All right. So I'm here again with Lucas for another Bitcoin study session. We're reading still Lynn Alden's Broken Money, Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better. We're on the chapter five and six today.
so as usual I'll give a small summary to hopefully kind of bring everybody up to date on where we're
at so if you haven't been reading along then hopefully this will get you to as if you have
been reading along so you can then afterwards listen to the conversation that Lucas and I are
having as we kind of parse out the topic and if you haven't I would encourage you to be reading
along this is definitely a book that very lucidly written very very well written so we finished up
Last time, we finished up chapters one through four.
Those constitute part one of this book where Alden answers the question, what is money?
That's what she posed to herself in part one.
She discussed the anthropology or the history of money as it concerns humans.
And as she told the story, there were two systems of kind of prehistoric to ancient money.
Those were first credit where people just exchange favors with each other as a form of ledger that they keep between themselves as a form of money.
And second was commodity, a type of money based on the physical characteristic of the thing that's being interchanged.
Physical characteristics that make a thing suitable to be used as money, like scarcity.
She also discussed how gold then emerged as the best of the commodity monies, largely because of its physical characteristics, of course, but largely because of its high stock-to-flow ratio, its scarcity.
She then looked at both the credit theory of money and the commodity theory of money, the theoretic frameworks for credit and commodity as forms of money.
She then didn't declare a winner between these two frameworks, even though they're kind of opposed.
They have seemingly different ideas about what money is, either a credit or a commodity.
Instead, she proposed a unified theory where she looked at the underlying logic of both theories, the credit theory and the commodity theory, and said, hey, what is common between both of these is that both the credit and commodity theory of money are based on the idea of a ledger.
That's the underlying idea that unites them, a way that they both are ways to record kind of transaction, keep track of who owns what.
So then she proposed the ledger theory of money as a way to unify those two.
And the question then arises kind of who controls the ledger and other things.
But the real basic idea is that, that the money at its most basic is the ledger itself.
And the thesis kind of overall of her book, I'll read that again.
And that's in the introduction, but I think it's good to keep that forefront in your mind.
And this brings us to this idea of a ledger.
So she says, quote, at its core, money is a ledger.
Commodity money serves as a ledger governed by nature.
Bank money serves as a ledger governed by nation states.
Open source money serves as a ledger governed by users.
As this book explores the evolution of technology, changes the prevailing power structures and incentives surrounding money from era to era.
So today we're moving into part two, the birth of banks. So we're going to begin to see banks' money serving as a ledger, as she says here, governed by nation states. And we're also going to see the technology of banking emerge as a thing that kind of changes, defines money from era to era, as she noted.
So we're entering part two. Part one is what is money. Now part two is birth of banks. Today we're doing chapter five and six. Chapter five, proto-banking and the Hawala system. So in this chapter, she begins to give kind of a history of the development of banking.
banking um this is a book about technology and for alden banking is a series of legal
and technological layers that develop on top of a commodity money uh we still got we can see that
actually in our other chapters the way that um banking is an abstraction that makes gold more
usable as a money and we're going to see that here today as well um so she starts with uh
something called the Hawala system, H-A-W-A-L-A, which was kind of coincided with the rise and the
spread of Islam, both geographically and in time. But it was also used by non-Muslims. And so the
Hawala system is a form of proto-banking, one might say, an antecedent to banking. It is a legal
concept where debt is delegated between a decentralized system of specialized brokers.
So here's an example. Alden walks you through this in the chapter. So the person using the
Huala system, the customer A goes to Hualadar. That's the specialized broker in the system.
Customer A goes to Hualadar A.
The customer gives money to the Hualadar, a password, and then a specification that the money be given to customer B, who's in another area.
So they want to give money to somebody else who's in a different area.
Customer A communicates then the special password related to this money they've given to the Hualadar to customer B.
So they communicate somehow, Fred, who's in a distant town, the password is Apple's in order to get this money.
