The Death of Gold | The Saylor Series | Episode 10 (WiM044)

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needs all right guys welcome back to the

what is money show i am thrilled today

to have

mr michael saylor sitting down with me

to discuss

bitcoin money history um as we add

some additional installments here to the

the sailor series

michael welcome back

thanks for having me robert

so

you know

i've told you about the feedback we've

gotten on the sailor series it's been

absolutely tremendous people are

reporting that it completely

reshaped their world view you know sent

them down the rabbit hole

it's been very valuable and so i commend

you for that and

i think the right place to jump in here

today

since we're taking the big picture

approach is to just answer the question

what is money

yeah you know you know i i never in my

life had anybody asked me that question

before you asked it to me the first time

for our first series

and when you asked me that question

that catalyzed a whole set of thinking

and it got me thinking money is energy

and of course we did the nine part

series and we spent a lot of time

talking about energy systems and

engineering as a discipline of of

manipulating energy and

and why it was critical to the human

race and the human condition and and so

we won't we won't recover any of that

because that's that's well trod

territory but coming back to the

question of what is money

you know and just focusing on it

i would say for our our round two or

part two of this series i'd say

money is tokenized energy

within a socio-political framework

so we know money is energy but but

tokenized energy that is a dollar is a

measure of energy a gold coin

is a measure of energy a bale of tobacco

that you're trading is a it's a token of

energy

and how much energy well

that that's where the socio-political

framework comes in whereas i mean you

can you can measure

actual

physical or engineering energy and it's

objective but

money ends up being to a certain degree

subjective because it's

yeah if i show up on a deserted island

and i've got a stack of gold coins

and everybody has guns

and they're shooting each other they

might not accept my gold coin whereas

if i actually offer them bullets for

their gun they might think the bullets

are actually better money than the gold

coin

just like cigarettes right or good money

in in a

pow camp

but gold coins wouldn't be so

so

this question of what is money gets you

really going so if money is tokenized

energy within a social political

framework

then we can look over the history of

mankind and we realize that

we've chosen many different ways to

tokenize that energy

and we'll skip through most of them

because they came and they went but but

uh

there are three

that pop to mind that are interesting

one is the gold standard

the second is the fiat standard and the

third is the bitcoin

standard and

when you start asking what is money you

start asking well what's the best

monetary system

and we've got these three systems to

talk about

i think that

um you know

one thing that's pretty clear is that

most people can't get their hands around

bitcoin because it's an utter paradigm

shift

and why is it a paradigm shift

well because i think bitcoin is the

first digital money

i mean it's the first digital money gold

wasn't digital money and and fiat's not

digital money either

um

and so economists and politicians and

investors

they all lack the right mental model

to understand bitcoin

because

science and engineering

were so intrinsic to gold that we took

it for granted because gold was a it's a

10 pound lump of something and if you if

you get slugged in the head with it

nobody had to explain that science and

physics mattered

and then science and engineering kind of

became like

quasi-irrelevant in the fiat world

everybody just kind of

they ignored science and engineering and

there were no immediate clear

consequences

there were just the hyper inflations and

the collapses of those fiat systems but

but because

because they abandoned gold

and there was no digital money they were

the only alternative to one fiat you

know the weimar republic fiat currency

was the next the pound and that

alternative you know was an alternative

to the next thing and the next thing so

we were comparing fiat currencies or

fiat monies to each other and so there

was no real need to embrace science and

engineering

and bitcoin is this paradigm shift where

we have uh digital money crashing into

uh

i guess what we'll call uh

analog money or maybe a political money

is a better way to describe it

and

now we start to ask the question again

what is money

and i think tokenized energy isn't good

enough to to explain what is money

uh

another way to describe money is by

coming back to the ideal model what is

the ideal model of money ideal money

is a shared

immutable

correct

ledger

you know you've heard the phrase you

know bitcoin is a shared immutable

ledger and people debate about whether

it's truly immutable or not but but uh

you know a crypto asset network

fully decentralized and mature

is the closest thing we can get to an

immutable shared ledger in the history

of the world

i think a lot of times when people

describe it as a shared immutable ledger

they leave off the correct or the

mathematically correct because it's

almost implied

but i think that

if you were to focus upon the three

critical dimensions of ideal money you

would say it's a ledger that's shared

everybody everybody in the

in the political system has to have the

same access to the ledger

it has to be immutable no one can

doctor it but it has to be correct

mathematically complete or

mathematically proper because if it's

incomplete

or incorrect

then it's not ideal money so

if i take that as a model

money is a shared immutable correct

ledger right that i can imagine the

perfect money would be

you know

some godlike being comes down on earth

and they create this

perfect uncorruptable

system and they telepathically

they telepathically drop that

shared immutable correct ledger into the

heads of every human being and every

time you incur

a debt

it updates the ledger and when you incur

credit it updates the ledger

and no one can corrupt the ledger this

is getting right to the heart of

property

right where it's essentially a list of

who owns what

and that ownership is premised on

what favors have you rendered to the

market

then you've earned some right to redeem

favors from the market

and money's just kind of the ultimate

form of property and one that can be

redeemed for any other form of property

yeah i mean i share a shared immutable

correct ledger could be used to allocate

ownership of all intellectual property

you can't you kind of need it to keep

track of your music rights or your video

rights or your movie rights on your

itunes

store what do you own

or the rights right registration and

licenses

can i enter a building can i exit

can i cross a border

what are my rights

and what are my obligations and what do

i own

and what do i share

and it all comes down to just a shared

database but that database needs to be

immutable and correct

and that is property the essence of

property

and i suppose you know

when you own a piece of property

and you buy it a piece of land five

acres somewhere then there's a deed and

you go and you file the deed with the

courthouse

[Music]

