Yo, welcome back to another episode of the Jack Mallers Show. I am your host, Jack. And today we've got another Bitcoin 101 episode. Where does money come from? I think when people hear money, they say, 'Oh, yeah, the dollar or the euro or the yen.' And while that's true, those are all forms of money. Did you know that fiat currencies as we know them today are younger than the internet themselves? Money actually has a very deep history and it was not invented by the government or by banks. It was invented by the people to solve a very particular problem. So today's episode is to understand the origins of money, the history of money, when and how and why was it invented and where are we today when it comes to money and the options that we the people have to monetize and economize. So without further ado, let's get started.
First to understand the problem and why money was invented, I think we need to start on what humans did before there was money at all. Because the problem is two people inevitably want to trade. Okay, before there was money, how did they solve that? Which will then lead us to why money was invented in the first place. So let's take Alice and Bob here on the screen. Alice has pecans. She grows pecans and she happens to want apples. Okay, Bob is the opposite. He happens to have apples and happens to want pecans. This is what we call the coincidence of wants where both parties trading happen to have what each other wants and want what each other has. Okay, so this is very simple. Alice hands over the pecans. Bob hands over the apples and everybody is happy.
Now, obviously, what if it's not that easy? What if Alice, she still grows pecans and she really loves those apples. She still wants apples. But what if this time Bob, he still grows apples and he's happy to give Alice the apples, but he doesn't want pecans anymore. Bob wants salt. Well, Bob has a problem. Yes, he has what Alice wants, but Alice doesn't have what he wants. Alice only has pecans and Bob wants salt. So now, in order for Bob to solve this, he needs to find somebody that wants pecans, wants Alice's pecans because he doesn't want them, and is willing to exchange the salt that he's looking for. And so he goes around town, the pecans are no good for Bob, but he happens to find Carol. Carol has salt and wants pecans. And I know that this is confusing, which is part of the problem, but Alice has pecans and wants apples. Bob has the apples, but wants salt. Carol has salt and wants the pecans. So, what does Bob do? Well, Bob first trades his apples for Alice's pecans. And then he takes the pecans and exchanges with Carol for the salt. So, now everyone's happy. Alice gets the apples. Bob has salt. Carol has pecans. Perfect.
Now, if we analyze these transactions, what actually happened is Bob monetized the pecans. You're like, 'What does that mean, Jack? How? What do you mean he monetized the pecans?' What it means is that money is very simply a market good that you are acquiring not to consume. So, Bob did not buy the pecans to consume the pecans. Bob acquired the pecans to actually later exchange for the things that he actually wanted which happened to be salt. So if I go back a slide you can see that pecans in this particular instance was the medium was the medium of exchange. You've probably heard this term. So now I know you don't consider oh well pecans aren't money Jack that would be silly. I understand. But you you have to know that money by definition is a market good that you are acquiring not to consume but actually to either save or later exchange for the things that you are looking to consume. So therefore anything can be a money. Bob happened to monetize pecans in this instance. Now, obviously, pecans aren't great money, and we'll get into that in a second.
But there are three types of goods in any marketplace. There are consumption goods, which is a cheeseburger or an apple, right? And I'm using those examples because I've never monetized a cheeseburger. I've never monetized an apple. And I've never acquired those things to save them and then later exchange them for the things that I want. These are consumption goods, by the way. It's not only food. What about a car? What about an airplane? What about a house? My house, I don't actually I didn't acquire it to later sell it. I acquired it to live in it. So, it's actually consumption good for me. I buy an airplane ticket not as an investment to later sell my ticket on United. I buy it to get on the plane and that makes it a consumption good because I'm acquiring the good in the marketplace to consume it. You then have capital goods which are like consumption goods except they're used to build more consumption goods. For example, let's say Apple the company buys a lot of silver. Well, Apple may not be consuming the silver themselves, but they're using it to build an iPhone, which they're then selling as a consumption good for the buyer, right? Like, I'm buying my iPhone not to leave it in the box and later sell it as a collectible. I'm buying it to use it as my cellular device and my smartphone. Now, the capital good would be Apple, which is acquiring the silver, which builds more consumption goods. And then the third type of market good is money. And this is it. There's three types of goods in any given marketplace. You have a consumption good, which you're actually consuming, capital good, which is used to produce more consumption goods, and then you have money. And money again is very unique. So you say like what is money there? This is so confusing. I don't get it. It's actually very simple. Money is the market good that you're acquiring not to consume and not to produce more consumption goods. You're acquiring it to save it and then later exchange it for the things that you do need that you do want to consume.