They've also deposited that money with the Hualadar in their own area.
The Hualadar in that customer A's area then communicates with the Hualadar in the other area that password.
so now the
the
Hualadar in the new area and the customer
in the new area both know that password
the customer in the new area
customer B who I called Fred
goes to the Hualadar there
tells him the password and then receives
funds in the new area
what you see in this example and what's key to the
Hualadar system is the money was never
actually sent there was money deposited with
the Hualadar the specialized broker
in one area and then in a distant
town, the Hualadar disperses funds to a different customer just based on information having been
sent. So basically, value has been transported without having to move underlying coins.
And then the Hualadars, who are this decentralized network, can later settle their transactions
amongst them. They can batch settlement of transactions and so do them at the same time
and so make it do it efficiently.
In talking about the Hawala system,
Alden actually begins talking about the Suftaja,
which she later characterizes as like a specific instrument used in the Hawala system.
It's like a traveler's check maybe or a wire transfer prior to those things coming into existence
between the Hualadars.
The Suftaja was the document itself that a person in one area could deposit their money with a person, get a Suftaja that would then entitle them to give the Suftaja to the Hualadar in another area and receive that money.
So again, like a traveler's check.
And so the benefit of a thing like Huala system or the Suftaja is that you can send money at a distance without transporting it.
So this is back in the days of commodity money, like gold coins, specifically gold, which is, you know, relatively, you know, it's portable, but it's more convenient definitely to not have to take it with you because there's the risk of theft by bandits in route and things like that.
So that's the benefit of the Huala system is its efficiency, convenience, and kind of this safety element of not having to walk about with a lot of money on you.
The one thing that is required, though, is trust in a Huala system. The Hualadars have to have trust amongst themselves. So, I mean, that's kind of the benefit of it, too.
the Hualadar system based on reputation. If one Hualadar doesn't follow through on this ledger
they're maintaining between themselves, then that person's going to fall out of the network and
reputationally, maybe even kicked out of the community, something violent happens to them,
who knows. So this is the Huala system as a form of proto-banking. These are technologies that are
arising to mitigate some of the difficulties of using commodity money prior to actual banking.
which arises as this way to facilitate payments between people in different areas.
So it's called the Huala system, and I said it rose and spread with Islam,
but also it came into contact.
This is a technology.
Technology spreads.
It diffuses.
It came into contact with the West, too, through the Crusades, Alden mentions.
The Knights Templar are this religious order that has – they have an office in Jerusalem and they also have their order headquarters throughout Europe.
and people who want to go to the Middle East and join the Crusades
could deposit money with one of the offices or their branches or whatever,
maybe forts, I don't know what they had, in Europe,
and then get some sort of document or code or whatever,
and then go to the Middle East, the Jerusalem,
and then from the Knights Templar in Jerusalem,
be able to take out that value down there.
So join the crusade without having to travel with all their wealth on them.
um all the notes also interestingly that the huala system is still in use um she gives an
example which is not a she's not like recording an anecdote maybe she is but she's that she has
seen personally it's just kind of like a probable situation of this happening and what she says is
imagine somebody who's an indian migrant worker in the united arab emirates wants to send a
remittance back to their home country. And maybe the advantage again, the advantage in the present
day of the Huala system is that, you know, there's no border frictions, there's no money,
you know, that you don't have to go through like a foreign exchange or whatever, or get taxed or
whatever, you know, a legal border between two nations is going to entail. And also just the,
There are, of course, broad swathes of the world population that are simply unbanked and don't have access to what we take for granted in the West. And so something like a Hawala system still functions for individuals and is used nowadays.
um what does so the question again for alden money is a ledger who controls the ledger then
in this situation so she notes that this is a channel-based ledger that's controlled by the
hawaladars and they're kind of each maintaining the ledger just as part of the network um quote
this is what alden says quote nobody knows or keeps track of the full network ledger there is
no master Hualadar that they all report to. Instead, it operates by individual Hualadars
keeping accurate books for their individual channels with other Hualadars, along with
reputations in the broader region so that each Hualadar is known by many Hualadars.