and that's kind of critical right and

and so much of property law revolves

around

making sure that there are no liens on

the on

the property before i buy it making sure

that you have the proper title to it

and that you can transfer that title

and um

i think that um

money right to your point right is it's

kind of like the apex property it's the

sum of all property or at least it's

it's the most important property i

suppose because

it would be the

the property that i could use to trade

for any other property exactly yeah

right any any other property or any

other product or service right so yeah

that is my tokenized energy and what

you're describing here sorry just one

more thing is this

movement of money out of the sphere of

politics into an engineered standard

and if we one of the one definition of

politics i really like is the discussion

of how to apply coercion

so bitcoin seems to be this type of

money that's actually

moving us past

moving economics out of the sphere of

politics into a more hard science

that seems to be part of this paradigm

shift as we've we've always thought

money was in the domain of who could

apply force but now it's moving into the

domain of

what's scientifically proper

yeah i mean we're moving from uh

politically engineered money to

scientifically engineered money yeah

from social engineering to scientific

engineering

yeah is it is that money because the

most important person in the village

said it's money

or is that per is that money because the

best engineer

offered it as money

yes

you know satoshi engineered money

whereas uh you know every government

has created

money

yeah

so if we look at if we start with that

model right shared immutable correct

and now we go back to all the monetary

systems in history

start with ancient coins

right coin networks well they've been so

many coin networks right starting with

the lydians

each each coin network is well i have a

i have a gold coin i have a silver coin

i have a copper coin oftentimes there's

three different coins you know one for a

thousand one for ten one for one they

have to be at three different scales

and the shortcoming is

you know you create a system of coinage

or custom tokens and then you start

shuffling them around in a network you

can only trade to the extent that you

have those tokens

and if people lose the tokens you know

the money is gone but then people

try to counterfeit the tokens they try

to cut the coins

different ways

eventually the coins might wear down

the coins have to be carried

um

and so why do all these coin systems

fail

i i guess on one hand there's never

enough of them

right there's always a limit on the

other hand they're discreet so

you can go from a thousand to a hundred

to a ten or from a thousand to a ten to

a one but how do you get to a 0.1

or 0.01

you know when you want to get to you

know to orders of magnitude more or or

you want to make change in the middle

you end up with all these money changers

and the result of the money changing is

a huge amount of friction or impedance

and

for thousands of years people couldn't

figure out how to manufacture coins that

couldn't be cut or counterfeited or that

we're durable

and so ultimately

ultimately every single

and every single mercantile system right

has its own internal coin system and

when you when you swap from one system

to second there's this money changer in

the middle and they take you

take you for ten percent yeah

i remember traveling from um

from london uh to rome back before the

eu was formed robert

and i showed up with dollars and i

converted my dollars into pounds

and then i think i took uh

i took a a plane to the netherlands and

i converted my pound to whatever the

dutch currency was and i went to belgium

and i converted the dutch currency to

the belgian currency

and then we went through france i

converted again and then we went to

italy and i converted again i ended up

with like 50 of what i started with

after about 72 hours

which makes sense to that energy analogy

because every time you have a

transformation of energy you know from

thermal to kinetic to chemical whatever

direction it's going you have loss

right so there's this this problem we've

always had transforming one form of

energy into another and back

so crossing a coin network is every

single time you cross the network

there's energy loss

and then there's loss over time

as people counterfeit coins and you

can't tell and then there's loss

there's uh

there's losses

as the coins get debased and

so the result is what like 5000

different systems of coinage

over time

and uh that every one of them struggled

ultimately they were the basis of the

gold standard

and um

we have this myth that there was a gold

standard in the good old days but it

seems like the gold standard never

worked as far as we can find

anywhere i mean we we have the stories

of the romans debasing their coinage and

the collapse of the roman empire

and we know the lydians eventually

lost theirs and we know there must have

been hundreds of systems of coinage and

greece and and one

city would would sack another city and

replace melt down their coins and create

the next set of coins

so i mean there's a problem with the

