh great negotiations with them. You'd have to be a grown-up, unlike this stupid clown, and you'd have to have a clear idea about what you want to do with the war. You have to think, all right, we have$400 billion, and that would allow us for four weeks. So here are our objectives of what we want to do in the four weeks, and here's how we're going to do it. And if things turn out in a different way, this is what our plan B is going to be. And you'd have to just very consciously and sanely manage your money. And that's just something that no government does today because they're all ruined. Essentially, they're spoiled by the fact that they have a money printer. So that's why Trump can launch this war first and ask questions later. Same thing happened with Iraq. The war happens first, you ask questions later. The bill doesn't come. Imagine how different it would be if they had to specify, let's say,$400 billion is what we need. Well,$400 billion is about$1,000 per capita in the US. It's a little bit more because there's about 350 million Americans. So let's say it's$1,000 per capita. Imagine you go around to Americans right now and say everybody needs to pay me an extra$1,000 on their taxes this year because we want to bring democracy to Iran. We want to save Iranian women, we want to stop Iran's nuclear program, we want to help Israel steal more land and make sure that nobody in the region bothers them in any way. And we need you to cough up$1,000. Imagine going to a family of five in the US and telling them you have to pay$5,000 this year to fight the war in Iran. I mean, there's 350 million people in the US. That's a lot of people, a lot of money. A lot of them can't afford to pay that money. And only the absolutely most stupid and the absolutely most despicable and violent of them would be willing to pay for these kind of senseless wars that don't affect the US in any way that for the which the US stands to gain absolutely nothing. If that's how they wanted to launch the war, they'd probably have maybe five million dollars. If if it was voluntary, if Americans had to actually put the bill, who knows how much they'd have? Five million, maybe fifty million? Wouldn't be enough to do any of this stuff, wouldn't have been enough to Iraq or Afghanistan or any of these stupid wars. But if somebody actually attacked the US, if Canada or Mexico or Germany or Britain or China got on aircraft carriers and wanted to attack the US, well then it wouldn't be a problem for the US government to raise money to defend. Every American is going to want to put everything that they can and they're going to want to fight and they're going to want to use their own guns and they're going to want to invest in anything that they can do to help, because they would realize then that there's a real um threat and it's worth fighting for it. So it wouldn't be difficult to get funding for war that actually is viewed as legitimate by the population. It would be very difficult to get funding for essentially criminal mass murder, which is what the US government has been doing for the past several decades.

SPEAKER_00 47:51

So, I mean, you know, uh I mean we go into so many different places there, and our time is almost up. But I but I will ask you one more. I mean, if if fiat doesn't make war free, it just delays and disguises the bill, then you know, we're talking about investors looking for it to show up and bond yields, currency weakness, commodity prices, I mean, even declining real purchasing power, as we've seen. Uh where does the monetary cost of war surface first in the real world? Where before the public fully recognizes it?