Now going back to Alice, Bob, and Carol. This all works when there's only three people. These monetizing pecans or we can monetize cheeseburgers or we can monetize salt. Alice, Bob, and Carol can hold all of these things in their head. Okay, Alice seems to like apples. Carol seems to like pecans, so I can get the salt. That's fine. But now try that with a village or try that with the city of Chicago or try that with 8 billion strangers. It gets really complicated really fast and there's actually some science behind this. So this is what's known as Dunbar's number. What is the human brain capable of when it comes to building a social network? Because one thing that we're actually very good at is recognizing faces and having relationships. So, let's say this is you and you have five close friends. Sure. Well, can you have six? Yeah, you can grow those relationships up to 15 and and maybe that's family. And can you grow from there? Sure. And this is what's known as a clan. You can have 50 folks that you're familiar with and you recognize their face and you can remember their name. The human brain actually scientifically taps out at 150. And at 151, like when you see someone that has a Facebook friends list and and they're on Facebook, they're friends with 170 people. Well, according to Dunbar's number and the science behind that, they can't actually be friends with 170 people. Now, they may be vaguely recognizable. Oh, right. You're Jane's sister. Oh, okay. Got it. But when push comes to shove, when literally building a social network with the neurons in your brain, you tap out at about 150.
Okay. Now, add on top of that that what money is is not simply recognizing a face and building a social network, but it's all about remembering who owes what to whom. Okay. Right. Carol. I owe Carol pecans. I owe Alice apples. Okay, so it's not just having friends and remembering, right, that's Alice, that's Jane, that's Sally. It's who owes what to whom. Okay, Alice owes Bob, Dan owes Eve, Gail owes Bob, and what do they owe each other and when is it due and what is each one worth? So, sure, you can track 150, but what about the ledgering between all of these people? Then it gets really, really, really complicated really, really, really fast, right? Now it's just too much. And the math behind this is actually very simple. However many goods are in a given market, let's say there's five. To understand the amount of prices that you have to keep track of, you just square the goods number. So if there's five goods in a market, the amount of prices you have to keep track of is 25. Because let's say you're you have honey. Well, what's honey's price against chicken? What's honey's price against blueberries? What's honey's price against salt? What's honey's price against wool? And then you got to do the same thing for wool. Wool to honey, wool to chicken, so on and so forth, so on and so forth. So when you're doing direct barter exchange, it's very explosive as you add goods to the marketplace, the amount of prices that people have to keep track of. So if I were to take the goods and go from five to 500 goods in the market, as you walk into Whole Foods, there's way more than 500 goods that you could technically buy in Whole Foods. You would have to keep track of a quarter million unique prices if you were to barter just by growing from five goods to 500 goods. And this is this n squared. It's the math behind how explosive it is as you grow the number of goods in a market, how complicated it is.
