Trivial to transact but impossible to forge and duplicate. And to verify they must be able to carry this information about any information so it has to do some platforms and networks and machines to generate effectively those transaction laws and records so to figure out how to make cash digital is a tall order which raises the question of why you would need to build such a thing in answering that question is surveillance to build parallel covert societies to libertarian economics and money to the pursuit of mortality all of these agendas fed into the creation of that coin and cryptocurrency. This isnt a story of just payment platform but a test to engineer a future society. A technological project i call the speculative fiction these currencies were platforms with the aid they are imagining. And then to inspire fear or hope and not just in relation to the future but one of the things i came to enjoy as i was working on the book is the currency world prick on one of the many terms of past and current how something actually functions as money. Then you believe someone else will take it from you in the future. Like it all has to do with anticipation. And then to anticipate a future where the currency is accepted whether state or taxes or goods. Is not necessarily about currency but how they use the idea and that would be wise widespread use. Led paper banknote has a peculiar challenge to prove itself under the extremely demanding rate every time you go to gad movie ticket and you see the signup we no longer accept 50dollar bills. And that is the necessary training how to verify what currency is. Paper banknote to authenticate itself in the moment in the whole of Society General to pass it through the transaction change the transaction chain take a 20dollar bill they are very dear to my heart i am fascinated by them after working on this book wonderful Government Technology with everyday life. So to the authenticating authority with the mint and the small textile Printing Company that specializes in they are amazing by the way. Along to write a book just about the process of secure paperwork it is an amazing artform and underappreciated. But this document and this bill has to function in the us 20 has a working life span over 1000 times over every kind of condition and circumstances before ultimately being withdrawn from circulation. There is a marvelous history to be written about the relationship between the secret service and prop money for movies they need huge volumes of cash and then to carefully supervise how that is produced to look believable and camera while not impassable. And to eventually realize one secret Service Agent said if it is green and has money somebody will accept at. And in that context if its green with a 20 somebody eventually will take it. They have to police themselves to ruin the currencys ability to function. So what this means is the real mess the singularity rests on the multiplicity. We know how currency is supposed to feel and what it looks like, how it authenticates itself to us because we have handled so much of it and that is the paradox now closing in on two centuriesold how to make something uniquely valuable through the sophistication. Hence all the state decorates that resemble birth and death certificates for the stamps , the seals and the color shifting inks. And those are the products of a tool. That was identified specifically for this because it can mechanically and quickly produce patterns exceedingly hard for the human hand reproduce. And stock certificates. And all of these transact with those signatures. They are archaic proof of precise and reproduction. All major currencies around the world also carry another Authentication Technology called the orion constellation this is a visual arrangement not for human but Image Processing software to communicate to certain categories of highend desktop Publishing Systems adobe photoshop, High Precision color it locks it out of the capacity to think it makes it possible to make an analog object by consensus platforms will refuse to touch that is strange and magical. So what that orion constellation raises for us is the difference that Digital Technology introduces to cash because a copy of the banknote is a copy there will be flaws and imperfections whether in the paper stock or missing details the way it was printed there wasted a copy of a banknote is not authentic it is a subculture of those who have expertise to recognize the subtle differences of bank notes. Unless it is compressed or altered a digital copy can be the original and easily verified as much it is a straightforward challenge of authenticity for reproduction which one is real . Or both how do you know if it is authentic or came first duplication is the issue of digital money itself this was issued by the institution and it has not been altered or tampered we can spot when somebody uses ball point pen to make a tendollar to 20dollar bill having a yosemite hasnt flipped a bit . There was one obvious solution that brings us to the first why digital cash. Like using paper checks or debit cards. The earliest project to predict the future of digital cash is the case this is the computers of tomorrow in the atlantic ma may 1964 in which the landmark document and among many other things that computers will dramatically transform the Digital Systems of money but that they could quietly police who has access to what and which electronic notes were affected this fantastic article from behavioral studies very much Johnny Appleseed of america and based on the congressional testimony to Warn Congress of imminent danger of the balance of power created by digital surveillance. Of that transfer system part of the team at georgetown brought together on behalf of the state department with the technological future of the soviet union the challenge was to come up with the best unobtrusive comprehensive Surveillance System they designed