whole idea of coinage and the problem

with coinage is it's based on metal

metallic money

and of course the highest form of money

is the is the gold so let's say it's

called the gold standard but what's the

problem with the gold standard

i mean it's never it never worked that

well because

it's got a couple of uh

some crippling flaws and just some

nagging flaws

there's inflation inflation's a nagging

defect it doesn't inflate fast it's like

it inflates slow but inflates it two or

three percent a year

and because it's inflating because

you're mining more gold and you're co

and you're striking more coins or

whatever it is you're moving around

it's not

conservative and by that i mean it's not

mathematically conservative or it's not

conservative from a scientific point of

view you start with 100 units and then

you've got 102 units and then 105 units

and 108 units so whatever percentage of

the gold supply you have is leaking at

two to three percent a year

and if it gets

you know and it could be worse if it's

not a closed system so if anybody

introduces new gold into the system like

you know when the spaniards found the

inca gold or they brought back the gold

from the new world you get

you get a massive inflation

i think i i remember reading a history

of caesar where when he came back after

the garlic wars he had seized so much

gold that that cro created a hyper

inflation in rome and the interest rates

leaped

and there was just too much money and so

so either there is inflation because you

seized gold or another nation flooded

your market with gold

or there's inflation because the gold

mining process continues

and so against our ideal model of money

that means that gold's not

mathematically correct

it's not it's not uh it's not

conservative nor is it correct it's it's

an approximation

under the best of circumstances it's got

a two percent error a year and so over

the course of a decade the best of

circumstances is like a 20 25 error rate

yeah but the worst of circumstances is i

double or triple the amount of gold when

i come back from you know sacking the

aztecs or the incas

or i you know i sacked goal

and i just brought back all this gold

and so then it then you've just got

a massive error so gold is

mathematically erroneous because

you're just shuffling metallic tokens

and it's not a closed system

i mean the second problem with gold is

confiscation

right because it's physical

the the custodial rights of gold aren't

really

they're not great i guess they're a

little bit better

they're a little bit better than fiat

currency but in some ways they're not as

good

um

if i have um a lot of gold if i have if

i have uh a million dollars worth of

gold or 10 million dollars worth of gold

it's heavy

really heavy i can't get it through an

airport

you know i i don't even know like

you know

i tried to

i went online on amazon once a few years

ago and i wanted um

i wanted a little pocket knife

and i ordered this pocket knife you know

how pretty much you can only carry a

blade which is like i don't know half an

inch long or it was a what's the number

it's like some infinitesimally small

size blade

like a quarter inch or half an inch

blade so i went on amazon and i found

someone advertising this really super

small

dinky little

knife that you could put use to cl to

cut a string with

and it was advertised as being a tsa

friendly compliant you know you know

little pocket knife

and i was so proud of myself because i

must have paid like

39 for it

and then i took it to the airport to go

through the metal detector and i swear

that the tsa agent stopped you know i

put all this stuff through they stopped

the luggage they're like show me that

and they pulled out this little

you know half inch blade to slice a

string with like sir you can't take this

with you

and i thought i can't but i you know of

course the defense of amazon said it's

okay didn't really

fly right and uh the the point of the

story is you can't even slip a

needle-like metal blade through an

airport i wonder if you could carry five

gold coins and get away with it or 10

gold coins if you can't get my little

pen knife thing through

and so the answer is it's easy to

confiscate custodial rights are really

weak

so the fundamental problem with the gold

standard is

is the custody is different difficult

and the security is hyper expensive

and by hyper expensive it's yeah how

much does it cost to secure a billion

dollars worth of this stuff

like what you hire 24 armed guards and

you down you know fort knox

okay

custody

it scales with the amount stored which

is something that's very problematic

yeah the cost you would say if there's a

small amount of it it's impossible to

secure and if there's a large amount of

it it's expensive exponentially

expensive to secure

and the security cost scales in some

ways exponentially with the amount you

have and also

with the number of nodes

if i have

a hundred thousand nodes i have a

hundred thousand points of failure

and so it scales with the number of

nodes the value of the nodes and the

velocity

of the nodes

or the velocity of the money right if i

wanted to move a billion dollars of gold

every day of the week