So that's who maintains the ledger for the Hualadar system.
So that's chapter five. We get this idea of proto-banking, that there are systems in
place prior to banking that are going to lead to it. Chapter six is called the innovation
of double entry bookkeeping and is more about the rise now of modern banking in Italy. So
double entry bookkeeping is going to facilitate this rise of modern banking. Double entry bookkeeping
splits ledgers. You may be kind of broadly aware of this. Splits a ledger into liabilities and
assets and those two then reconcile. And this type of record keeping is going to allow for more
elaborate sorts of financial services that we associate with modern full service banking to
be developed. Banks actually get their names etymologically from banco is an Italian word
meaning bench. The modern bankers, in this sense, would sit on a banco, a bench in the merchant
square, and they would serve the merchant class. Each of the bankers would maintain a ledger.
And if you just go to the banker and they would do the accounting between different merchants who
were there. This would increase efficiency. So if two merchants had the same banker, they could just
move money between their accounts with the banker, instead of having to do material transactions,
weigh the gold, test the gold, all those types of things. And so it increases efficiency to have
a banker in this way who's maintaining a ledger. It just requires a simple update of the ledger.
It also then is going to allow for bankers to begin to innovate, and they begin to develop
paper instruments. Previously, we heard about the Suftaja, that was a type of paper instrument that
was linked to a specific person. The person would go to the Hualadar in one area and get the note
saying something like person X is entitled to payment. With modern banking, now we begin to see
the development of this idea of negotiability, which is financial jargon term for you can just
transfer this paper instrument to a different party. A banknote is a bearer asset without a
name party, so it can be given to somebody else, and then they can negotiate, transfer it further
on to another person. So what are then the effects of the rise of this type of modern banking,
where we begin to get negotiable paper instruments that can be transmitted to other parties?
This further enhances gold's portability, liquidity, and divisibility.
You have the bankers, again, that are holding the deposits, but then what's moving around are these banknotes.
Very portable, very liquid, very divisible.
Another effect is abstraction.
Now, legal ownership can move faster than physical possession.
So legal ownership of the deposited asset, the gold coin or whatever, can move around faster as a banknote, separated from the physical possession of the actual gold itself.
This increases convenience. Paper is easier to carry, and it's more divisible. All these types of things for transactions just requires updating a ledger.
And also safety. Again, robbers and bandits, you don't have to worry about them taking the gold as much.
But it does increase counterparty risk because like with the Hualadars, again, there's trust is required in this type of system. Once you begin adding abstraction, you begin to have to trust those who manage the abstraction.
so the next part of the story of chapter six is the development of modern banking and the rise
of paper instruments that represent claims to gold we see a kind of this inevitable slide or
tendency towards fractional reserve banking so in a basic bank it's purely custodial one-to-one
they hold the gold in a vault whatever you give to them they hold until it's withdrawn
minus a small fee for their service.
But then there's this slippery slope or tendency to fractional reserve.
So that's where, of course, just a fraction of the deposited item is held by the bank
and the rest is loaned out.
And this tendency is guided by competition.
Banks are competing for your deposits, bankers were.
And so they would be like, you'd be like, who's going to charge me the least amount to manage my deposit, to hold my deposit?
If they then reloan the money out, they can charge less and less fees and even begin to offer you money back to hold your deposit to pay interest.
So that competition is going to lead banks to embrace this idea of French reserve banking.
And the banks also realize, I mean, they're not stealing, unquote, unquote.
And they realize, okay, say I'm holding 40% or say 40% of my assets never leave deposits, right?
They're deposited with me and they just never go out.
Then as long as I maintain 80% of what I have and loan out 20%, I'll be safe.
So banks realize that and can loan some out.