electronic funds transfer system like this systems of credit and debit cards. The reason being it is a timestamp to let you engage in every aspect and gives you data about the transaction and it can react to your purchases at something the state has decided you cannot have two red line to deliver forms of invisible coercion. With that marvelous in a horrific sense. Because the project affiliated to disenfranchisement and for those who have assets and to make them unavailable. That was said in an interview and said now that everyone uses that Electronic System to deny people access to credit to make she even envisioned as a society around systems and this scene from the show that in the background sees oranges for the first time in years that she doesnt have any money that lets her by oranges its only for other things. She could only freely engage in transactions for herself. For one specific purpose so that she can be tracked and monitored. And those transactions this is where we see people but then these transaction systems and that particular project was to make withdrawing money from the bank account as easy to do digitally as it was physically with the equivalent protection for your privacy. Weather that is digital or physical cash you can have in hand and theoretically there is no way for your particular identity circulate them when they are redeposited they go back into an account and deposit for recirculation. This was an inspiration to open up a vast design space and indeed a small Cottage Industry and to circumvent his patents and added into the industry. And in this case, he had a very different why why it was worthwhile to focus on electronic cash. He is a great figure for historians because his life like one of his safety shots goes through a whole new un subculture and theme navigated through so many subcultures and communities. For those other lives of digital cash and how they all came together and with a Loose Network of cartography advocates and to be interested in privacy but also with the possibility that was native to the internet but operate outside territorial governance entirely. But to have this the signature along with serious clever jokes about the talking heads for go this was his plan and his vision of cryptoanarchy the description of the master plan that he argue largely inevitable with the spread of strong encryption of anonymous digital cash for new off the books global blackmarket markets and information networks. And as the list implies as the collapse to the nationstates and government. Thats the second wife. And to transact in privacy but uphold the users out of a relationship with julian assange, and also the creator of bit coin dark monies silk road. Or for the retired intel engineer posting manifestoes but his why raised another how. The currency is not being managed then how much currency should be produced . How is that amount verified . And how do you know that token you are transacting is real . To have prototype toy currencies to have that computational challenge and as he was not alone but there were many other people who collaborated. So he envisioned that you have verifiable work with a proof of work is cost is the volume of money to replace the system of human Central Banks also like a cute email address. The technological roots of the project this is the design for what works and then to govern the production to contribute to be measured and verified by other people. The technological roots laid the idea how to deal with email spam another challenge to create a place and prevent the flood of worthless paper. And the Cultural Roots of this project has less to do with reinventing postage than reinventing gold. The third why is a complex set of political commitments to a currency backed by Precious Metals. And then i realized that this is already james bond gold finger pointing to fort knox. The obsession with gold will carry throughout the next part of my talk. This is the third why based on a complex set of commitments of currency backed by Precious Metals. And with that liquidity of online commerce and transaction transactions. Scarcity, the way it functions as an asset class and the deflationary character. And i have to say what hg wells calls magnificent and stupid honesty goldman and all of that however unreal to put it outside of the control of government regulation for banking. This version of the digital cash project due on the work of the real pioneers, a subculture of digital gold currencies. Before paypal egold and other companies doing massive volume but then to put them to quarterly in idaho and others. This particular artifact is from the Liberty Dollar not a bank. That is the own circulate of all notes of ownership receipts for volume of precious metal stored on pallets. And his soon as they could issue paper receipts to come up with their own ledger and transaction system to pay and be paid in the precious metal accounting system. This version of the digital but that networks ease of use is the scarcity of precious metal. And they required a tremendous amount of trust on behalf of the users mammogram of the bar of the chain of custody documents and warehouse that you likely never saw and when someone drops the dime and the secret service got wind , everyones assets were tagged and thrown into the van for the trial. The whole network could be distributed and all the assets walked out the door with us marshals. It is the best source for the currency scheme of all the stuff that is left over from the various documents they released publicly which provokes another how how do you build a system in the ledger of ownership with the scarce material that is distributed. Sitting with a sympathetics to the goals but not the means of the digital gold currencies of particular importance isnt just the scarcity of gold but the way it could be known the cultures of knowledge and the ways it can be physically weighed or assayed or