And so if we go back to Dunbar's number of well, what's the maximum social network a human could memorize and actually keep track of in their brain. And then you add the complexity of you're gonna have to square these things because you're not just keeping track of the humans, you're keeping track of which humans owe what to each other and when does that due and what's the value of each of those transactions. It clearly doesn't scale. And so what money is intended to do is solve this exact problem is sure if you want to exchange with only two people in your life, fine. You don't maybe you don't need money. Maybe you can monetize pecans. Maybe you can use barter. But if you wanted to then be a part of a village and then that village becomes a town and then that town becomes a city and then that city becomes a country and then that country becomes a region and then all of a sudden we have the internet and we want to economize 8 billion people. We want all of us to be able to buy and sell goods with each other. Money is the technology we invented to solve for these exact problems. So problem one is money needs to solve for who owes what to whom. Favors can't just be remembered by everybody, right? And especially not to keep track of both sides and for years and and without writing them down. Okay, we also need to keep track of what is it worth. So this concept of a price, okay, it's very difficult to say, okay, a half jar of honey is worth one full chicken, but how much is a half jar of honey worth in wool is totally different. You're like, well, I mean, am I supposed to memorize this? Am I supposed to write this down? So, it's also keeping track of what it's worth and it's solving for the scale problem, which is if I only have 500 goods, I need to remember and memorize 250,000 barter prices. It's ridiculous. With money, we can drastically reduce that. So, if I go back to the 250,000 prices here that we have for 500 goods. Now, if we introduce money here in the center, we're back to 500 where if you have 500 goods, there's only 500 prices. And you could put those on a price tag and it's very simple. And money acts as like a pivot language. It acts as a unifier is you can create a good, exchange it for money and then take the money and then go acquire the goods that you need. And you don't have to monetize other consumption goods like a pecan.
Now the result of all of this also it makes society better because for example if we were still bartering and let's say my profession was I'm a professional repairer of broken windshields which is a valuable service if anyone's ever broken their windshield. You're like well crap now I can't see the road. There's a crack in my windshield. I really need to be able to fix this in order to drive. Thankfully, there are experts that you can drive in same day and within 30 minutes your windshield is fixed. That's amazing. However, if I was a professional windshield fixer and I fixed a few windshields today and then I went into Whole Foods and I said, 'I would like a ribeye.' And they would say, 'Okay, cool. What do I get in exchange?' And I said, 'Well, I fixed a few windshields today.' They would say, 'Well, I don't care that you fixed other people's windshields. My windshield wasn't broken, so why would I give you food in exchange for you fixing other people's windshields?' And that's a very valid point. And so the problem is that maybe everyone's value they're creating isn't directly exchangeable for the things they want. Which again, money solves this problem. Is that I can fix windshields and charge money for it. Charge for a good that I'm not intending to consume. I'm charging as I fix your windshield. I'm collecting something that I'm not going to eat. I'm not going to drive. I'm not going to fly. I'm not going to live in. I'm going to save it and then I'm going to put it in my pocket and walk to the grocery store and then exchange it for the things that I actually need. And that is economizing and using money to scale barter and scale exchange and trade between humans. And now obviously if you scale that you say wow that means anybody can do anything of value to someone else. You can fix windshields. You can be a surgeon. You can be a welder. You can be a chip designer. You can be an artist, a rapper, an airplane pilot. You could do anything you want as long as someone else in the market places values it enough to give you money for it. And then you can take that money and you can go acquire the things you need like steak or rent or coffee or a phone or medicine or school or flights or power. And that greatly improves society because we all can be hyper specialists and hyper experts in very niche things. Like in a tribe of five, there's no windshield wiper. There is no chip designer. But if you have money and you're able to scale human collaboration, then people can become hyper experts in very niche yet valuable things. And then they can use that value that they're driving to get the things that they want and need in their life using money as the technology to escrow and proxy all of this value exchange.
So I love this quote from Richard Dawkins. If you understand money deeply in this way, money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism, right? It's I did something valuable for someone else, but I don't want to directly exchange that value right this second. If I fix your windshield and I'm not hungry and you don't have the food that I want, just give me a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism. Just give me a token so that later on when I want to, I can exchange the the value, the altruism I gave to you by fixing your windshield for something that I would like in return that I would like to consume. Right? That's a very high level way of thinking about money. I think it's a very fascinating way to think about it. So now understanding all of this now we must understand that money in trade it arrives naturally. See once you understand this money was not invented by government. Money was not invented by banks. Money was not invented by corporations. Money was invented by all of us. It was invented by the market. It emerges naturally. So what I have on the screen here is you have a town or a city or a country or any market like the market exists naturally. People naturally want to trade and exchange value because every trade is beneficial or else the trade would not happen. I would not give someone $50 for a steak if I thought the steak wasn't worth $50. Every single voluntary exchange voluntary, right? Like no one's putting a gun to your head is by definition mutually beneficial or else one party wouldn't have done it. You could be like I can't believe steak is $50. But if you didn't think it was worth $50 and you wouldn't have swiped the card. And so trade happens naturally. It's mutually beneficial between the parties. And then as the money scales and becomes more popularly adopted, this is like Bitcoin story. More and more people are like, 'Huh, this is a pretty good money. I could use lots of things for money. I could use pecans. I could use silver. I could use dollars. I could use bitcoins.' And slowly but surely within the marketplace, people start adopting the monies that benefit them.