for 365 days in a row a thousand miles

right

figure out the security cost of that

right uh the conclusion is

this money is so heavy it has no

velocity right it goes into fort knox it

sits there for 30 years and nobody

audits it

and

under that circumstance you can almost

delude yourself into saying it's secure

but it's only secure because there's no

money velocity and there's no

distribution if i wanted to give gold to

eight billion people and wanted to move

it every day

then the cost of the security would go

up to consume all of the energy that

humanity produces right right probably

probably the cost of security for eight

billion people moving gold every day is

more than the sum of the entire gross

national product of the world right so

security doesn't you know the security

cost doesn't work it doesn't scale this

gets into then that separation between

or the decomposition of money into an

asset and a currency then right so gold

is functioning as an asset but it's not

useful as a currency something that

circulates therefore we introduce a

currency

and the other thing on goal i guess it's

it's the best approximation of that

immutable ledger that you described as

ideal money but it has still has this

error rate for both inflation which is

relatively small but the bigger error

rate has to do with the violence and

confiscation risk that

it's unpredictable when the market's

going to be flooded or if you're going

to be confiscated or if you're

custodians trustworthy etc

it's not correct and um

because

the you know it's tokenized energy

but and it was the best idea for

tokenizing energy and the bronze age

right i suppose right

but um

it's not a correct token and because

it's so

easy to confiscate

it it's not really a shared ledger

anymore it's not shared tokens right

because i can't share it because i can't

carry it with me

and then that leads us to the third

problem with it which is the

hypothecation it's it's too easy to

counterfeit

and manipulate and it's easy to

you know because i can either debase the

coins

themself

or i can lie about the gold about the

asset in the vault while i give you a

gold note

i either create the gold note and i lie

about it or i just debase the coin

and um and that that creates a problem

of authenticity

and uh

that leads us to the fourth problem

which is authentication it's it's too

expensive to audit and authenticate

you know in fact you know

out of out of uh

everybody that i know i don't know a

single person that's ever authenticated

a gold coin right

you wouldn't know how coinage was an

attempt to make authentication

self-evident right

right and and uh you know isaac newton

worked on how do you create a good coin

and most coins were crappy but but you

know we still struggle with this issue

and uh so if you can't authenticate it

then that really undermines the shared

part of the shared ledger as well and

maybe the correct part

and so transportation is also a defect

it's too expensive and slow and

difficult and dangerous to move

and distribution is a defect because

it's difficult to move difficult to

authenticate and easy to confiscate

then that means how do you distribute it

it's too difficult to distribute and too

expensive to distribute when i talk

about distribute i mean how do i give it

to a billion people

right i mean practically speaking

if you distribute uh up to a thousand

dollars of gold coins to a billion

people today

there would be a 35

markup slash markdown every time it

trades

right you you pay ninety dollars for

sixty dollars worth of gold

if you have sixty dollars worth of gold

you'd be lucky to sell it for forty

dollars

and so that that uh that transfer cost

is obscene

and then finally you got this division

issue

right how do you divide

a one ounce gold coin

you know you can't and so i can't divide

it so i have to create silver coin and

copper coin

and now i never have the right

combination of change

so prices don't work quite right

so gold has

fundamentally it it's it's the best

tokenized energy in the bronze age

but because of all these

all of these defects

by the middle ages

it was clear it's going to be replaced

with some some type of fiat or some kind

of checking system or other paper ledger

system

i it's not clear to me that they didn't

replace it

i talk about the gold myth

it's not clear to me they didn't replace

it 2 000 years ago like i i you know

they talk about the sumerian tablets

right and the sumerian tablets of clay

they have ledgers on them right so isn't

it quite possible if not likely that we

had checking systems or ledger systems

that were privately enforced by banks

thousands and thousands of years ago

so the gold myth is there never was a

gold standard there was never a time

when all money was gold

what you've all what you had was a time

when the principal asset for store of

value over the long duration was gold

right

and it's quite likely

that you always had uh you know the

merchant

had their ledger and you had a credit

with the merchant yeah and you know

maybe that was a credit with the ancient

roman merchant and maybe that was a

credit with

the town or maybe that was a credit

if you're on a ship anybody's ever been

on a ship

