Ben McKenzie

You take it from me not because you trust me.

You trust that you can use it.

government and that someone else will accept it.

Yeah, that it works.

And so money does three things.

It's a medium of exchange.

You can use it to buy and sell stuff.

It's a unit of account.

You can run your books with it.

And it's a store of value, meaning its value stays relatively consistent over time.

And crypto can't fulfill or Bitcoin couldn't fulfill any of those three because you couldn't use it to buy and sell stuff, really, unless it was crime to pay for stuff that was illegal.

It was so volatile that it really wasn't an effective unit of account and store of value.

now all currencies are fallible just like all social constructs all humans so none of these are perfect imagine a bagel costs one dollar and then ten and then ten cents yeah you know you just can't if that were to be a currency it would be unusable people would just freeze and hoard which would sort of plunge the economy into recession which is actually well whatever we're getting a little far afield but it's actually what contributed to the great depression

We were on the gold standard.

The amount of money that the government and other governments in Europe could hold was predicated on how much physical gold they had.

Like a dollar was equivalent to a certain amount of physical gold.

And the idea was to give it tangibility.

It's linked to something real.

Real, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.