So now we have to understand and think about what makes a thing money. What makes it good? And this is from Nick Szabo. One, hard to lose or steal. Obviously, if the money was trivial to take like a or easy to lose, that would be pretty bad because you can work and fix all the windshields or work and do your job and then you lose it or then someone else takes it from you and then what value is that? Now I can't eat dinner. The next is unforgeably costly. This means expensive to produce and impossible to fake. Right? So obviously if the money that I'm getting in return for fixing the windshields and doing all this valuable work was easy for someone else to just make out of thin air, well that's a problem. And that's one of the main problems I have with fiat currency. And that's why I say no man should work for what another man can print. Because what am I doing sacrificing my life and pouring my blood, sweat, and tears into something only for someone else, some other dude who's either an elected or unelected official to be able to print what I earned through hard work out of thin air. Well, that makes the money not nearly as appealing. And then the last is very easy to verify. So when I go exchange it, it's very important that a merchant or anyone receiving the money in exchange for the good that I want to consume, right? So okay, I've fixed a bunch of windshields and now I have this money thing. And it doesn't matter what money I'm electing to use. I could use any money I want. Now the merchant is going to one have to want to receive that money and value that money as well, but they're also going to make sure that it's not fool's money. It's not fool's gold. And it has to be very easy. Like imagine I walk in with gold and they're like, 'Well, I'm going to have to melt this gold down in order to verify it.' Well, that's not a very usable money either. So hard to lose or steal, easy to transport, impossible or very difficult to produce more of or fake, easy to verify what's real or not. These are throughout the history of people monetizing things.
So right, we've used throughout human history, we've used shells, shark teeth, flints, silver coins, gold coins. The the thing is which of these things carries all of these properties, right? So let's talk about salability for example, and I give a little scorecard here across fresh fish, firewood, wool, salt, cattle, and silver. These were all money once upon a time back in the day. And you're like, 'Really? Salt was money, Jack?' Yeah. Hundreds and hundreds or thousands of years ago. Yeah, salt was relatively scarce. Easy to transport, easy to tell whether the I was holding sugar or salt. It's very easy. Just put a little bit on your tongue. So, yeah, 100%. Now, over time, it becomes actually not very scarce, actually not very durable, actually not very salable. So, salable in this example is which of these goods are people willing to accept, right? Fresh fish. I that's a hard that's a hard sell for for for me to be like, 'Hey, you know, I I'd like this house. I'll give you a bunch of fresh fish or what about wool?' Or what about cattle? And over time, precious metals like silver and gold ended up winning out and becoming the most salable hardest money over time.
Let's talk about storing value across time. Let's say a cart of apples. Well, the problem with a cart of apples is they go bad over time. They go rotten. So whilst they might be valuable while they're in season and fresh off the tree, just give an apple a week or two and they're rotten and you can't consume them. And so maybe I worked and had my life savings in a fresh batch of apples, but then in two weeks I'm poor and homeless. So that's not very good money. Now, what about money that I call leaks, like the dollar? Well, sure, the dollar is not going to go rotten like an apple, but the more they print of it, then the more they're diluting the value of me being able to exchange it for other goods in the marketplace. And so that's also not very good. So, not only does the good need to be salable and acceptable and people want it and value it as money, but it also needs to store money across time. So, salability is about transacting across space, right? Like, is someone if I walk into a store, is someone going to want to receive this and have the ability to receive it? And then across time is you know are people can I store this you know money has two jobs one can I send it like from here to London and then the second is like can I send it from here to 10 years from now and you're like wait what are you talking about I'm saying can I create value for myself that in theory allows me to buy a house and in 10 years from now I could still buy a house because what happens with a lot of fiat currencies is people earn enough money to get a dinner or get a house or get a flight and then 10 years from now due to inflation it's only half a house and you know only one flight instead of four and only dinner at McDonald's instead of dinners at steakhouses and that's because that money is leaking value over time so money needs to be able to travel across space and across time.
