And this is one how and several competing wise. How do you go about getting the digital equivalent for currency for cash and coining it is a significant technical challenge and you need to create a Digital Object that is difficult to forge and duplicate. Easy to verify, prove it is what it claims to be under all kinds of conditions and constraints for all people. You must be able to carry the information what it is, what it is worth without generating any information how it is used or by whom and has to do this on platforms and networks and machines that generate effectively perfect copies and transaction logs and records. So to figure out the how of how to make Something Like cash digital is a very tall order which raises the question why you would need to build such a thing. Answering the question will take us from fighting surveillance to libertarian theories of economics and the pursuit of human mortality and all of thes agendas fed into the creation of bit coin and the cryptocurrency a block chain currency today. Its not just the story of building a new payment platform but a deliberate attempt to engineer a future society through the mechanism of money a utopian project i like to call the speculative currency projects but also the term speculative fiction these were platforms not just for future outcomes but to aid and then to be accompanied by prototypes and stories and practices seeking to inspire fear or hope to avert future conditions or invoke them to appear the currencies that function not just to the future one of the things i came to enjoy working most on as i was working on this book was how people who work in the currency world talk about currency and passing current is a way to talk about how something actually functions with money that is something you accept because you believe somebody else will take it from you in the future then it passes to someone else to say that the passing current which gives currency its name has to do with anticipation to hold currency is to anticipate a future it will be accepted where there a merchant or gift exchange. So what this book ends up being about is not necessarily about currency but how people use the idea to imagine a future where something will be accepted or valued or in widespread use. So, in other words to transact cash is relief in the future acceptance of the note but also the veracity of the note itself. A paper bank no has a peculiar challenge to prove itself under an extremely demanding condition to do so to the untrained user. Every time you see the sign of that they have we no longer accept 50dollar bills or when you receive these use them in the following way it is the necessary training of how to verify what currency is and make paper banknotes prove themselves up paper bank note must be able to authenticate in the moment as you handle it and into the whole of society generals you can pastor and convince everyone through that change one chain it is not forged for counterfeits to take a 20dollar bill they are dear to my heart after working on the book uniform object of technology and the product of the authenticating authority in the event of the Federal Reserve and then to specialize and it is amazing. I long to write a book that is just about the process of making secure paperwork it is an amazing artform very underappreciated. But this document has to function without recourse with any of these authorities and us 20 has a life between five and seven years will be transacted thousands of times and its lifespan under every condition of circumstances passing in and out of banks before ultimately withdrawn from circulation and destroyed. A marvelous history to be written by someone about the relationship between the secret service and the production of pop money for movies because they need huge volumes of cash. You have to have something to show when you open the suitcase and the secret service watches how that is produced to look believable on camera but not be passable on the set if it is green and has 20 on it somebody will accept it. So the bills have to function as authenticating systems in a context if it is green with a 20 somebody will eventually take it somehow they have to police themselves to the way it doesnt ruin the ability to function. And the singularity that it is forge no more counterfeit we know how it is supposed to feel. We know what it looks like and how it authenticates itself because we have handled so much of it. That is the paradox of the modern bank note how to make something uniquely valuable to the sophistication by which you reproduce it. s everything that decorates the document that resembles of birth and death certificate stamps and seals color shifting inc. And security threads. You cant quite see it at this resolution but the beautiful and psychedelic patterns that we see on the face of currency that is the tool that is specifically good for this because it can mechanically and quickly produce patterns exceedingly hard for the human hand to reproduce. The other place you see rose engine late for work is stock certificates. It is telling that all of these patterns share the banknotes that we transact with those signatures at the bottom. It is precise and reproduction. All major currencies around the world also carry another authentication technology, pattern of circles called the orion constellation of visual arrangement not for humans but Image Processing software to communicate to certain categories of highend desktop publishing systems, adobe photoshop, photoshop, extremely High Precision color copiers that this object with this pattern is not to be digitized. It is a mechanism to walk this out of the capacity to be made digital which is a beautiful thing to think about. Is a system that makes it possible to produce the analog object that digital platforms will refuse to touch. It is strange and magical. And what the orion constellation raises is the difference, the challenge of knowledge of Digital Technology introduces to cash and in practical terms a copy of a bank note is a copy there are flaws and imperfections whether in the paper stock and there are ways to know that a copy of a bank note is not authentic but a beautiful subculture of people who have the expertise to recognize the subtle differences in banknotes so even the best counterfeit can be spotted. But unless it is compressed or altered the company