And that's not necessarily bad.
Of course, the banks are upfront with the customer about that.
But then the tendency then is to want to compete for more and more deposits, offer lower and lower fees, give out more and more interest, which means loaning out more and more, maintaining less of that fraction as actual reserves.
governments, all the notes, are also going to kind of have the tendency to encourage this
increasingly fractional reserve banking. There are more claims with fractional reserve banking
and lending out than there are now more claims for gold than actual physical gold because money
that is lent out can then be redeposited and then only a fraction of that needs to be retained and
then it can be loaned out again. And so again, for governments, everything's going to look good,
like there's a double entry bookkeeping showing assets and last liabilities are matching up,
and the economy is booming. And so politicians, government officials are like, we'll encourage
this embrace this. But then the tendency, then the slippery slope tends to go too far,
bankers keep pushing the limit on how much can be loaned out. All the notes of this system then is
unstable and risky quote there is an there is an inherent instability in this type of design
because it relies on the false promise that demand depositors can pull their funds out at any time
even though if most of them were to try it once they wouldn't be able to and of course that's the
situation of a bank run um because although everything is balancing out on the ledger
through the type of bookkeeping they're doing they do not have liquid reserves their reserves
There's maybe loans denominated as, you know, they're loans that are on the ledger as an asset, but they're actually, you know, loans out to somebody.
And so it's not a liquid asset that can be given to somebody who shows up at the bank and says, hey, I want my deposit back.
banks then in the modern area came to have five to 10x more deposits on their record
than they did liquid reserves be able to give out to people who had deposited the money so in the 2008 financial crisis all the notes it ran up to 23x more deposits than liquid reserves
which meant there was only $1 in the bank for every $23
that had been given to the bank and the rest being loaned out, etc.
And then so kind of more to the even more current quote,
all the notes quote,
as of the end of 2022, banks in the United States
had approximately 18 trillion worth of deposits that they owed to customers and only had a little
over 3 trillion worth of liquid bank cash, unquote. So that just gives you an idea of the numbers.
Alden ends this chapter again with the question that's most present for her in this part of the
book, which is who controls the ledger? She then posits that, imagine we're still in a gold-based
banking system. She's going to look at fiat-based banking in a later part of the book. But we're
considering proto-banking up to modern banking. So now consider then in a gold-based banking system,
who controls the ledger? And basically, it's three parties. Banks, the government,
and individuals control in different ways. So banks control their own sub-ledger.
individuals have to trust that the bank is maintaining the ledger correctly. And then
the bank then either holds it 100% if they're fully custodial, or they, you know, maintain that
fraction that they've promised that they were going to maintain. So the bank maintains their
own sub ledger. The government, though, also partially controls the full ledger, because they
have the power to order banks to do things like freeze or liquidate accounts, which they can do
for seemingly good reasons, like it's money laundering, or this person's a criminal, this is
all drug money, or for maybe seemingly bad reasons like political persecution. We don't like this
person, so freeze, liquidate their account. They can also, of course, just order the money to be
taken from a bank and centralized in a central bank.
Last is individuals, though, because this is a gold-based system, still control the ledger
to the extent that they retain the gold themselves.
You can not deposit the money in a banking system, in a gold-based banking system, assuming
it's not illegal.
And then people holding the gold are relying on the natural qualities of gold to maintain
the ledger.
That's for Walden, the commodity money. Nature maintains the ledger. It's maintained by the physical transfer of the commodity and the physical characteristics of the commodity itself, its scarcity. Individuals, banks, governments all have a role in that sense in controlling the ledger in the gold-based modern type banking system.
so that's chapters five and six
Lucas then what do you think about that do you
I don't agree or disagree with this is a historical account and I don't suppose
you're going to put on your historian's hat and disagree that this is
how it developed but did you have did you find her
history I guess persuasive for what it was
I found these chapters easy to read, informative.