And so I think this slide is a very fun visual to understand think about it this way this is a known as stock-to-flow as a way to measure a money's scarcity so that your value isn't getting inflated away. So on the screen you have the white dots of the existing stock pile that exists. So right now I have the Venezuelan Bolivar. How many of Venezuelan Bolivars currently exist versus how many are actively being produced? And that gives you this what we call a stock-to-flow ratio of okay, what's the relative scarcity? For example, if I had 10 Jack bucks and one was being created every single day, that's highly inflationary because we're going from 10 to 11 and 11 to 12. That's really, really inflationary. You're talking about double digit inflating the core supply versus if I have a billion Jack bucks and I'm creating 0.00001 a day, that's far less inflationary. So, Venezuelan Bolivars highly highly inflationary. They create more each year than actually exists in total. Gold is much better. However, gold is still inflationary. People need to understand this. Gold still inflates about 2% a year. And what I mean by that is 2% new gold is created each year relative to the amount of gold that already exists today. And so if you run 2% inflation forward, you're actually losing like half of your wealth due to inflation like every 30, 40 years. Believe it or not. So anyways, the dollar, okay, dollar is better than the Venezuelan Bolivar, but much much worse than gold. And where is Bitcoin? Bitcoin today, because the 21 million hasn't been fully issued, is technically inflating at less than 1% because there's still a block reward with each Bitcoin block. But if you consider Bitcoin as just the fixed 21 million, as if they've all been issued, then Bitcoin is actually the only money with an infinite stock-to-flow, believe it or not. So it's interesting to think of like okay wow there's different forms of money and you can measure them different ways which one has which one is more scarce which one carries more value across time which one's easier to transport across what I call space like from here to London or from here to my grocer right which one is more salable.
And so throughout human history there's been two core forms of money or approaches to money there's been a list and then what I call a thing now let me break this down really at the end of the day, as I mentioned, money solves for human memory. Like, if we could just memorize who owes what to whom, we wouldn't need money. But, as I mentioned, we physically and scientifically cannot create social networks and lists in our brains this complex. And so, one approach is to just write it down and say, 'Okay, I, Jack, am the king of the town, and I will keep the list that keeps track of who owes what to whom. So, whenever there's a trade, you have to report it to me and I will enter a new ledger entry and I will say, 'Okay, Dylan owes Sally this and Jane owes Jack this.' And I will keep track of the list. And then the other option is to have an actual thing. And a thing is like a gold token or like a sea shell. Now, the problem with lists over time is that both sides have to agree that it's right and you end up needing trust. What if Jack says, 'Yeah, you know, I actually don't like Jane that much, and so I know Jane is technically owed a bunch of apples, but I'm going to cross that out out of spite towards Jane.' Right? And that is what we live in today, guys. Like the Federal Reserve and the US government and whoever you believe is ultimately now we're in fiscal dominance. Whoever you believe is ultimately controlling the money supply. They're really at the end of the day keeping track of who owes what to whom and how much money should exist. And that's accounts like these banks have accounts at the Fed and that's really how money works today. The other option if you're like well trust has not worked and not scaled throughout human history, you can use a bearer token. You can use a thing like gold. And when you use something like gold, you don't need a list of who owes what to whom. Because if I have 10 ounces of gold, then it is implied that the world owes me 10 ounces of gold worth of stuff. The actual keeping track of who owes what to whom is embedded in the token itself. Hey, I have this amount of gold. So, the world owes me this amount of stuff. It's implicit and it's implied. The problem with the thing is that it doesn't scale because I cannot right now it's very easy to update a list at the Fed or a list at Cash App or a list at JP Morgan Chase. You could do it on your phone via apps. I cannot send gold over the internet. I don't want to carry gold on my dinner date this evening. Gold or physical tokens have had a tough time to scale. And what's interesting, I have an arrow here on the slide, is as we've used things to monetize and economize, we've actually ended up needing to create a list of the things, which is what the system we're in today. We were on the gold standard, but gold didn't scale on the internet into 8 billion people. And so then everyone deposited their gold to banks and governments. And governments kept a list of who has what gold. And then they divorced from the gold standard because we trusted them and they're like, 'Ah, screw this. You know, we're in so much debt. We don't want to do this anymore and now we just have a trusted list with the US government and the Federal Reserve.' And so each have unique problems. A list has plenty scale and it can work globally and you can update a list digitally instantaneously but the level of trust has failed us. A thing you don't need to trust. You either have the gold or you don't. But gold hasn't scaled especially modern day 2026. We've got the internet and economy of billions of people.
