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Hello there. What I’d like to talk about today is money. Again! Because money! So I got some good comments on the video. I did want to do a longer video anyway. Sort of experimenting with video lengths. People saying, ah, shorter, ah, longer, more, less, left, right, up, down. So the interesting thing about money, because it’s such a fascinating topic, right, you could just go on forever. The interesting thing about money is talking about its relation to crypto and how that sort of works. So I’m not a big crypto believer and there are reasons for that. Mostly uncertainty reasons, not any other reasons we’ll say. And so that’s where I want to go over today. So it’s the same topic. Money. It’s a longer form video. I’m going to focus on fleshing out the idea a little bit more and talking about mostly crypto. The thing with money, as I said in my short video, is we’ve got this future value that represents potential. And obviously the potential is not manifest now, that’s why it’s future. The value is based on a value you’ve provided in the past, that’s how you get the money, and it’s best to not point this at materiality. So you don’t want the money related to a type of rock or you don’t want it related to a substance that has a dual use. You really do want it to represent value. So the realness of it in terms of materiality should be minimal or hopefully zero. Because what you’re really going for is one of the trends in gentles, beauty. So money represents, we’ll say, the potential to create beauty or to create structure or order or whatever in the future. And when you think of it that way, a lot of things make a lot more sense, like why people give away money at all ever, why people donate to religion, what does religion need money for, right? There’s all sorts of things you’re going to get what’s charity about, right? You’re basically buying ego to some extent. So there’s all sorts of ways in which the representation, not being tied to materiality, is actually allowing you to understand how the world functions, like what behavior is. And then what that means too is that money is directly reflective of values, full stop period, end of statement. So it’s not only reflective of values, but that’s what it’s ultimately reflecting. So if you go out, you spend your money, you get some drugs, some alcohol, right? Like that’s what you’re valuing in the moment. And you can say, well, that’s not value as such. It’s like, well, it is. It’s just that values change based on your time horizon. So if you want to value your happiness right now, you may need to think about the future. But if you want to value your happiness right now, why not go off, get some drugs, some alcohol, some hookers beer, whatever. But if you want your wellbeing far in the future to be valued, then you wouldn’t do the short term stuff, right? So this is Paul Van der Kley, talks about this a lot, right? Like the cocaine with a bullet chaser. Yeah, why not go out on top? Although I don’t know this, I’ve heard heroin is a better drug. Maybe it’s heroin on a bullet chaser. I don’t know. But it’s a good point. Like why bother? If you can just go out on top, then why wouldn’t you? And people mostly don’t. Of course, when you get addicted, strange things happen like you tend to kill yourself. So this value can change based on the time horizon and where you’re looking. So attention then plays into value and potential value and the value of money in the moment. Because again, the value and the time horizon interact such that that’s what you’re willing to give up now. And this also explains why people have a hard time with money. So you get a lot of money, you win the lottery, bankrupt within five years, almost everybody, right? 80% or something crazy. And if you’re a mediocre basketball player, you have too much money, you’ll lose it all, right? You’ll spend it all on stupid things. So a lot of people that don’t have a good connection of money management and value and beauty in the future, they tend to just spoil their money. So when you link money to materiality, the problem you run into is material things become less valuable over time on average because entropy. So you can’t get around entropy, by the way, just to be sure we’re curious. So there’s no reason not to spend it now. But if you’re wise, if you can look at the larger time horizon, you can manage your money such that you’re spending enough in the present that you don’t go crazy and become miserly, but you aren’t spending so much that you don’t have any for the future when you need to make big purchases when emergencies happen, or you can invest it in such a way that you can get it if you need it sort of a thing. So there’s all sorts of ways that’s how you convert money or cashflow into wealth, by the way, is by looking at the long-term and medium-term time horizon instead of just the next week, next month sort of thing. And we talked a little bit about in the last video about the different ways to interface with money in terms of you can increase the amount you’re getting or you can decrease your expenses. Same effect. Same effect. You have more control over decreasing your expenses and you do over increasing your income. So it’s a quicker and easier thing to do. So there’s a lot of confusion. I mean, the reason why money’s kind of out there in