accounted for if you go back to the archival material its like going back into the archives of the archivists. Meticulously maintained sheets that tell you every single time it was tested sitting on every context. And with knowledge and written in terms of block chain knowledge. The creators of dgc proposed ideas so something that would allow them so that quality of money so that was for Precious Metals. Started going to libertarian events in New Hampshire as i was working on this book because its one of the only places with casual daytoday transactions and in Precious Metals. Im sure many of you can guess why you can buy things and with that changing volume of Precious Metals at the time. And that metallic content changed on the basis of the hobby just to get rolls and rolls of quarters and hang out in your house at night working for to identify the pre 1964 quarters and then to cycle through the banks own inventory. And then to buy socks or what have you at the libertarian event and then from your smart phone with a bit coin. Or you are transacting silver. A very specific question. How was that the people that make one thing like the other . Because both could theoretically be known. Asking why he got interested in silver he looked at me baffled the wait is the weight its a specific type of knowing the first and last why of making digital cash is just closely connected to the previous three is the same issue was explaining the system of digital cash. The journal of trans human thought. And someone on the margins and the member of an almost forgotten network philosophers and bay area weirdos at the end of the century. And then and then to sites inspiration and get the key ideas going. So to be focused on the creation of limitless abundance more energy, information, time, spac. And of the austrian freemarket economics that a path to abundance through technological innovation that the phrase free markets barely does them justice and then to be nominated and hayek and that influential figure the issue from the virtual bank and filled with jokes about the future they were sure they would be a part of. The first thing they thought had to be free with the ultra free market with the breakthrough that they hoped for was money itself. New forms of future oriented currency distributed by decentralized banks are the vehicles out of the earths gravity well to be rich beyond measure for which they could profit today and many of those experiments are notable to build currencies on how wildly successful you are going to be with idea coupons the only remaining idea coupon that i intend to claim to mature only if the prediction came to pass so you could buy into the prediction almost of your betting on kick starter except for the likelihood if some number of operation or putting humans on the surface of mars by a certain date. And one other bet it takes the melancholy sting to lay the groundwork and then plan to have themselves cryonic frozen. The highlighted name was an entrepreneur and a techno optimist notable for other stents for the Space Shuttle budget into the congressional record to depress the value of the private industry spaceflight market and the online information marketplace a fascinating book to be written at some point here is the interesting character indeed this was widely discussed with the Information Exchange with the inversion of the entire internet trying to build by himself from scratch a singularly bizarre project also was dying of pantry at on pancreatic cancer the issue that he discussed with a friend of his how to create the money to hold its value into the future are secured from taxation available with a password. Indeed how the past word itself has controls in the brain has to be reconstructed with so much accuracy the password could be recalled from it a reverse prize to bring its own back. This is from the log of people being frozen. Which is still maintained which in of itself if anyone wants to do this of like nonfiction and studies of everyone who is currently on i. C. E. The snapshot of a particular quarter of the 20th century. So the need to freeze meant the currencies they were envisioning to simultaneously have technological change while also remaining themselves safe and secure as real estate or Treasury Bonds the kind of money that could keep your wealth from you in which your love existed but thats impossible in the intention that plays out in much contemporary digital cash. And fascinated by this picture always wonder what the woman on the left is thinking as she gazes out of the courts. This is the room that it is stored in which they are frozen. In what is this room of room full of broken time machines and investment vehicles was speculative innovation to produce the technology to repair the machines and this is the fourth why of digital cash is ended up being produced after the millennium as a paradox that was also a fantasy of the downturn improve security and speaking practically nobody is speculating on cryptocurrency of people in the same breath promise something that is more solid than any other aspect could be which as a historian of mathematics it is as real as math but simultaneously while the volatile through the stars of prosperity and its rare to find an asset like that. The deep freeze tasks include that i would like to close here with the correspondent and a recipient of the second bit coin transaction with technical and critical feedback with the first draft of the new system and decide from themselves and probably construed the most important person in the early days. Money is ultimately about that. One of the questions we should think about, and the long run we are all dead. The future is where we go to be archaic and asked her nest stick fools for the deceased. The future is where all money ultimately ends. And so one of the questions that i think this project gives to us, that i hope we can talk about a little bit in the q and