So I close all this out and bring it back to you have to understand money is technology. Okay, there are many of them, right? There's not one singular way to fly. There's not one singular way to go online, right? So let me make this point. Flight. Technically, I could try and fly with a banana. I could go on my roof right now and jump off and try and fly with a banana. Now, I would have a really poor time. I'd probably hurt myself greatly or die because bananas are not good technologies to use for flight. Now, hot air balloons are better than bananas. I would probably not die hopefully if the hot air balloon worked, but I also would not necessarily get to where I needed to go, at least in a timely manner. Biplanes are better than hot air balloons. And the best way to achieve flight is a jet. Guys, money is the same way. And people don't think of money this way. They don't think of it as a technology where there's many different options. And depending on what they're trying to solve for and what they want to do, they can elect whichever money technology is better for them. So for example, seashells. I would say seashells today are more like a banana. If you want to store your savings in seashells, you can. I think then you're going to have a really bad time and you're going to be poor really, really fast. I would say paper money is more like a hot air balloon. Yeah, sure. Technically possible, but are you going to get to where you want to go? Are you going to end up being able to build savings, own a home, beat inflation? No, definitely not. Gold is probably like a biplane. It's the analog version. Like, okay, at one point in time, this was the bee's knees, but we're in 2026, and gold doesn't really scale. The biplane's not going to get me to California to visit my parents anytime soon. And Bitcoin is like the jet. It's the modern day engineered version to scale to society as we know it today. At least in my opinion. But you have to understand that money is a technology and you can choose whatever money you want. Yes, governments make you pay taxes in their currency. And so they are forcing you in some way to adopt their money literally by force, literally via violence. Like if you don't pay your taxes and you don't use our money, we will lock you in a box for the rest of your life. Which is very unfortunate and I disagree with. But nonetheless, you don't have to use their money all the time. You could use seashells if you want. You could use gold if you want. You could use Bitcoin to save money if you want.
And just some fun history. In New England in the mid-1600s, did you guys know that clams were actually legal tender? So, believe it or not, and and I I'm just giving you this context because people are like, 'Wait, the dollar hasn't been money forever?' It's like, no, the dollar is actually younger than the internet. Money is an ancient technology to scale human cooperation. I'm going to say that again. Money is a technology as old as everything else that you use in your life at least to ensure that we cooperate at scale. So yes, in the 1600s, clams were legal tender. By the way, issuing money from a central party actually started before there was government as we know it today. It started from kings. So kings did it as a way to better collect taxes. And it's actually from that point in Lydia that it built this idea that one party, the dominant party, the kings of the town and now the government, the US government decided how much currency there should be. But this is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years old. And there's many many many many monies and money solves a very particular problem very specific properties and you get to choose which one you want to use. And so then I pose the question back to you guys and this is how I live my life of well which money do you want based on the problem it's supposed to solve? Well, it needs to be able to travel through space. I need to be able to send it from point A to point B. It needs to be salable. It needs to be liquid. It also needs to travel through time. I don't want my value being inflated away. I don't want to have a money that anybody can print. I want my money to be scarce. It needs to be easy for me to accept. I need to be able to really easily know the difference between fake gold and real gold. Fake Bitcoin and real Bitcoin. And you choose which technology suits your needs.