you know sailing for months at a time

you know the quartermaster has all the

supplies

and

if you wanted some of those cigarettes

or some of that alcohol they might let

you sign it out but then they charge

your account and when the voyage is over

they debit it against your wages

right and so this has been going on for

as long as people have been sailing

ships around

what what we have

is the myth of the gold standard but

we've always had um an asset currency

system and the currency was a check a

checking system

with a central counterparty we can call

them banks today

but we had goldsmiths right that had

gold notes back in the middle ages

and i think you've always had merchants

and you've always had quarter masters

and you've always had the guy in the

army that said you know you lose it

we're going to build your wages we're

going to dock your wages for that

you know whatever it is you lost or

you're spent or are you consumed i think

this is a really important point to zero

in on because what so what gold gave us

was this

reliable

medium for final settlement

but it could only be used for large

transactions essentially because the

economics don't make sense to use it for

small transactions so it doesn't

circulate well but you can settle large

transactions with it

so

due to that technological limitation of

gold effectively had such a high value

to weight i guess you might say that we

needed these

cheaper

systems these credit systems or

derivative systems systems of deferred

settlement built up around it

and that has been

kind of the problem throughout history

as we we have this system for final

settlement but we build systems of

deferred settlement around it which are

economically more efficient

but if they introduce all of these this

need to trust counterparties which comes

with counterparty risk which blows up

time and time again

and one of the implications of that is

is the social political systems we can

create are small and local

right the implication is city state yes

or uh yeah because i i have to get my

credit from the local merchant so if the

local merchant is a thousand miles away

the credit system doesn't work it breaks

down

so

i think you can be you can create a

trust network that goes about 10 miles

or 20 miles yes

it's fascinating trust network out to

the suburbs and then once you get beyond

the suburbs the trust breaks down

and if the trust breaks down

that means you've got renaissance italy

with

a hundred different city-states and

they've all got their own little

system of trust and ledgers and coinage

and there is no universal money and so

you can't have an easy rise of the

nation state

under a gold standard or a coinage

standard at least it's kind of

challenging right it's fascinating to me

that the the actual

shape

and configuration of our institutions

is derived from the nature of our money

in a way right the reason we have a

central bank is because of gold's

technological limitations so what it

gets me really thinking about is

when you swap out gold for bitcoin how

much how transformational it potentially

is to all the institutions we take for

granted today

yeah

i think that what we're what we see is

the progression of money as technology

through the ages

and if you have a better money

you have

a better economy

and as the money gets um

if we come back to this issue of is it

shared

is it immutable is it correct

the the greater the sharing right the

greater the economy the more immutable

the higher integrity you know the higher

efficiency of the economy the more

correct

right the more effective the the economy

the faster the network updates

the faster the economy

so i mean coming back or just finishing

up on goal why does gold fail

in theory why does gold fail in theory

uh it fails because

the base layer protocol is okay it's

kind of god given by nature it's it's

the creation and the smelting of gold

it's okay

but

it's not um

it's not conservative

the base layer protocol is

is uh

is not conservative um

the application level protocol that one

layer above the base layer or the layer

two

the application protocol is difficult

and

dangerous

but what does that mean like so i give

you

ten blocks of gold that's the base layer

okay well so what are all the

applications of gold

you know you can what can you do with

how many people do you know that can

actually refine or melt down molten gold

and create something with it

that's the dangerous part and the

difficult part so gold applications

they're

they're difficult and they're limited by

the laws of physics

and um

and that just means that and and there

is no application protocol

so

if i want to do anything

with gold above the layer one is either

a very difficult dangerous application

like gold goblets or gold coins or

something like that

or i have to create the equivalent of

gold check

which is a manually implemented protocol

and

now we've got the same problem fiat

currency at the point you implement a

gold check you've in essence moved on to

the fiat standard

with a gold reserve of some sort

so

gold fails primarily because there's no

good application protocol it's not

conservative it's too difficult too slow

too dangerous

and the physicality of it