the zeitgeist, if you will, in the culture is because there’s cryptocurrencies and there’s a new one every week. So what’s that about, Mark? Cryptocurrencies aren’t real. They’re not tied to materiality, are they? Maybe. Maybe. But cryptocurrencies are an attempt to tie things to materiality. So the Bitcoin white paper, for example, which I have read, by the way, a long time ago, granted, but I did read it, um, the Bitcoin white paper is pretty clear, right? What you’re doing is you’re tying money to work and you’re tying work to computer and you’re tying computer to, well, computer is inherently tied to electricity. So that’s interesting. So there’s something with an existing monetary value, electricity, that is tied back to work and work is defined by this mathematical formula that a computer does. And then there’s a proof based on cryptographic mathematical certainty. So that’s what Bitcoin is. Now, not all cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin. There’s a couple of different types of cryptos. Uh, there might be three or four, but there’s two main ones, proof of stake and proof of work. Proof of work is Bitcoin, right? Oh, I did some work and therefore I have value and the value is, you know, X percent or a full Bitcoin or whatever it is. When you’re mining, it’s a full Bitcoin, by the way, you can only mine full Bitcoins and they’re limited, right? And so it’s tied to materiality, to quantity, right? It’s because you’re limited. There’s a limited number of them. They come out on this weird, you know, logarithmic scale and whatever. But also, you know, you can get money from fees for doing work, recording the blockchain, it’s called, right? The chain of custody for the transactions. And that can be done in splits, right? So they’re called satoshi or something, you know, tiny parts of a full Bitcoin to recoup fees because somebody’s got to take the time, energy and effort to run the software on the computer and the software has to do some work and that takes computer time, which takes up electricity, right? So it makes sense the way they’ve tied it up. But A, it’s tied to electric usage. This is a bad idea. So that’s why all the Bitcoin mining people went out to places with cheap electricity. In some cases, put a few businesses out of business by using up all the electric power or cause the electric prices to go up because they were effectively taking advantage of a loophole in the system. And a lot of systems have loopholes and because they have to because systems can’t be perfect, oddly. And so that caused the local electricity prices to go up while the Bitcoin electricity prices actually stayed stable. This has to do with how they bill out electricity. Kind of complicated. Someday I’ll do a video on electric prices and why the green energy thing is a big scam. But in the meantime, back to money and crypto. So crypto is tied up in this, what is electricity costing? And also what is the equipment cost? Because there’s expensive cards for Bitcoin, at least in some of the other minable currencies. Now there’s also Ethereum, which is proof of stake, which means you have something, you own something, there’s a contract base to it. So that’s a different matter entirely. So these are all tied up in electrical power and in some kind of computing capability. And you can usually, I think you can do this with Ethereum and Bitcoin, you can take them off chain. You can print out a Bitcoin QR code and pass it that way. And that’s a perfectly valid thing to do. The QR code can represent a wallet, that wallet can have any number of Bitcoin or any percentage of slice of Bitcoin in it. So that’s one way you can spend Bitcoin. Of course, the value is fluctuating all the time. It’s not very good as a currency. It’s very good as a value transfer method, if you’re transferring large amounts of value, but it’s not very good as a currency. Now, the one argument that I heard that was very convincing was a talk between Vin Armani and Jonathan Peugeot. See if I can remember to link it here. And Vin Armani made the case that Bitcoin in particular is a currency tied to epistemology, tied to knowledge. And I thought that was very interesting because that is correct. The blockchain, which is the ledger of accounts for all of the spending that goes on, is definitely a type of knowledge. And because it’s distributed and because it’s hard to mess with, it can be messed with by the way, that’s what forks are, roughly speaking, when they fork a currency, they’re actually messing with the system to some extent. And if you have two system and wherever they met, those coins are valid on both systems. Kind of interesting to know. So when you’re talking about crypto and knowledge, all the knowledge of all the transactions in the crypto system are available literally to everyone to look up. This isn’t particularly useful when you’re talking about millions or hundreds of millions or billions or trillions of transactions, by the way. You can trace individual transactions. Absolutely you can. Not necessarily too hard to do. But if you want to see it as a whole, you can’t do that. That’s ridiculous. Too much information. Too much data. So there’s a limit to that. And again, I’m not making a claim about the limit or how feasible or could computers solve this? No, they can’t, by the way. Commodity explosion works against computers