SPEAKER_02 48:20

Yeah, it's a good question. I think, you know, initially I was my focus was on uh oil prices. I thought that would be the uh first thing. But I think you know, the way that Iran has managed to just completely take control of the strait and allow traffic to go through, essentially uncontested, while all the uh aircraft carriers of the US are hundreds of miles away, unable to come anywhere near, suggests to me that uh maybe the oil shock might not be that thing. Of course, this can change because you know the one US attack on oil infrastructure in Iran means Iranian retaliation and Gulf oil infrastructure, and that could cause a massive crisis. But my uh my dark horse pick for the uh most uh important place where this uh cost of the war is going to show up, uh, fingers crossed, is in the uh 10-year uh bond, in the bond deals of on the treasury. I think that's what's really interesting. And it's uh it it's really fascinating to see it because a year ago was the last time Trump had, well, not the last time he's had many, but maybe his last very big uh stupid tantrum that he threw when he uh decided to impose all of these very idiotic uh tariffs on foreign countries. It was an incredibly idiotic thing to do for many, many reasons, which is beyond getting into right now. But the important point here is that Trump chickened out and backed out of his stupid tariffs exactly at the point where the 10-year yield came close to 4.5. I think it was when he hit 4.5 that he made the uh that he walked back his tariff and he gave a 90-day uh uh what was it, uh relief from tariff or something like that. And uh and and then basically the whole thing fizzled out and uh essentially he was saved by the Supreme Court, which prevented him from doing this. I mean, it was an extremely expensive and uh stupid thing. But in any case, the important thing is that as the 10-year yield hit 4.5, he had to back down. And we had something very similar happen this weekend. The 10-year yield on Monday morning was nearing 4.5, and that was exactly when Trump chickened out and said, Oh, we're making great progress in the negotiations with the Iranians, so I'm not going to destroy all of their power infrastructure and kill millions of people in starvation and the disease. I'm not gonna do this war crime that I very casually tweeted about a couple of days ago. We're gonna give them another five days. Well, you know, the 10-year yield went down then, but I think if there's going to be further escalation, I think the cost, you know, the I think the market realizes that all of these numbers I mean, all of these numbers that are being given about the cost of the war are ridiculous nonsense. Uh, they're fiction, they are uh similar to the numbers that were given about the cost of Iraq. So anybody who's not a moron who watches TV constantly and believes what this government tells him is going to factor in that the cost is going to be a lot larger. You know, they already got the Pentagon budget up to$1.5 trillion. They already need$200 extra billion dollars for this. And um, you know, the way that the US fights his war is as becoming very obvious now is you know, the last 50 years, the the Pentagon has innovated basically nothing except budget increases. How do we make everything so much more expensive? How do we make it so expensive so that our friends in the military-industrial complex make a lot of money and then give us great jobs when we retire? That's basically been the Pentagon. While China, Russia, Iran, and other serious countries have spent the last 20 years building the hypersonic missiles and the drones that are the most important weapon of the 21st century. The US was spending$10 trillion on fighting Israel's wars, murdering people so that Israel could uh uh steal more land, subsidizing Israel as it murders people in Gaza and as it sets up its uh torture gulag camps in Palestine. And uh that's just the that's just the reality of how the US government has been operating. It's so ridiculously incompetent, it's absolutely astonishing. And that's why, you know, China, Iran have hypersonic missiles and drones that are much more effective than what the US has. And the US is building these$14 billion monster aircraft carriers that are essentially obsolete. I mean, here they are, they're fighting a war, and their stupid$14 billion aircraft carrier is in the Mediterranean, thousands of miles away. Why? Because it's dysfunctional. Why is it dysfunctional? Because it's an overpriced, stupid piece of junk whose only purpose is to make money for a military-industrial complex. Whatever this stupid aircraft uh carrier and these uh jets can achieve can be achieved a lot cheaper, a lot more reliably with a few drones. You can just have drones fly and achieve whatever it is that you want. This notion that there's all this um that all of this technology in the US is making it a military superpower, is I think it's coming crashing down, and the US's ability to enforce its will in the world is likely being severely compromised. So all of that suggests the fiscal problem is uh getting more and more serious. I think you know the the burden of the debt is enormous, and as the yields go up, the uh impact is just going to go up. So, I mean, I've been waiting on this for many, many years. I yeah, I think uh the implosion of the treasury's market is really valhalla, as far as I'm concerned. It's uh if we can put government bonds out of business, that's going to be the best thing that we can do for human, for humanity and for world peace. So uh I've been excited before, I've been burned before, but I'm not it's not gonna stop me uh getting it. Not gonna stop you yet.

SPEAKER_00 54:13

Uh okay. Well, listen, our time goes too fast. I'm not gonna finish just up on that. I'll ask you one former uh, you know, just kind of question just on practical wealth protection in this environment because I mean, former gold bug, of course, you know, you're still long Bitcoin. Um, we got a big audience that watches this. If a retail investor has some savings today, but they don't want to become a full macro speculator just to protect their purchasing power, what does a sane hard money allocation actually look like for them in practice?