the physicality of it invites violence

it's

i can literally fire bomb the city kill

everybody in it and the goal won't be

damaged

and so

like when in doubt

shoot first

and then

sift through your clothing and take your

gold

i don't have to worry about any

collateral damage

the last thing in the world you want to

do is be carrying around

immutable money on your person

when someone has an incentive just to

kill the people and take the money right

so that that's the fundamental problem

with gold that's why the gold standard

ultimately has always just been an

invitation to war

and uh never-ending i think

thousands and thousands and thousands of

wars

and uh little many wars right invitation

to criminality imitation of violence if

the criminals don't take your gold then

the counterparties take your gold and

the counterparties don't take your gold

then the go then your own government

takes your gold and your own government

doesn't take your gold the hostile

government takes your gold but

ultimately

gold because of his physicality is is

imperfect property right it is an

imperfect property

and um

and it's imperfect money

because

because the token itself

is so cumbersome and unwieldy

to utilize and this is so it's bronze

age money as you said but this

contention over gold that extends right

up into the 20th century in world war

one world war ii

there's still

massive gold flows taking place

geopolitically

um

while those nations are at war so it's

almost

i think it's an ill understood aspect of

human history that a lot of

the violence

between countries has been over the gold

or about the gold

um but it's not often discussed in the

history books

yeah when you i mean when you think

about it

you never

you never read a historical account

where someone says

yeah we uh we invaded their country and

we killed everybody so we could take

their paper currency

right

like

that

i could give you 5 000 accounts of

we sacked the city we burned it and we

took the gold

you know by the way we might have sacked

the city and haul the people off in

slavery

but we might have taken their livestock

we we prefer to take normally the

livestocks all dead by the time we take

the city though

right so the people are dead

the cattle are dead the food is gone

you know the water is all gone but the

gold's still there yeah

so generally if you look at the first 5

000 years it's we sacked the city we

took the gold then even in the modern

era you know from 1700 1800 1900

you know we we sacked the city uh okay

what do we make off with

there's not that many diamonds so

normally they're not they're not easy to

find there's not

not a lot of that sometimes you know the

nazis took the art right yep

and the nazis took the goal yep right

and so there's a lot of that you know we

took the gold from the treasury

stalin sees the gold during the spanish

civil war you know and the polls had to

smuggle their goal away to keep it from

the nazis

and there's all sorts of examples of

of uh somebody sacking some city or or

rolling over someone's border to take

their gold

um that's because it's takeable

right exactly

it's like uh why do you want to take it

because it's takeable

but

not a single example like the nazis

didn't want norwegian

you know paper currency they didn't want

swiss paper currency they didn't want

the dutch or the french paper currency

and not many people asked the question

why we didn't take their checks yeah we

didn't take their securities

you know because secure at the end of

the day securities and derivatives and

all these things have no value

maybe the factory has value

yeah

if it's not destroyed maybe the people

have value if you get them to work for

you the gold hat you know has value but

the paper doesn't there's some examples

of the opposite actually i think in

japan they had the norbito laboratory

where they were running experiments

where they would bomb their enemies

territory with counterfeit currency

so they would try to go you know they

were the idea was to go and bomb say

england with a bunch of counterfeit

pounds so they could hyperinflate their

currency and disable their economy

so it's like not only do you tie the

paper but you try to actually

inflate the enemies paper

i yeah i think that there's um

there's a lot of examples where hostile

governments would attempt to just

counterfeit the currency of their enemy

to destabilize the regime

but it doesn't get reported a lot in

political history or even military

history

and uh i mean some nations successfully

did it to the u.s but we don't want to

talk about it right

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so

you know you won't you won't read that

much but that's

it's an effective thing you could do

well anyway so i think

i think that

that ends my thoughts on gold it's it's

basically

a metallic token and it was our it was

our best idea

but it it seems to have stopped working

thousands of years ago

you could say

you could say a thousand two thousand

years ago almost certainly they had

shared ledgers

and they just used gold as a method of

final settlement

and we know that it

we know that it failed at different

points we know that it was debased and