The Ledger, every show

“My guess is, however, that I think I don't actually believe that we're at the dawn of a new age. I actually believe that we're at the that that most of this 10 years back, 15 years, 15 years from now, it will look a lot like Pets.com.”

“Now, I'm not a hundred percent sure of that, but maybe, ah, ah, but I think that there's a certainly a, I would say a quite significant probability that the whole thing just drops to zero, ah, because I have not yet seen any reason why this has to be a valuabl…”

“It's not at all clear even now that there's anything that you can do with crypto that you can't do other ways. But, you know, obviously if something comes along that I, I'm happy to see it, but I don't see it now.”

“Bitcoin is what people are owning now in large value, and any gains in energy efficiency just gets swallowed up very quickly. You just push further into that margin, and it, ah, it, it's, ah, it's a self-defeating form of progress.”

“There will not be 1600 cryptocurrencies out there. There will be one or two.”

“From the point of view of monetary economists, we're exploiting cutting edge, ah, computer science, ah, to set the clock back 300 years.”

“So, the interesting thing about all of this shift to cryptocurrency is it's saying, let's throw away This technology, it's more, it's a social technology rather than a, you know, a mathematical technology, but let's throw away the social technology of repeated…”

“And if Bitcoin became really a serious, well, ok, it you'd be amazed at how quickly whatever freedom you think you're getting via the blockchain would disappear.”

“Bitcoin circulation will always expand to drive the cost of producing a Bitcoin up to the point of being insane.”

“The one thing I will say is so far cryptocurrency shows no sign whatsoever Of becoming currency. Whatever it's doing, it's not money.”

“I don't believe that blockchain is going to undermine Amazon or any of these people, because The reason I use Amazon is not because of power, or the, not the power of Amazon, but the power of laziness.”

“My barber actually did ask me if he should put all of his money in Bitcoin. So this is not, this stuff is not hypothetical, it's for real, and there's a lot of, Uninformed people getting ripped off.”

“So let me give you a comprehensive list of the countries that currently have inflation exceeding 50% a year. South Sudan and Venezuela. End of story.”

“Cryptocurrency is not going to put food in the stores when there's no food in the stores, right? It's not, it's a, it's not fund, Venezuela's problem is not fundamentally a monetary problem, and most really severe monetary problems are not. Most really severe …”

“The best argument I could possibly be persuaded for on, on the question of Bitcoin Is that Bitcoin will become like gold or high denomination notes. It'll be something that people hold in their stashes in, in in Buenos Aires, or actually high denomination euro…”

“What I would say, however, is that both gold and hundred dollar bills have a, now, first time I said this, I said they, they're, they are tethered to reality. And then it turned out that that was a bad word to use when talking about, to crypto people. So, so t…”

“There's very little sign that it is becoming any kind of widespread means of payment, and that's 10 years on.”

“Mostly the main obstacle to people producing high quality counterfeit, ah, dollar bills is the fact that the Treasury Department, the Secret Service will track you down”

“We developed this, you know, socially ingenious thing, which is enduring institutions that have a reputational stake in, ah, in safeguarding the value of the, ah, of the tokens they create, and, we're throwing all of that out, and it's gonna be really, really …”

“Government officials are as, ah, ah, you know, they read the same magazines, they, ah, no one reads magazines. They read the same social media as everyone else, and, ah, and want to be trendy. And, ah, you know, the trendiness is a very big factor in all of th…”

“The high tide of financial innovation in, in, in other respects, non-crypto financial innovation, was in a period roughly, you know, 2000 to 2007, and the great bulk of that innovation was essentially just doing an end run around regulations.”

“And this was the best, far and away the best defense of crypto that I've heard.”

“What keeps most currencies valuable is the belief that, well, two things. The belief that governments will exercise restraint in issuing currency, ah, and the fact that legally you can pay taxes. So if you like, the thing, whole thing is backstopped by, ah, by…”

“And it is in fact expensive to make transactions. It's, ah, the, ah, the actual implementation of the blockchain is, ah, ah, is one that is hard. It's hard to do transactions in Bitcoin.”

“It's, hyperinflation never happens just because governments are untrustworthy. It's always associated with political and social collapse.”

“If people, now, one thing that could happen is that people introduce alternative cryptocurrencies. But of course, if they do that, then we have a much larger supply of cryptocurrency and the price, the value of the existing cryptocurrencies plunges.”

“It looks like there's something like five hundred million to a billion dollars worth of transactions, ah, a day in Bitcoin.”

“As best we can tell, the dollar value of bitcoin transactions peaked at the beginning of this year, and that's actually fallen substantially since then.”

“You can imagine the governments, if they start to see the seniorage eroded by crypto, will say, okay, well, we'll offer you government-validated crypto, ah, which, not sure at some point why that's any better than government-validated other stuff, but, ah, The…”

“When you hit a real anomaly in in what you think is a well-established point of view you should study it, and most of the time the answer, the explanation turns out to be bad data,”

“So money, first thing to say about money is remember always that money is only incidentally an asset. It's not something that produces in and of itself. Money is a lubricant. Money is something you use to facilitate transactions in the real economy.”

“And the history of money has been one of making money increasingly invisible, increasingly frictionless. Has been one of pushing it into the background.”

“The direction of that evolution, if you're asking where, where would that lead you to think we were going, it would be towards a cashless society. It would be towards one where, ah, money was really just an accounting entry someplace, and in which payments wer…”

“The striking thing about Bitcoin is that it sets up a system in which, ah, first of all, ah, the creation of this currency involves a lot of real resources. We're actually spending a lot of resources now computing power or electricity to generate this, much as…”

“One way to think about that is reputation is a technology. It's, we solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning what could be one shot gains in which people literally take the money and run and turning them into repeated games in which people have an inc…”

“In fact, I know it's not inherent in the technology of conventional banking. I suspect it has to do with a combination of market power, but also largely, you know, government enforced barriers, particularly government barriers that reinforce that market power.”

“Now, gold is not money. Not in any of the real senses. Nobody, you know, go into a store and try and pay your bill with a bar of gold. It ain't gonna work. Gold is not in fact a medium of exchange. It's not something you can in fact use for transactions.”

“Catherine, who gave, I think, that's the best defense of crypto that I've heard”

“The gradual expansion of currency in circulation gives the US government some tens of billions of dollars of revenue.”

“If you look at the United States, the ratio of currency in circulation to GDP fell steadily as far back as we can tell up until about And then it started rising again. And we actually have substantially more, ah, dollar cash in circulation relative to GDP than…”

“Indirect estimates suggest that something like two thirds of those high denomination dollar notes are held outside the United States. They're being held as hoards of value, and they're being held as hoards of value even though you can't actually do business wi…”