can be the original to be easily verified that is the perspective of reproduction in which one is real or both . How do you know which one came first . The question of authenticity is the issue of digital money itself. How do you know a bank note was issued by the institution credited with it . And it has not been altered or tampered . We can spot with the ball point pen to make a tendollar bill into a 20dollar bill how do you know somebody has not flipped on the digital cash to give it an extra zero . There is one solution and that brings us to the first why of digital cash all the money in a master ledger. And that indeed is the earliest project to predict the future of digital cash would be the case. The computers of tomorrow the atlantic 1964 the same magazine to publish the landmark document that help to inspire hypertext so to predict among many other things that computers will dramatically transform the nature of congress with the creation of Digital Systems of money and do that through total comprehensive surveillance that could quietly police how all money was transacted who had access to what in which notes were authentic or real or issued. That attitude changed over the course of the following decade this fantastic article Behavioral Sciences at stanford who worked at the government of defense and the Johnny Appleseed of cold war computing this is congressional testimony to Warn Congress of the danger of the power created by digital surveillance and in particular by the use of Electronic Fund transfer system. And is part of a team at georgetown that was brought together by a think tank on behalf of the state department with the technological future of the soviet union thats challenges to come up with the best on of trust so unobtrusive Surveillance System after considerable work that is to say Something Like the credit and debit cards and the reason being it gives you a time stamp geocoded place that you engage in every aspect of any form of transaction and that to be computerized and in real time to react to your purchases for example to decline your ability to do something so realtime price gouging and redlining are deliberate forms of inverted visible coercion over assets. This is not that long after and the handmaids tale begins with a nightmare of the money because one of the first rooms of the project to disenfranchise is to use databanks for women for those who have assets and freeze those assets and lock them out of their own credit and was said in an interview everyone cap missing it and said that now that everyone uses electronic forms of credit its easy to deny access and indeed with monetary surveillance and coercion based on the theme in the book to see oranges for the first time in years and longs to get one but cant because she has not been given any money that lets her by oranges she can only have coupons for other things she cannot freely engage in transactions or accumulate value for herself the money is only good for one specific purpose in the way so that can she be tracked and monitored and controlled and the responses were not slow in coming and then to create digital cash with those exact fears of surveillance the electronic surveillance of the future. And this is where we see and those transaction systems to make big brother obsolete. And the project of digital cash was to make withdrawing money from your bank account is easy to do digitally is physically with the equivalent protection for privacy. When you withdraw money you have that cash in hand and theoretically with the notes that you have withdrawn to your particular identity. You can give them to people, circulate, make purchases and redeposit into the identified account and circulation is anonymous. This was an inspiration for a huge set of other projects opening up a vast design space other people try to find ways to work you need a small cottage industry. And how to circumvent in various ways to build your own are added into but in this case for this particular article there was a very different why for why it was worthwhile to focus on electronic cash. And is a great figure for the story and. And then that takes you through a whole new subculture because they navigated through those communities and projects. And then to see the rise of digital cash and how we all came together toward the end of the millennium as a member of the loose advocates that call themselves the cyberpunks as their name might suggest but also with the possibility of computational currency native to the internet that not only ensures anonymity of transactions but operate outside territorial governance. The backslide we use to have the signature of emails and online post with clever droop jokes about lyrics from the talking heads this was his plan and his vision of cryptoanarchy and a description of the master plan he argued was largely inevitable with the spread of strong encryption through anonymous digital cash with new off the books global black market anonymous markets and Information Networks and Money Laundering schemes as that list implies to the collapse of the nation and collapse of government. And not just to transact dollars but to adopt those and to pull them out with the relationship with the direct the creator of the anonymous bit coin book silk road has an interesting batting average for a retired manifesto. But the why of creating digital cash and however and how much currency should be produced how is that amount verified how do you know the token you are transacting is real and to have prototype currency to propose the computational challenge and i hasten to add not to be alone in this there were many other people and they all collaborated so he envisioned the unit of verifiable work that a computer would have to do to produce a do token news cost could regulate the volume of money a mechanism to replace the system of human decision directed central bank. And very provocative. The technological roots of this project he also made his own logo and for reusable work and prototype currency in which with the production of new money that would have to contribute to be measured and verified by other people. The technological roots of the project lay in ideas to deal with email with a price that is effectively free to prevent the flood of worthless paper. For many enthusiasts the Cultural Roots had less to do with reinventing postage than