asf im reflecting on this, not necessarily just practical currency but currency that also holds promises about the future. And ways of thinking about the future. And ways of thinking of what the future holds for us. If there are ways that we can talk about what kinds of futures we would like to live in. And how money can build toward those promises. How forms of currency can actually provide avenues into a Better Future than when we are going to get. Thank you very much for your attention. [applause] it ended on a super gleeks notes. I made a bleak mood, its a super bleak time right now. [laughter] so we are going to have a mic for the questions. For the benefit of americas wonderful Television System cspan which we cannot be more tickled about. Oh, i should have actually said that. We are going to be on cspan book talk. Which is literally one of my favorite things in the world. Its going to be us and congressional testimony. And impeachment hearings. Good company. Its drawing a line thinking about when you were were at the libertarian gathering in New Hampshire and how their only specific coins had certain values. It reminded me of even thats entirely Different Reasons if you go to certain countries they will only accept american dollars. Or will only be 20dollar bills in certain years. Anything prior to 2009 or something, is worthless basically. So i think sudan is one of those countries where if you go there at 20s and our 2009 and prior they will not be accepted. I dont know, my question is if you have any comments on that or there is this weird kind of line between if you have power and if you dont have power. And the different uses of money and the different values we place on it. Thats a wonderful question. I think there is two dimensions to this question, that are all especially interesting to think about in terms of how we talk about things like crypto currencies. Which are that the first is the idea of fungibility. Like all the economical sense all money of a particular kind is fungible. They are all units that can be exchanged from one another. They are all in some abstract sense the same thing with specific instantiations. But in practice thats not the case. Monday is actually highly particular. It is highly particular both in terms of the values given to different monetary objects, whether thats people who are much more obsessed with the spot value of mental than the face value of coins. Or with people who are operating in a context where, for statewide reasons, federal reasons, particular builds before. When news Security Technology can be trusted. Like this whole economy they got flooded with extremely good fake notes. Which were u. S. Notes that last i heard mostly likely printed using old equipment from east germany they got sold off and ended up in north korea and libya. But they had like fantastic facilities are producing really beautiful notes. Those effectively killed off the ability of certain classes of dollars from before a particular period to circulate. So those dollars really arent fungible. They actually exist in different regimes of knowledge of being able to understand and verify that something is likely or no. But even more than that i think this goes into questions of power in the future. As we have learned both from behavioral economics and from wonderful work by people like viviana seltzer we dont treat, even money that we ourselves hold, the same way. Zealots are has written an incredible length depth about the question of how we we all do this. You get 20 bucks by chance from somebody and it will be like this is my fun 20 bucks. I get to spend this on anything because i didnt earn it. The process is called earmarking. It seems like a trivial thing we all engage in ordinary life. Except for the fact that it can have a real impact like structure our finances. For how we think about putting money away for the future versus spending money now. For how we think about giving money to different people for what it means to receive money. Allowances, pin money, walk away money, the stash of and i cant swear because on television, but the stash is whats called f you money that people can accumulate in businesses or marriages as a way of providing a kind of security and in the prospect of things changing. All of that is theoretically fungible money except you Different Things to you. One of the kind of most salient questions for that is, we use our thoughts about how money is earmarked to also tell ourselves stories about the future. Thats another place where money has the anticipatory function. To help us imagine different ways of life, to help us feel differently about what might he coming. It also gives us different ways to express or have power relationships put upon. So one particular useful kind of element of going to all these libertarian things, was being able to encounter people for whom transacting money was an expression of power. Not in the way that for almost everyone it is, not in the sense of being able to have the power to do something or express that power over someone else. That instead the very act of transacting to choose which you would transact in was a sign of commitment to a particular society. To a particular set of ideas. So in the libertarian context you hear a lot of dismissive referrals and people trying to buy things using frn switches Federal Reserve notes which is to say dollars. Those things, that trash. One of the kind of fascinating and deeply peculiar things about the New Hampshire context, was all of these places where people go to tremendous travel to figure out how to transact the earliest, bulky us, weirdest version of bitcoin persontoperson with their smart phones we have to go over to the hillside where you can get reception so you can actually successfully get it to work and it would not settle for ten minutes and all the rest of it. And they would do that for like a pair of socks. But the point was, the