They piqued some curiosity in me in terms of wanting to learn more about the whole wall of system, thinking about tally sticks, which we can talk about.
But thinking about the tally stick system and how that was used, kind of contemplating the nature of the benefits of the Huala system.
And, yeah, so I, again, as we've talked about it before, Alden does a fantastic job writing this book.
She's incredibly thorough and she provides.
This is like if you've ever read a Tom Clancy novel.
I think it was one of the first, or if not the first.
He wrote this book called The Hunt for Red October, which got turned into a movie and later, I think, into another movie.
Anyways, but supposedly after he wrote it, he was called in to the White House and basically investigated
because his accuracy and the detail that he had was so thorough
that they felt that he must be getting some sort of information
that he wasn't supposed to be able to.
But Alden is kind of like the economic Tom Clancy.
She's doing a really good job of walking through all these different systems.
One of the things that I guess kind of the first thing that struck me about this,
So Hawala, I guess, is Islam for trust. And that's, I think, a well.
Cool. That encapsulates it.
Yeah.
Yeah. But so I was thinking about this, how in previous talks, I've talked about one of the benefits of Bitcoin is that it will shift the focus from growth to innovation for companies because they won't have to fight every year to overcome a 12 percent cost of capital because of inflation.
and so that will allow them to make more long-term decisions and growth throughout the
talks that you and I are having growth is evolving to me to be much less of the positive thing that
I always thought it was before where bigger is better when I think about growth in terms of a
banking system I think so if we've got the whole wall network and we have one bad actor in that
network, then they basically get cut out, not even by the customers, right? Like the other
Hualadars will cut them out much like a cancerous spot before it's allowed to metastasize and spread
to the rest of the network. But in terms of the banking system that we have today,
I before I was just mentally running through in my mind all of the massive fraud embezzlement, just outright theft, et cetera, et cetera.
news stories that I've heard in the last five or 10 years of banks. Um, and it's very clear when
the details of stuff like that starts to come out in Ron would be one of the earlier examples. Um,
when the stuff like that stuff starts to come out, it's very clear that it's not a single actor.
It's complicity by, you know, tens, 20, hundreds, thousands of people.
And size can be a major detriment because it can allow that cancer to mesasticize and spread throughout the entire network.
So I found that really interesting.
I don't know. I mean, so again, that kind of takes us back again to, you know, what is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is, it is decentralized that every node is separate, every actor is separate.
you know you don't you can you can have bad actors in the system and it doesn't affect the rest of
the system at all like yeah one bit in fact if you were to say if you were to say you know as a
network as a community identify certain wallets that are bad actors and everybody is then going
to just say well we're just going to refuse to accept or do business with those wallets and
And all that really does is it makes everybody else's Bitcoin worth more because now you've effectively taken some out of circulation.
So, yeah, there's this self-protection mechanism to the whole wallet network that I think you see reflected in Bitcoin as well.
Yeah, the Huala system is very interesting because it is, I mean, it shares with Bitcoin at least that it is decentralized.
It requires trust, but as you know, there are ways that that trust is enforced through reputation.
And also, in some of my side reading on it, it seems I think that a lot of the Hualadars were also like friends and kin.
Like they were like tribal affiliations and whatnot.
So we learned in a previous chapter that like credit based systems seem to work well on the local level when you between friends and Ken where you can enforce reputation and there are maybe other reasons to cooperate with a person.
And so the Hualadar network then just finds a way to make the network through these, it's a channel-based ledger as all the notes.
And so the channels of the ledger then become based on friend and kin and allow non-friend and kin to use it and kind of divert their credits through those channels.