reinventing gold. This is a third why of the political commitment to a currency backed by precious metals. I find this slide to music and that one amusing and i realize this is goldfinger from the james bond movie to make gold radioactive. That of session will characterize this is the third why to make digital cash to the currency backed and the desire to combine the ease and liquidity of transactions but the physical constraints of gold the scarcity and the challenge and the function of collateral that is the medium of exchange and the deflationary character to be able to hoard it. And hg wells called the magnificent stupid honesty. Cold follows that to the plea one the people that believed in it. This pas from the Liberty Dollar system coming off a bank they hasten to add which was attempting to create their own searchable note which were not notes of currency as such but ownership received free volume of precious metal physically stored on the budget pellets. And they would also as soon as they were able to issue paper receipts issued digital warehouse receipts so they could be paid in the precious metal accounting tokens. This version of the project drew on the work. These had the ideology, the network easeofuse and scarcity of precious metal and required a tremendous amount of trust on the part of the users. With its marks and chain of custody documents sitting on the palate and a warehouse which she likely never saw and when someone dropped a dime on the operation of the secret Service Called wind of the notes in circulation everyone asked and got thrown in the van for the eventual trial. Your whole network could be distributed and neither was the ledger. And of course i should say the reason why the quality on these materials is so bad it is the best source of the archives on the digital so debate concurrency scheme the fbi of the stuff that is left over from the various documents be released publicly for which provokes of course another how how could you build a system where the ledger of ownership and scarce material values were as distributed as the owners and trade sectors. Its not the means of the digital gold currencies of particular importance for people of digital cash project it wasnt the scarcity of gold. Going back to the archives it is like going back into the archives of archivists. If these maintained sheets that told you how it was created every single time it was tested in every shelf it has sat on in every country and context and every time someone physically handled it. A kind of knowledge that may ring a bell for us. People in the creators alike proposed ideas for digital cash as a kind of verifiable collected all of the production of money something that would allow them to somehow measure and a snapshot of the overall shape and quantity of their money in the world in the way that they could more or less of you for precious metals. I started going to the libertarian events in New Hampshire in the mid20s since i was working on this but because they were the only places i could find where attachable daytoday transactions were being conducted in the crypto currencies and precious metals. Im sure many of you can already guess, but the reason why you can buy for specific value is because of the changing volume of the coinage overtime. So, basically the metallic content of silver half dollars in quarters at times changed on the date that they note there is a whole kind of New Hampshire libertarian hobby that is to get rolls of quarters and dimes from the bank and then hang out in your house at night going through them looking for the characteristics sparkle that helps you identify the pre 1964 quarters and then just returning all the rest into cycling through the banks on the inventory. So you go to buy socks or chili or what have you libertarian enclave event to be conducted by smart phones were through transacting silver. There was a very specific kind of question of how is it the people that like this one thing like the other and it is because of the way in which both of them could theoretically be known. A when i asked him why he got interested in the money he looked at me baffled and said silver is silver and the weight is to wait. It is a gullibility. So, before the end of the last by making digital cash and sometimes the strangest, the most oddly beautiful that so closely connected begins in this magazine just the same issue he was explaining the system of digital cash, this issue of trans humanist thought. He was an extra being and someone on the margins of the digital gold currency. And the member of a remarkable almost forgotten network technologists, philosophers, futurists and very dear to us at the end of the century. Many that played the creation of art extravaganza at one point or another including virtually everyone outside of the sciences and most of the people that kicked the tires and hoped to get the idea is going for it. The extra pins were focused on the creation of the limitless abundance on the cosmic scale. More energy, more information, more time and space, more intelligence and more life. The devotees of philosophy and economics believe that the path to abundance within the technological innovation accelerated by markets so free that the phrase free market really does them justice. This is one of the many currencies created a and the austrian economists. Extraordinarily influential figure in the 20th century much to our detriment issued from the virtual bank and this is filled with jokes about the future of the extra pins that they were sure they were going to be a part of. The first thing that they had thought had to be freed that would create the radical technological breakthrough that they hoped for was money itself. New forms of future oriented currency distributed by states with decentralized banks would be their vehicle out of the earths gravity well. He wanted to build conceived were enriched beyond measure to profit today. Indeed many of the currency experiments werconcurrencyexperr just how experimental they were to build reputational currencies where you could bet on how successful you and the rest of your friends on the mailing list were going to be. Idea coupons which i believe i may hold one of the only remaining ones i may claim which i would mature if and only if a particular prediction came to pass. So you could effectively buy into that prediction almost as