gesture, the performance of engaging in a transaction that as it were, cut you out of the society that you did not want to be a part of. It allowed you to identify a different set of social practices. One of the reasons why Ross Albrecht started silk road was because is very committed to this sort of, even within what ive learned in studying and working on this book is that every libertarian project has an end plus the one version of what libertarian is. Ross aldrich wasnt egress among other things which is a group that basically tries to bring down the pernicious state through many, many transactions which take place outside of the state context. So for albrecht, the part for starting the silk road was not to become the Pablo Escobar of the internet or of the poor internet, but also to create a space in which people could get used to the idea of engaging in secret transactions that were outside of taxation systems that were making use of bitcoin. Too basically, as it were, use drugs as the attractor to the real points. Which was that you would be integrated into this antistate economy. A way that we can sort of bear all this in mind is when we look at all of the transactions we engage with and takes place around us. Transactions far beyond the space of cash alone. Transactions also at the level of favors, gifts, of coupons, of casino chips, what have you. These are all ways in which these are ways in which power relationships but also models of history and plans for the future are being performed. Right from persontoperson. These are ways they get mentally earmarked and acted out. So i think its really worthwhile to think about the flows of money, especially where we can see this much more explicitly with crypto currencies. Where you know the rule of craigslist where that the reason why the goods are cheap is because you have to smell some strangers house. By the same token, one of the greatest challenges for transaction crypto currency is having to get the speech of why its important that you are transacting in his crypto currency. And watch somebodys youtube videos, just let this happen. We need to think about that is not being exceptional, but not unique. Its like being exceptional and explicit, but it is not unique. Part of the nature itself as it embodies cultural practices and beliefs. That was super. [inaudible] i was excited about that question. People were inspired by these pioneers and this guy both are not free now but also this is an extreme case. I dont know if you try to buy bitcoin you often have to sort of disclose, show a government with your picture to some people so, so you can buy the thing. And then all other trades that people who build the system, who are seeking with image and secrecy because the government treats the transaction systems the way it does. They seem to not be realized and in fact it may be that traditional cash system and credit card. Again because of the way the government treats them provides more secrecy and a nonentity in some cases if the governments go to citibank and ask like why, when, where you bought something, they needed judge to see something. But im not sure about the u. S. But in other countries bitcoins in similar countries are treated in a way they are particularly unprotected from these kinds of surveillance and sort of easily accessible to whoever wants to surveilled you. How much this utopia are realized . That is a fantastic question. Theres two aspects to it. The first is more practical aspects, which is that i think in some ways part of the story i want to tell today, part of the story the book tells, is the way in which the same technology ended up having to bear the weight of fundamentally conflicting agendas. Of different ways of different goals to accomplish in a way that i think anyone who is in Software Development can recognize. That nightmarish mission work started out as a messaging app, but i guess we are now also a calendar . And we are also going to be able to read email, its like an ebook reader thing in there because were like a book Club Platform now. That happened. We all worked in the space and in a grander sense, part of this is because, as a Technology Gets negotiated, as its actually being designed and produced, it often ends up having to take on a series of different projects. Different visions, different agendas. And in this case part of what i wanted to help capture today is as we go to each why, its both evolving from the previous one, but diverging from it. So, one of the things that fascinates me about david jones were, the first why, the privacy digit cash project is that it actually worked. It worked extraordinary well. Ultimately did not take off, the company didnt take off and theres a bunch of Different Reasons for that. But did you cash itself provided precisely what he promised in a laser focused way. A method by which you could transact existing money anonymously online, or in person entirely digitally. The moment that it starts to shift into yes, but for ideological reasons we dont want to transact u. S. Dollars, we want to transact our own currency that would generated, has a whole new layer of difficulty to that. And part of that new layer of difficulty is how do we verify how much of this is actually in circulation . And then if you wanted to function in a way thats more like a deflationary thing like gold, that adds yet another layer which is calorie going to keep track of who has the rights to transact which thing it which point . His system, for all of its flaw that was also a feature, which was that you could lose your digital cash. If you had it on a card and you left the card in a taxi, it was like you left an envelope full of cash in the taxi. The benefit of that though, was that also function to that way because it was truly anonymous tokens with no connection to you, there is no recourse for that process. Whereas by the time you get into the prototype block chain