too. They can make it better. But at the end of the day, if you have too much real-time information, computers aren’t going to help you. Phone systems, tracking people in real time, it’s easy to track individuals. Again, sure. Or sets of individuals. No problem. But when you scale up, it gets harder. And crypto is the same way. So you can track somebody’s purchases on the blockchain. You can track where they enter the blockchain, where they leave the blockchain. And they’re not anonymous. Bitcoin is not anonymous. So wallets can be anonymous. You may not be able to tie wallets to people until the money leaves the blockchain and then the anonymity goes away. So maybe useful. Probably not as useful as you think. So that’s something to note. So the interesting thing is, is crypto worth anything? And I think that a case can be made either way. There’s certainly a way in which if public contracts are worth something, then Ethereum can be worth a lot of money. Now, whether or not the contracts that only deal with closed worlds or video games or something, or coins, which aren’t necessarily currency, so coins can just be markers of an accomplishment and not necessarily tradable. That’s another crypto trick, by the way. So there’s a couple types of crypto and some are not tradable. If it’s not tradable, it’s not tradable. And that may be fine. Maybe it represents something else and Ethereum can be used for that. Bitcoin can too, but Ethereum can be used more efficiently for that. Maybe that’s okay. Crypto has lots of problems. Transaction times are through the roof compared to B-Sit MasterCard. So it’s not like we’re going to overnight flip over to using all electronic Bitcoin type currency. It’s not like we’re going to be able to do that. It’s not like we’re going to use all electronic Bitcoin type currency. That’s impractical. It can’t be done. It cannot be done. People argue we can get the speed up enough. No, you can’t. In order to bring the speed up, you have to bring the potential for fraud into the picture. And nobody wants to do that, because then you don’t have your epistemology in it, or you don’t have your knowledge, you don’t have your system of record. It’s actually incorrect. So that’s just not going to be possible because you’re not understanding the trade off there for sure. But that’s why banks are going to be around for a while. So if you want to do slower transactions on the order of minutes and larger transactions by necessity, crypto has a lot of potential. So it has a lot of potential to figure out which banks have which money and where that money is moving to. That might not be a bad thing. And that’s something you could track potentially much better with a computer, especially if it’s a limited number of large movements. Even if it’s one a minute, that’s easy. That’s nothing. But when you’re dealing with a piece of mass crap, for example, you’re tracking about many more times that per minute. I think it’s hundreds of millions a second of transactions, something crazy. So the time actually matters. And because Bitcoin can’t accommodate that and Ethereum even can’t accommodate that and some of the other ones can’t, can’t quite do it. Some can. But again, they’re sacrificing safety and security for that and increasing fraud, or at least potential for fraud. So there’s a lot to look at there. If you’re going to think about, well, how do I value Bitcoin? How do I value Ethereum? And one of the things you’ll notice that happened recently was, you know, well, because money is tied to the government, which is a fair statement. It is. There is a central bank. But it’s an unfair statement because the government’s too slow to do anything about the value of money. They’re too dumb and too slow. Congress takes forever to do, to go to the bathroom. Like these people are not going to be able to affect the price of currency on any reasonable time scale, like less than six or eight months. But they do control the bank and the central banks do have quite a bit of influence of the currency, but not entirely because it doesn’t represent what they think it represents. So the fact that they’re printing more money because money is not tied to materiality. In other words, money does not represent material things in the world anymore. You know, not since coinage. It doesn’t really matter. And when it does, that doesn’t work. So you may say, oh, well, gold is a stable, stable form of money. And therefore, okay, gold has been used as the sole currency for countries in the past. Believe it or not, there is a history and you can just look this stuff up. When the king of, was it Numibia, I think, went through Egypt back in the day when the pharaohs still ruled there, right, a long time ago, they have gold mines where they had gold mines and they had lots of gold. So he just spent lots of gold because gold wasn’t worth anything to him because he had lots of it. They got it right out of the ground and his people gave it to him and it was done. He disrupted the economy of Egypt for 30 years and they had a gold economy. Like gold was one of the primary currencies, was the primary currency. Disrupted the entire economy for the next 30 years by a simple visit. I don’t know how long it lasted. I don’t remember, but it’s worth noting. The price of gold can stay unmoored from commodity prices for a hundred years. That’s happened in