I mean, it's not a pure credit system because we don't have negotiable banknotes yet, but it is a way at least in where friend and kin type networks can become even transnational and people who are not friend and kin can use them to teleport money.
and on that one of the things that all the notes in there is that the huala system kind of
contemporaneously has come under attack i guess you would say or suspicion as as a conduit for
terrorist money laundering and getting money to terrorists and things like that and you know i
don't doubt that that could be true but i wonder is we see the kind of weaponization of anti-money
money laundering stuff against Bitcoin as well. It seems to be a way that governments go after
decentralized networks that are not controlled by the government is to point out the nefarious uses
of it, even though, of course, the US dollar is also being used for terrorism and money laundering.
And so I just I thought, you know, this Huala system, is it maybe another thing that is coming
under attack simply because it is decentralized in an age of centralization where power wants to
have the final say. Yeah, it turns, it really matters what window you're looking at that
through, what shores you're looking at that from, because, I mean, for starters,
one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and always has been. I think that
It depends on who's trying to define it as such.
One of the things that is really resonating with me since starting to study Bitcoin is that if you want to know what the liberating, freedom granting, decentralizing, power back to the people technologies are, look at what criminals are using.
look at what criminals are doing in order to um in order to get out of the system because
in a lot of ways that is going to be what everybody else catches like moonshine guys
that ran moonshine was the they were the first people to adopt the car like you know the car is
certainly not an element of terrorism um but it but it certainly did allow them to escape authorities
But, you know, so it was a horrible thing back then, awful, that these people were running moonshine in cars.
But, you know, you look at it today and you're like, I don't know, was it really a very good idea to outlaw alcohol?
It pretty much seems like all we did was jumpstart organized crime and give it steroids and a structure, basically, to run the country from this kind of underground method.
If criminality is good for innovation, maybe that was like a Y Combinator thing to have prohibition, like make something illegal to see how these criminals are going to innovate.
It's a lab for innovation.
We can harness criminality to our benefit.
Yeah, you're stress testing it, right?
I mean, you're putting the lid on and you're adding stress to it and something is going to pop out.
And I don't know necessarily.
It doesn't seem – it probably doesn't track with me that it's the criminals that are doing the innovating.
It's probably more just it seems to be that it's the criminals that see they see the technology for the liberating thing.
that it so like i i think a good way to look at it is like it probably like it's not illegal
to send money from one person to another person until somebody tells you it's illegal because
they want you to do it through their system yeah right you know so like it's it's like yeah i think
it's interesting that you can um that we you know we can hear this talk about it um but then you
break it down and you look at it from really what is actually happening.
And it's like, I'm giving this guy money and he's giving another guy money or I'm giving
this guy money and he's letting somebody else take money from another person.
It's like, that doesn't seem like that's not, you know, that's not child trafficking.
That's not cocaine.
That's not, you know, um, but for the same reason, um, we've got, that's why, that's
why Ross Ulbrich is in prison.
Right.
Yeah.
But even historically, like you say, it's not a crime to send money to another person.
But like there have been religious prohibitions like against usury and like interest and things like that that have almost prior to certain transactions.
take you know it does serve as a prohibition on maybe sending money to another person to the extent
it's going to require you know a third party to hold the money and get some sort of transaction
fee or whatever so even in ancient times it might have been like i don't mean that's what
while i think was like some of those things were like these are like kosher or whatever
interpretations of um the religious strictures in place that like yes this is good against the
backdrop of islam you can do it this way um oh no actually i guess alden does note in this chapter
that like part of the historical relationship between hawala and the sushtafa the financial
instrument is a little bit obscure because there are this background of islam and so you know
the hawala dars maybe don't want to have how they're operating become perfectly transparent
in that era because then maybe the reigning religious authorities don't, you know, find
that it's not consistent with some religious text or whatever.
I don't know.