system, youre starting to look at something that has now reached a point where to preserve and an enemy you have to know exactly who knows what it what time it all transactions forever in a single place. Such that as we have all seen, ross is a great example of this, a single break in that chain enables you to be anonymized a vast swath of activity and quickly reconstruct the grasp of the whole payment networks. So its not just utopia that failed, rather its one of my favorite books, but thats very dear to me in a big inspiration writing this is a american story can and novelist Margaret Young who is often neglected in some ways. Partially because maybe she spent the second half of her career writing a thousand page novel is very difficult to repeat she wrote a wonderful biology issue angel in the forest which is a history of the same town in indiana which hosted, over the course of a couple decades, two completely different utopias that were basically at war with each other. Where one was in a pop bolus acute topia that made people and angels and the other was a radically atheist socialist utopia that was trying turn people into machines basically. I think in some ways, part of the reason i kept going back to that book is that digital cash is kind of a story like that. Its not just a story about the failure of utopia, its a story about a series of utopias each trying to supersede or incorporate the other one with fundamentally different visions and goals. And the process of trying to reconcile those, is now the complex of web and which block Chain Developers are stuck as they kind of tried to balance all the promises of the original white paper which features a great weasel word edit. Which is a long promising you dont need trusted thirdparty to verify transactions. What is it, trans actors can be anonymous, that can end up being carrying a lot of weight for people and i think it really speaks to the fact that even he understood, you can see this in the email archives and the postings now komodo understood this was something to solve up coupled her problems at once. Not necessarily solving all of them in the optimal way, but more heavily skewed towards the digital gold currency side of things than the purely information protecting side of things. So all of these subsequent developments weve seen a people trying to figure out what do we really want digital cash to be and custombuilt to that. So when you look at some the legs the cash you see something thats really trying to fork over in the direction of anonymity rather than preciousness and scarcity. I am on fire in terms of long answers i really apologize. Im enjoying thinking to the stories with you. One of the same sort of building on that that i thought was most interesting when i was reading is how all how all of these utopian motivators, the things these libertarian enclaves are really motivated by their fear of emergencies and these bizarre blown out of proportion utopias that they have envisioned. I am wondering, if when you spoke to these communities they recognized whether that tension between this extreme optimism and extreme dystopian ism is differentiated between their miss trust in government and their mistrust incorporate surveillance and whether those of the same thing to them . Thats a fantastic question. Thats another sort of its another thread in the book and its another big thread in how we construe money broadly. Which is how we think about money in terms of crisis. Like one of the thing that haunts the production of money, especially the 20th century, his questions of what regulates its flow, what happens in states of emergency when the value of money abruptly changes. One of the first things, i used to do this sort of informal poll when i would be talking to technical audiences about the history and the book and i would ask was the first thing you think of when you think of a monetary emergency . It was shocking how many people thought of hyperinflation. Which may sound somewhat obscure want to talk about it like that, but the images of that particular moment of printed money, printed currency, banknotes that have become so devalued there being care carried around a wheelbarrow and used insulate houses, retained an incredible potent quality of memory for people who were concerned about the idea of monetary emergency. Now perhaps like venezuela is replacing it, zimbabwe or hungary. The tricky thing though, is to dis articulate the history of monetary emergencies from the particular roles that emergency plays in the libertarian imaginary in the United States. Which i think its well worth thinking about when we talk about bitcoin. Because even though bitcoin is a global story and not a u. S. Story, i think it is significant to remember that it emerges in the exact moment, to the day basically of halloween night of 2009, the moment when ted spread in the United States is at 2,082,009. Suddenly im blanking, this is the worst thing for historian. You cant get a date wrong. Im suddenly blanking on when this financial event took place. Moments of massive financial crisis, the middle of the global credit craze, a real sense of open freefall. Encoded into the block chain itself. In the barely earliest blocks of the bitcoin block chain is a timestamp which is the headline in the times about the major bailout being made for banks. Its like something being marked as a currency that was emerging at an exact moment of crisis when it could like be when there is a context for what should be widely adopted instead of other things. This is, i think in some ways building on the set up ideologies about money that comes out of a very specifically american context. Which is the sense of future urgency as an investment strategy. The idea that the existing system is going to collapse. Ive ended up reading so much literature you can go back like clockwork, decade by decade the United States is going to be a road boy or health