recent history, by the way. So if you’re thinking like, well, eventually it’ll correct. Yeah, but you may not be alive when that happens. So maybe tying to gold doesn’t work either. Because historically it doesn’t. That’s just like factually correct. I know people get very upset. Materialists get very upset. Oh no, prices can’t be understood. But as I mentioned in my economy video, it’s not how pricing works. So it’s okay. It’s cool. So if you think we’re printing more money, the government controls the money flow, and now we’ve got a problem, and that’s why Bitcoin when the money flow increases, Bitcoin should go up while the dollar should sink. It makes some kind of sense. It’s intelligible. But then it happens. We have a global crisis, and the money is finally under pressure, and we’ve got 30% or so, in some cases month on month, by the way. Good to note. Inflation, you would think that Bitcoin would continue to rise from, I think it was at 62 at the time, and Bitcoin dropped like a stone, boom, right down to 42 or 35 or something. Crazy, right? Like cut in half almost. And the Bitcoin people are confused. What happened? We have a stable currency, and we have a stable transaction size even. Relatively speaking, it doesn’t fluctuate as much as we’ll say the transactions on V-SET MasterCard or the Intra Bank transactions or any of that, because they don’t understand what value is represented by the Bitcoin. Money represents value. It doesn’t represent the things about the money. It doesn’t represent coins. It doesn’t represent gold. It doesn’t represent work in the past that’s stable, right? Because it represents the future value, the future potential. It doesn’t represent the thing today. It represents something else that we don’t know about in some cases, or we know very little about tomorrow. So what that means is that the value of currency is based on certainty about the future. That’s it. The value of all currencies, all currencies, is based on the understanding and predictability or certainty of the future. Now you may say, well, that means all currencies should move in lockstep. No, it doesn’t. No, it doesn’t. If you’re in a country that you believe, not that is, there is no is in this equation, that you believe and enough other people believe is not affected by a world event, say a skirmish halfway across the world between two entities, then your currency may not move at all as a result of that skirmish, which shouldn’t affect your economy because it doesn’t have anything to do with you and it’s halfway across the world and there’s large oceans in the way. Then your currency wouldn’t move. Now, any global uncertainty in a global economy can move any particular currency, but it’s hard to calculate why all of a sudden. So the downside of globalism and crypto is no different because at the end of the day, if I need something to eat, the amount of work my computer did is not a good analog to figure out how much food I’m worth. It just isn’t. Sorry, crypto bros. It’s not the way the world works. It’s not ever going to be the way the world works. So money is representing certainty to some extent. Money because that’s future potential value. If I don’t know how long I’m going to live all of a sudden, and this is documented, this happens all the time, people spend all their money. If they think they’re going to die, they spend every last time they have. That’s a common occurrence, especially people with no family, no reason to go on. They just get what they can get while they can get it because they’re going to die and you can’t take the money with you, it turns out. You can pass it on if you have someone to pass it on to and you care enough to do that. So this is worth understanding. So the dollar goes down, crypto goes down because the uncertainty increases. That’s what should happen to currencies in an uncertain world. Sorry, it’s not hard. It’s sad because we want to link it to something that won’t escape our grasp. We want to say, no, I always know what it’s going to be worth. But again, my video on economy, that’s not how value works at all anyway. Value in the present doesn’t work that way. Value in the present works on negotiation. It’s a trade in real time. And a trade is an agreement between two people and if you can’t get an agreement between two people, that doesn’t make something valueless or priceless. It makes the transaction not happen. It’s a third state. And this is when we get into this binary thinking, well, something either has no value or has infinite value or has some value in between, or it just, the trade doesn’t happen. Like there’s a bunch of conditions there. So crypto is not tied to any reasonable expectation of value in the future. Now you can say, oh, I have a trust network, right? But money’s not based on trust, or at least not entirely. It’s based on the future potential value. So if I have something today that, well, let’s say some ore that contains gold that I can’t refine, that’s worth something right now to somebody who can add value to the process by crushing the rock and refining the gold. It’s worth more to them than it is to me, because I can’t unlock the potential of it in the future, and they can. With crypto, it’s harder to see where the added value could be to the money itself. And so it acts like a commodity, but the commodity price fluctuates because the value