I can't say this for certain, but I don't think that there's an example of a law being
passed outlawing the transfer of money by someone who didn't offer their own way to
transfer money.
so that to me means that it is not motivated by religious reasons and there are other reasons like
like you know i i but i again i don't know i don't know that for a fact but um that seems to
me very consistent where i guess i i take so much of a more squinty-eyed look at these things now
whenever i hear the word terrorism whenever i you know these are these are um words that people
what is the there's the saying um do you still beat your wife yeah have you stopped beating your
wife yeah have you stopped beating yeah have you stopped beating your wife and it's like well
you know like it's this indefensible thing that you yeah that people get locked into um yeah so
i don't know that's kind of how i think about it i guess um fascinating to to read so the islam
network was using checks as early as the 10th century at a time when like Europe was
still kind of starting to fumble around maybe a little bit with metallic coins.
And so, you know, that area of the world has given, you know, modern mathematics and navigation
and I think the oldest university in the world and, you know, really has developed a lot of things
that when they spread throughout the rest of the world had a shocking impact on the way they were perceived.
Here's something I want to ask you about.
So what did you think of when you read about the tally sticks?
I'm sure you're probably aware of it or you thought of it before,
So the tally sticks were accountants would sit on the benches, the bancos in Italy, in Florence and Vienna, and two merchants would come up and merchant A would say, hey, I want you to make a mark in your ledger that I owe this guy 500 whatever.
And the other guy goes, yep.
And so then what the guy would do is he'd make the mark and he would take a stick and he would break it and he would give each person half of that stick.
and that was basically put that back together.
That's how you made the claim in order to get it.
What did that make you think of?
Because that sure made me think of something.
Yeah, yeah.
Public and private keys at the...
Yeah, 1,000%.
Yeah, yeah.
I found that incredibly fascinating, the tally sticks.
So I did some extra reading on that too.
I think that this wasn't as much used
by the merchants on their bancos
And like this was an alternate way that the ancient English, I think some Germanic tribes used.
Okay.
So this wasn an Italian banking like modern banking emerges in Florence and whatnot Um cause you get like I think if I read this correctly like part of this one part of the stick is called the stock and one is called the foil
Later, these things become so widely used, the tally sticks, the stock and the foil that
they bring the stocks to a place and that place becomes the stock exchange.
And so, yeah, yeah.
And also the short end of the stick is another phrase that I got the short end of the stick
that comes from tally sticks too.
And just so to make it less abstract, I got a picture here I wanted to share.
Can you see that, Lucas, right there?
I can see your thumb.
Oh, yeah, I got it.
Oh, that's what that looks like.
Yeah, so it's split lengthwise like this.
And these – can you really see it good?
Am I just pointing it not right here, Lucas?
Yeah, I can see it.
It looks like a dull saw blade, basically.
That's it.
That's a good way to describe it.
And the notches, the serrations, each of those are indications of different denominations.
Like this is a bigger one and these are just different types of denominations in the exchange.
And the really – so I think this is a quote maybe from Wikipedia.
No, this is – it's from some article online.
I won't read it.
But basically then the tally stick is then you have these two things split lengthwise like that.
If they match together perfectly, then you know each part of the exchange gets one of them.
when they match together you know that the um the person did hold the debt or the credit or whatever
corresponding to this other person and the really cool thing is um random this is a i wrote it on
the word document you might have saw it there randomness in nature is the best cryptography
because the grain of the wood not just the notches but like this is is it's so elaborately
like not purely random of course there's like a reason the grain is as it is but it's not
replicable and so like a tally stick you could probably use this today with quite a level of
cryptographic security or whatever because like the you can't recreate the wood grain you don't
have to do the notches perfectly or whatever like how subtle that is in the wood when you see if
everything lines up absolutely perfectly it was an immense level of security obviously back in
the day where you need to maintain a ledger in some way.
If you just purely write it down,
all of the trust is on the person maintaining the ledger.
But if it's like maintained in this tally way,
then there is that, like you kind of hint at the analogy with Bitcoin.
People do have their own key to the exchange,
to their own funds that is going to cryptographically secure it.