if they were bidding on a kick starter except for the likelihood of say a computer capable of a number of operations or living humans on the surface of mars by such and such a date or successful reanimation. Theres one other bit on the future of limitless abundance. To take some melancholy staying out of the idea that they were going to lay a groundwork for the posthuman immortality and then die to become a decade or two before it panned out. It presented its own problems for the digital cash. The highlighted name was a professional techno optimist in the 70s and 80s notable for among others reading the entirety of the budget into the congressional record was part of its argument that the Space Shuttle was artificially depressing the value of the private industry spaceflight market and he opened the company in california in the marketplace both of them about 20 years ahead of their time give or take. Theres a fascinating work to be given at some point hes an interesting character who basically lived in advance of his own context more or less perpetually and it was widely discussed in the information marketplace system and exchange was effectively a version of the entire internet he was trying to build from scratch by himself in thand early 1980s. It is a singularly bizarre project. And by the late 1980s he divided pancreatic cancer. One of the issues that he discussed sort of. Who was a friend of his was how to create a kind of money, an asset class that could hold its values into the future secured from taxation or seizure available to fill the password when reanimated. Indeed they talk about how it was the threshold into would have to be reconstructed with so much accuracy that they would be able to be recalled from it in order to unlock your assets. The kind of pride for being able to bring its own creator back from the dead. This is from the law of people being frozen is the term which r which was still maintained and in and of itself if anyone ever wants to do this like writing something of an experimental novel about anyone that is currently on the ice would be an amazing snapshot of a particular corner of the 20th century. So, the need to freeze meant the kind of currency that they were envisioning needed to simultaneously separate social and technological change to bring about the world that would be able to bring them back while remaining safe and secure. Another tall order that could keep the wealth while disrupting the context in which the wealth existed. Perhaps impossible and the tension plays out in much contemporary digital cash still. Im fascinated by this picture it as part of the d. Animation process. I always wonder what the woman over on the left is thinking if she gazes down at the corpse. This is the room of doers in which the key people from history of digital cash and currency are stored in which they are frozen. What is this room as we look at it but a broken room of time machines, investment vehicles with a specific sort of this is a digital cash as it ended up being produced after the millennial. As a paradox and motor of unstoppable invention that was also a fantasy of the downturn and those speculating on the currency may recognize this exact paradox of people who in the same or it can promise you something that is more solid than any other asset can be is the phrase i hear a lot. Its simultaneously a volatile rocket to the Stores Across prosperity. Somehow those things at once. It is hard to define an asset like that. The occupants of this room include. I would like to close with this. He was a correspondent. He and his family ultimately sold their plain holdings for the treatment of lou gehrigs disease from which he would pass away in 2014. Into this is the moment i want to actually stop the talk it might seem like a strange stop because it is always about the future. To quote John Maynard Keynes in the long run we are all dead. The future is where we go to the archaic, and anachronistic foo fools. Its where all the money ultimately ends so one of the questions the project gives to us that we can talk about a little bit indicating they as i am reflecting on this thought only as the practical currencies because that also hold promise is about the future and ways of thinking about the future and thinking about what the future holds for us. Is there a way we can also try to think about what kind of future we would like to live and how money can build towards this promistowardsthose promises, hof currency can actually provide the avenues into a Better Future than the one we are likely to get. Thank you very much for your attention. Plu [applause] ending on that bleak note that ins kneiam not new and its a be right now. [inaudible] we are going to have a microphone for the questions for the benefit of americas wonderful television system, cspan. We will be on cspan, its literally one of my favorite things in the world. Its going to be us and congressional testimony. And impeachment hearings. Good company. Its kind of drawing a line something i was thinking about when you showed the libertarian gathering in New Hampshire and how the only specific claims have value. It reminded me although it is entirely Different Reasons found go to certain countries they will only accept american dollars or it could only be 20dollar bills in certain years and anything prior to 2009 is worthless. Sudan is one of those countries if you go there 2009 and prior to essentially not accepted. I guess my question is if you have any comments on that and this line between if you have power and if you don dont inte different money and value to be placed on its. That is a wonderful question. I think there are two dimensions to the question that are especially interesting to think about in terms of how we think about things like the crypto currency. First is the idea of the fungibility. They are all units that can be exchanged for one another in an abstract sense with specific instantiations but in practice, that isnt the case. Its actually highly particular. And its highly particular both in terms of the values that are given to the different monetary objects, whether that is people that are much more obsessed with the spot value of medals than they are the face value of coin, or people that are operating in a context where the statewide reasons and federal reasons, particular period where the new Security Technology was