of the trust network is unknown. Because until the crypto is moved off chain, or unless you’re with a custodian, so if you’re Coinbase or one of those other places, you have a custodial wallet, they know who you are. But until it’s moved off chain, you may not know who it is. So I can buy things with the crypto on my Coinbase account, but they know who I am. And so they know where that money went, where that crypto went, and they know where that money went, where that crypto went. And that makes it of a different type than cash, or than bank transactions, because nobody’s monitoring all the bank transactions, it’s ridiculous. There’s way too many of them. You can see general flows, but you’re not going to be like, oh, that’s him buying a sweater. Could in theory, if you were targeting me, but you can’t do that for everybody, that doesn’t work. And there’s better ways to get that number anyway. Like, well, how many sweaters were bought? Now you can get all the cash ones by looking at the retail sales instead of trying to figure it out from the bank transactions, by the way. So that’s why that information isn’t available the way people think it is. In crypto, every purchase you make is available once they know who you are. Now, again, they may not know who you are until you take the money off chain, then they can probably figure out who you are. There may be ways around that that I’m not aware of. I’m sure they’re complicated. There are Bitcoin mixing outlets, right, to make it a little harder to trace. Fair enough. But by and large, on the blockchain, people can trace your transactions, and that limits their value. It doesn’t necessarily increase them. So that’s worth knowing. Not a crypto fan necessarily, also not, you know, bearish on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going to go to zero. There’s always going to be a place for Bitcoin, probably large transfers, especially of money that needs to get overseas, right, or money that needs to go between banks or something, you know, because you can send it between people and then people can deposit to their bank for free so they can get around bank transfer fees. Not a bad way to get around fees because the fees on Bitcoin are a lot less basically because one transaction can contain a lot more money and the transaction rates are flat rates. So I’m not sure about Bitcoin. I’m not sure what alternate money would look like or why we would care or why the system we have isn’t good enough. You can make all sorts of claims about the evil lizard people running the banking cartel from behind the shadowy dark room with the cigars or whatever. I don’t care. Most of this stuff cannot be controlled. They’ve been trying for decades to control the economy and they can’t do it. It’s just they can’t do it. Historically, it doesn’t work very well. Not that it doesn’t have any effect. Everything has some effect, not making a very good case, but it doesn’t have the effect they intend. They tell you upfront, we want inflation at this rate and they can never do it. So when it’s happening, I suspect it’s an accident. I suspect that it’s a coincidence. I don’t think they have any control at all. They have a little bit of influence, but they don’t have any control. And so, you know, take heart. No one’s controlling your big evil banking things. You are getting screwed over in very many ways. I could go over the ways that the banking industry has screwed you over, but they’re all faults of the government, not the banking industry. The government controls banking, at least in the U.S., more tightly than any other industry. So when the banks do something to you, it is the fault of your legislators and it is no one else’s fault, by the way, because they can prevent this. They just choose not to, and they do so either through ignorance or malice. They’re fully aware. So that’s my thoughts, long form on money. Money is a tricky thing. There’s a lot of aspects to it. If you want me to address something else other than sort of crypto and, you know, generalized value, which I tried to do here, maybe poorly, maybe well, you’ll tell me in the comments, right? Then let me know and I’ll try to cover it. I’m trying to cover things that people want covered. I don’t know what people want all the time. That’s why comments are helpful. Or you can find me on one of the Discord servers that I frequent, Bridges of Meaning, Awakening from Meaning Crisis, or my Discord server, Mark of Wisdom, if you can get in, if you’re cool enough. I’m usually on one of those three servers hanging out. I’m on Clubhouse too. We do Meaning Mondays at noon on Mondays right now. So yeah, if you’ve got feedback, give it to me and I’ll try to do stuff or more stuff. I’ve got a lot of topics. I’m always trying to cover topics. I’ve got a lot of topics I don’t know how to talk about yet. So that’s the thing, too. We’ve got another model set of model slides coming up because we did a presentation on Clubhouse. I’m happy to do more on money if that’s what you want, but you’ve got to let me know where to go with it and I can try to go there with it. Or if there’s something I didn’t cover well in this video, just let me know. I’ll try to do a better job. With that, I just want to thank you because I do appreciate that anybody at all watches my YouTube channel or any of my videos. Thank you for your time and attention.