So, if I pull up gold, fiat, and Bitcoin here on the screen, and these are the properties of money that has historically solved society's problems and made it good. We've got durability, divisibility, fungibility, portability, verifiability, scarcity, and its track record, which implies some version of trust. Gold historically has been very durable, but not divisible. It's been very fungible, but not portable, not easy to verify, but is scarce, and has a track record of a very long time. Fiat currency. Now, fiat exists in large part to solve for where gold failed us. Fiat is not durable. It is very divisible though. It is not fungible but it is very portable. It is not verifiable. It is not scarce and it does not have nearly as long a track record. But where gold failed predominantly in divisibility and portability, fiat is very divisible and very easy to move. Right? You just make an API call or you get on your phone, you click a button and people can update lists, but you got to trust them and they can issue more currency and inflate your world away. Now, you go to Bitcoin and Bitcoin actually achieves everything except you can make an argument that it doesn't have the track record that gold has, right? Because Bitcoin hasn't been around as long as gold has. So, you can make the argument that Bitcoin is still the new kid on the block. But everything else, Bitcoin is durable, divisible, fungible, portable, verifiable, and scarce. And these are actually the reasons that I choose Bitcoin for my money. Like where are my life savings? My life savings are in Bitcoin. And people say, 'Yeah, but when you go to Whole Foods, you don't use Bitcoin to exchange.' Who cares? Sure. Okay, fine. You're right. Like, I use a credit card, so I actually am able to use fiat without having to own it. And then I either sell a little bit of Bitcoin to pay off my credit card bill or I borrow against my Bitcoin. But the money I elect to use for all of these properties and in order for me to exchange and live my life and grow value and collaborate with society, Bitcoin's the best money for me. It solves all the problems that money is supposed to solve. I don't just do what a bank tells me to do. I just do what the government says.
And so, actually, if I go back to this idea of historically, we've had lists or we've had objects, things, right? A list could be thought of as like the ledger at the Fed and an object could be thought of as gold. Fascinatingly, Bitcoin and what Satoshi invented is actually both at the same time. And it's because the blockchain, some of you guys think, oh yeah, the Bitcoin blockchain, the blockchain is just a giant list, right? It's a giant list of who owes what to whom. So, we can all transparently see which public keys can spend which bitcoins by providing a signature with their private keys. This is at the time for me, this was like a huge aha moment. I was like, 'Oh, I totally get it now.' Bitcoin's a giant list, but it's also an object in that the information itself, the list itself, like having a private key itself behaves like a bearer instrument. Like I can literally hand someone bitcoins by handing them my hardware wallet or my keys. So, it's actually both. What Satoshi solved for is turning information into a bearer instrument. So, it behaves like both. It's fascinating. And Bitcoin is the first money that has made a physical object out of a list or created a physical object that is a list. It depends how you want to think about it, but they're both true. And that's what actually allows Bitcoin to achieve monetary properties that no other money has. This is the core innovation. And this is why it's this public, auditable, transparent ledger. And because it's a ledger, I mean, you can update the ledger from anywhere in the world. Doesn't matter who you are, where you are, you can do it. And and obviously with things like Lightning, instantaneously, it's easy to receive and verify and it's free to store. Like if I needed to store a lot of gold, that sounds very expensive. Bitcoin's very easy. 12 words in your brain. So fascinating. So anyway, I hope this was very valuable. Thank you guys for tuning in and listening. Let me know what other Bitcoin 101 either direct or adjacent topics you'd want to hear next. And with that, I'll catch you guys in the comments. Peace and love. Take care.