SPEAKER_02 54:42

I mean, I it's difficult to give a one answer for everybody. As far as I'm concerned, it's really Bitcoin. That's it. I mean, I think you want to have some fiat uh to cover expenses for a few months so that you don't have to be buying and selling with Bitcoin all the time because the volatility can mean that essentially you're playing the lottery with the price that you get when you need to buy and sell if you have major expenses. So you want to keep some fraction of your wealth as an individual, or let's say as the operating cash for a business, you want to keep some fraction of that in uh fiat. You probably want some gold. Um as a you know, it depends on your level of conviction in Bitcoin. The higher your conviction in Bitcoin, the less gold you're gonna need to sleep better at night. But beyond that, I don't really see a compelling case for investing in um in in other asset classes, except where you find a very clear uh compelling advantage in the market where you're you have a very strong thesis and you're looking at balance sheets and you're doing due diligence and you've got a very clear idea about let's say, well, you know, AI is gonna explode next year, so I want to buy NVIDIA or something like that. Like if you have these kind of theses where you're willing to put your money where your mouth is and you have a strong level of conviction and you have an understanding for it, then by all means go ahead with it. But I think um you want to get rid of this uh melting ice cube in your hand that you need to get rid of, this idea that, oh my god, where am I gonna put my money? What's gonna happen to the SP? Should I move my money from the SP to the Nasdaq? Should I go from the Nasdaq to the should I buy bonds? Should I do this? If you're stuck in this um this cave of fiat assets, I I don't have clear answers about how to navigate that. And I don't think that uh trying to navigate that actively will work out well. I think your best bet, if you insist on remaining in fiat assets, your best bet is to just buy the index. But uh beyond that, I think uh you know, ultimately, as long as you're just able to build a significant base in Bitcoin over time, you know, the risky thing about Bitcoin is if you go all in initially, there's enormous volatility. So you could buy the top and then witness a 70% drawdown, and that can be devastating. So you want to go in probably gradually, particularly if you're going in at a time when Bitcoin is hitting all-time highs, because it could be a top and it could be a big crash. So you don't want to be going in um aggressively at a time when Bitcoin is near all-time highs. You want to be gradually going in and then gradually building your position, increasing the size of your position until the position is essentially comfortable for you to uh be able to have a very large position there. So that even if it were to draw down 70%, you're fine because you've got other assets, you've got fiat to manage your expenses, and you don't need to be selling the Bitcoin during these big drawdowns.

SPEAKER_00 57:48

All right, that's Saefidine Amos, uh author of the gold standard, the fiat standard and the bitcoin standard. Uh great book, that last one of yours. Thank you, thank you. I'm glad you liked it.

SPEAKER_02 57:58

I mean, it's uh it's still a bit of a Bitcoin book, but it is also a gold bug book. So for all of the gold bugs out there, I mean, I let me just do a little bit of an advertisement for it. It's an alternative history of the 20th century where fiat money dies in 1915. So we were talking earlier about war. This is a thought experiment of what happens if we'd had a clearing mechanism that allowed people to settle gold. Remember the first question that we uh discussed in this interview that ultimately the limitation of gold is that it's difficult to have a market where it clears and it can be used as money. Well, in this book, I introduce an airplane-based settlement network in gold in 1915. Uh, well, it starts in 1911, but it's uh taken off, if Felix used the pun, by 1915. And that results in uh the collapse of all of the major central banks of the world in 1915 because people take their money out of the banks that are financing the war and they start trading with one another directly. So we have essentially a peer-to-peer distributed network for trading gold, and that means nobody needs to keep their gold at the central bank with a lot less gold than the central bank. The central bank's Ponzies collapse and then the war ends in 1915. So then we go back on a gold standard, but it's a lot better gold standard than the one that we had in the 19th century. It's an industrial, technologically advanced gold standard. So this whole book is trying to imagine what the world's what the gold standard could have looked like with 20th century technology and what the 20th century could have looked like if we had had the gold standard instead of fiat standard. Spoiler alert, a lot more prosperity and a lot more peace, and a lot less war and a lot more technological advancement.

SPEAKER_00 59:31

History repeats itself, it feels like uh always a sharp, serious conversation that forces us to rethink the mechanics of money. Appreciate your time. Thanks again for joining us today on Kitco.

SPEAKER_02 59:42

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

All right, and a big thanks to our sponsor, Swan Bitcoin, your partner for generational wealth. You can get started at Swan.com slash Kitco. And thank you for tuning in. And if you want to stay ahead of the macro trends and get independent hard-thinking analysis you won't find on mainstream networks, make sure to hit that subscribe button right now. I'm Jeremy Stafford. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:08

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