scape of people siphoning gas out of cars and fighting for food in the supermarkets within five years. And it has been like that for 50 years. Every five years, in the future theres going to be an definite disaster. But whats most salient about that disaster is the fact that the disaster functions, not a something to invert but is something to embrace. Because by embracing it, you get to the better system. You get to it by a process of emergence by emergency. By embracing the idea that everything is going to fall apart instead of trying to get involved in some advocacy position that selling people your silver dollars in certificates. Like theres a huge economy of emergencies survivalist sales. All of these places where people pay top dollar for buckets of freezedried food, and the fish antibiotics and all of the rest of it. Its within that context that we need to think about that is a future for money. That is something that shapes ways people think about money. I think we should not underestimate how much the adoption of crypto currencies is still to some degree, shaped by how it was initially connected with states of emergency and fears of states of emergency. Like a lot of the earliest attempts to sell bitcoin to a general public involve people like my favorite antiheroes, who shows up in this book, this guy named roger who is basically a citizenship entrepreneur and a bitcoin evangelist. He is now involved in libra land and is involved in taking over contested island in the danube and make it into block chain utopia. But at the time, and like 2010 ish, he started a business trying to sell people secondary citizenships for bitcoin. For pass passports for bitcoin business. The whole premise of it was people who are interested in bitcoin believed in emergency was coming people who were interested in bitcoin are in a market for this kind of thing because they are convinced they are in danger. I think we need to partially understand the part of legacy that crypto currency may still be in the process of overcoming, is the way in which they were initially created within such a specific framework of the future. Within the conversations that i personally recall from this world in like 2010 and 2011, but cones being adopted in cyprus in the middle of a financial freeze. Like bitcoin being adopted by refugees, this was like the marketplace. People who would last access at the financial tools and now moving into the space it was always following assumptions and the people of talking to in my interviews. This was coming for us in the smart thing to do would be to get into bitcoin now. So that you have it with you when you fled with your bag on your back through the dust storm. So i think the framework of crisis is a really interesting one to look at, not just historically, but now obviously its part of what is especially striking about our current moment is all of the ways in which people are trying to negotiate what it means to think about a future in crisis and how we should manage that her think about that financially. [inaudible] goes along the very american idea that will also be millionaires. [laughter] so it kind of goes it has to have both of those. I know thats interesting. I think in many ways its a really good way of thinking about the kind of consisted should to tension that lays at the heart of not just early crypto currencies, but of a lot of different kinds of what we might think of is more for mental or speculative currencies. They often have to sustain this internal paradox of crisis and promise. In the same way that the fundamental problem of extra rope he in history was trying to strike that balance between we are Building Systems that everything we construe is the meaning of human life is meaningless because we will not even be in our bodies anymore. We wont die, i will be some sort of robot tiger, you will be a brain and the squid and we will living in a satellite all the rest of it at the same time clinging to the idea that you still have your wealth and your wealth still mean something. It will be significantly of access to these resources. Theres something sternly robust about an internal paradox. Its almost as a certain kind of trusses and structural inert engineering where they reinforce each other. As long as you can maintain for yourself the internal paradox that like a terrible crisis is coming, the food network the network for logistics for the delivery of food is going to collapse. Going to be the book written by jacob reids father is titled mr. Investment banker, blood in the streets. There is going to be blood in the street, literal militant chaos that the chance for you to clean up. Its going to be a chance for you to make good on catastrophe. That in a way something we should think about not just something that has a flaw but instead somewhere we need to understand why the logical flaw works. Why its a selfsustaining system for the people who adopt it. [inaudible] thank you wealth your time. [applause] and book tv in prime time starts now. In just a minute, Brown Universitys peter andres talks about relationship between drugs and war. Then the Washington Post care lending and philip rutgers have their reporting of a Trump Administration thats followed by sally pipes argument against medicare for all. And repping up the evening is Susan Hennessy and benjamin witness, their look at the executive branch and president ial misconduct. Check your Program Guide for more information. Now heres peter andres. Good afternoon i am the director of the Watson Institute for international and public affairs, and i am so delighted to be here today to celebrate killer high. Fantastic new book by peter andres. I just want to say as a student chinese affairs, i hardly need to be told about the relationship between drugs and war. I have course know the intensity and the feeling of china and the central humiliation that began with the opium war, but at the same time its