introduced and cant be trusted. The whole economies got flooded with extremely good take notes which were u. S. Notes the last i heard ghost reducing old equipment that got sold off and in it up in libya but they had fantastic beautiful notes and effectively those killed off the ability of certain classes of dollars from the four particular periods to circulate and those dollars we are not fungible. And different regimes of knowledge to understand and verify it is likely or not. But even more than that this goes more into the questions of power from the wonderful work we dont treat even money that we hold the same way. Theyve written an incredible length about how we get 20 buc bucks. It seems like a trivial thing we all engage in an ordinary life except for the fact the impact of structure and finances and how we think about putting money away from the future for spending money now and how we think about giving money to different people for what it means to receive money allowances, walker walkaway money and i cant swear because theyre on television but thats of f you money providing a kind of security against the prospect of things changing. All of that is theoretically fungible. One of the most salient questions. Its where they have this anticipatory function to help us a notch in different ways of life and feel differently about what we think might be coming to a v. Element of going through these libertarian things as being able to encounter people for transacting money was an expression of power not in the way that almost everyone is coming off in the sense of being able to have the power to do something or express the power over someone else but the very act of transacting, choosing what you would transact as a sign of commitment to a particular society, to a particular set of ideas so in this context, you hear a lot of dismissive referrals to people using things like frn that stands for Federal Reserve note which is to say dollars. Those things. And one of the kind of fascinating and deeply peculiar things about the context was all of these places she would go through tremendous trouble to figure the earliest, bulkiest and weirdest versions of that coin persontoperson with their smart phone where you have to go to the smart get it to work and it wouldnt be settle would be n minutes and all the rest of it. And they would do that for like the pair of socks but the point was the gesture, the performance of engaging in the transaction that as it were would cut you out of the society you didnt want to be part of that lets you identify a different set of social practices. One of the reasons they started silk road. Even within a. Part of the reason for starting silk road wasnt to become the Pablo Escobar of the internet or the network i guess but also to create the space in which people would get used to the idea of engaging in secret transactions that were out of sight of the taxation systems making use of that claim. They would use drugs as the attractor to the real point. I think the way that we can sort of bear all of this in mind is when we look at the transactions it goes far beyond the space of favors and gifts and coupons and casino chips and what have you. These are all ways in which both power relationships but also models of history and plans for the future are being performed from persontoperson and so i think it is worthwhile to think about the flow of money especially where we can see this with crypto currencies where its the reason they are the cheapest is because you have to know smell a strangers house but the same token one of the greatest challenges for this is having to get the speech about why its important that you are transacting in this currency and watching somebodys videos, like just let this happen. We need to think about this as not exceptional, but not unique. This is an extreme case i dont know if you tried to buy bit coin but you often have to sort of disclose, show the government id and then all other traits of the people that built the system that are seeking this because the government treats it the way it does, they seem to not be realized and in fact he be the traditional test is because of the way the government treats them and provides more secrecy in some cases if the government wants to go to citibank and not why and when and where you bought something. Im not sure about the u. S. , but in many countries it is treated in a way where they are unprotected. Having to bear the weight of the fundamentally conflict in agendas of the different ways of trying to accomplish anyone whos on Software Development can recognize a. Of experienced this if you work in the states and i think in a grand sense part of this is because as a Technology Gets negotiated as it is being designed and produced it often ends up having to take on a series of different projects and in this case part of what i wanted to help capture is it is the evolving from the previous and one of the things that fascinates me about this work, the privacy project is that it actually worked it provided precisely what they promised to. As 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. Its who has the right to transact which things at which point. Its how you can lose your digital cash like if you have it on had iton a card and left thea taxi is like you left an envelope full of cash in a taxi and the benefit of that is that it also functioned in that way because it was truly like anonymous tokens with no connection or recourse in that process. Whereas by the time you get into the prototype system, you are starting to look at something that has now reached the point where to preserve anonymity it is necessary to know exactly who owns what at any time and the interactions forever. Such that as weve all seen, i mean, ross is a great example of this. A single break in the chain change enabled you to change the activity and quickly reconstruct, you know, the whole Payment Network in the transaction system. You can see this in the email archives and things like that. Also to understand something trying to solve a couple different problems that once. Not all of the optimal way but those that were skewed toward the global currency side and the purely information protecting side. But all of the subsequent developments people trying to figure out what do we really want digital cash to be . So we see something trying to fork over anonymity. Im on fire in terms of long answers. One of the themes that that was interesting was how all of these utopian motivators and enclaves are motivated by the fear of emergencies so when you spoke to these do they recognize that tension of extreme optimism as well as a differentiate between their mistrust in government and corporate surveillance . That is a fantastic question. It is a big thread in the book and how we construe money gradually in terms of a crisis. One of the things that haunts the production of money in the h century is questions of what regulates flow and what happens in the state of emergency when the value of money changes. I had this informal poll talking to a technical audience asking people whats the first thing you think of with the monetary emergency and it was shocking how many people fought it was hyperinflation. But the images of that particular moment of printed currency that were so devalued to be carried around in wheelbarrows and using to insulate houses seemed like a potent quality for those who were concerned now venezuela is replacing that. Or zimbabwe or hungary. The tricky thing is to just articulate the emergencies from the particular role in emergency plays in the United States which is well worth thinking about because even though bit coin is a global story and not us it is significant to remember it emerge is a the exact moment, to the day, halloween night, 2009 this is the worst thing for a historian to get a date wrong. [laughter] so im blanking on the financial event but a moment of massive financial crisis the middle of the global credit freeze and a freefall coded into the block chain itself the very very earliest blocks is a timestamp which is a headline in the times about the second major bailout being made for banks like it was marked as a currency emerging at the exact moment of crisis when there was a context. In some ways this builds on ideology about money coming out of specifically american context the sense of future urgency as the Investment Strategy that the existing system will collapse and you can just go back like clockwork the United States will be a road warrior people siphoning gas out of cars. Fighting for food in the supermarket and it has been like that for 50 years. Every five years in the future there is a disaster. But what is most salient is the fact that functions not as something to avert but embrace but then you get to the better system by a process calling it emergence by emergency to embrace the idea everything will fall apart instead of trying to get involved in the advocacy position to sell people your silver dollars certificates with a huge economy of emergency all of these places where people pay top dollar for the big its one the buckets of freezedried is food but to think about that as a future for many that is something that shapes the way people think about money. And we should not underestimate how much the adoption of cryptocurrency to some degree is shaped by how it was initially connected with fears of state of emergency a lot of the earliest attempts to sell bit coin to a general public is one of my favorite heroes who shows up in the book is basically a citizenship entrepreneur and bit coin evangelist now he is with the takeover of the island in the danube to make it a block chain utopia but at the time and 2010 he tried to sell people secondary citizenship for a bit coin in the whole premise was that people who are interested in bit coin believe the emergency is coming and it is a market for this kind of thing because they arent convinced they are in danger. So we need to partially understand part of the legacy cryptocurrency may still be in the process of overcoming come in the way in which they were initially created with in a specific framework of the future. The conversations i personally recall in 2010 and 2011 bit coin is adopted in cyprus in the middle of the financial freeze. This was the marketplace those who have lost access to other financial tools and moving into the space with always the following assumption with people that i talk to with my informants that this was coming for us in the smart thing to do is to get into bit coin now to have it with you when you fled with the bag on your back through the dust storm. So the framework of crisis is really interesting to look at not just historically but now because part of this is striking of the current moment is all the ways that people try to negotiate what it means to think about a future in crisis and think about that financially. It also goes along with the american idea we will all be millionaires. [laughter] so it has to have both of those. In many ways thats a good way to think about that tension that lies at the heart not just early cryptocurrency but different kinds of what we think of as experimental or speculative currency to sustain the paradox of promise. In the same way that the fundamental problem of history was to strike that balance between we are Building Systems to make it everything we construe with life is meaningless we will not be in our bodies. We will die will be a robot tiger you are brave in a squid living in a satellite and all the rest of it at the same time you will still have your wealth and it will still mean something it will be significant you have access and in much the same way something that is extremely robust of the internal paradox like the trusses and Structural Engineering to reinforce each other that you maintain for yourself the internal paradox that a terrible crisis is coming the food network not the food network. [laughter] the logistics of the delivery of food will collapse as the book written is titled blood in the streets there will be glad and those streets literal militant chaos and the chance for you to clean up and make good by betting on catastrophe. That is something we should think about not when it has the inherent logical flaw but instead something to understand why that works and why that is a self sustaining system for those who adopt it. [applause] thank you for your time [inaudible conversations] welcome to the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the director of education and we are very honored to host mister brown for his book think and imagine it is wonderful to have yall here with us this evening at the museum and those of at home watching on cspan. We have a wonderful presentation