So yeah, the tally sticks are a really interesting
forecursor, precursor, forebear to Bitcoin. Yeah. Oh yeah. Precursor, forebear. Tally sticks. Do you,
do you think that tally sticks are the world's first example of biometric, uh, scanning or by
say like biometric? Cause I mean, like you, you bring up a very good point where it's like,
you can't take a stick and, um, get another one and match the grains. You can't cut that same
stick and use it shorter and get the grains to match. Like it's just not going to happen.
It's like a fingerprint, except probably I would say, I would assume it's more accurate, but I'm
not sure. Yeah. No, you ask if it's history's first example and there's actually another practice
called chirography, C-H-I-R-O graphy, chirography, where an agreement is written up on a piece of
paper and the paper is torn so you then oh i love it yeah the paper is the jagged edges of the tear
also occur in this sort of random way that two torn pieces of paper are really never going to
line up perfectly unless you have the actual one that was torn um and so there is this whole art
i this whole history too um like tally sticks are not i asked chad gpt if tally sticks are a form
of chirography and they're not because chirography is limited to paper but there's probably um other
yeah there's tally bones that was on the wikipedia page so there's other instances of using um nature
to secure the ledger not in the form of like the commodity characteristics of a money but like
literally using nature as the ledger instead of writing it down in um having a double entry
bookkeeping thing in that way. I had a band that was called the Jagged Edge and it turns out,
it turns out that there is a like R and B group from Atlanta. That's also called the Jagged Edge.
Cool. And we, we played a gig one time and a bunch of people showed up early and they were
very disappointed to find out that we were, we were not the Atlanta R and B five dudes piling up,
piling out of a truck wearing boots and flannels and they're like with a jagged edge we're like oh
shit yeah it's us but you're gonna be disappointed they came they came in with the jagged edge of
their top tally stick and you came in with yours like these things do not fit together this does
not match up at all it doesn't work one bit um one of the things uh that i thought was interesting
I wanted to talk about was the, um, so three, um, three layers of basically, uh, how, how
notes evolved.
So they went from, um, here's a, here's a note specific from me, specific to you for
a specific amount.
And then, um, that note became negotiable.
So it became like if, uh, and a lot of people probably are young enough that they never have
done this, but you can take a, if somebody writes you a check, then you can indeed,
that check. You can sign the back of it over to them. So that's like an, that's a negotiable,
that makes it a negotiable thing. And then the, the, the next layer of that was that
we just went to standardized units and they were bearer assets. So instead of it having your name
on it, instead of it being for a specific amount, now it was a $20 bill, a $5 bill. Here's a quarter,
here's a nickel, et cetera, et cetera. Everybody could use them. We talk about what the benefits
of that is, right? Which is that it, I would argue, I don't say that I don't think it increases
the portability of gold. I think it increases the illusion of the portability of gold.
I think it, I think it contributes to a greater blow up in the end, which is what we see from this,
the rise of this, of fractional reserve banking. But one of the things that popped into my mind was,
so what did we lose when we did that, when we changed, when we changed from this specific me
to you? What we lost was all of the time that people have spent cumulative over the last couple
thousands of years making change. Like when you go to a standardized unit, then every transaction,
like the odds of it being exact change, like when was the last time you had exact change for
anything? Right. You know, very rare. Um, and so that necessitated another switch, which was to
a type of digital bearer asset, basically, like the credit card. It used to be that the credit
card, by the way, was something that you verified every time you used it, right? So it used to be
that you walk through Walmart and if you checked out in Walmart, then they asked you for your ID.
I haven't had my ID. I haven't had anybody ask for my ID for the use of a credit card for like
15 years, probably. Yeah. Something like that. At least 10, at least 10. So, but anyway, so then that
that obviated the need for change again. So we, we didn't need change. Then we did change,
need change. And now we don't again. But what, what Bitcoin is, it allows you to have the perfect
amount. I was thinking about that. I was like, like, what are, what are the things that are
different about different kinds of money? And it's like with, with physical money, with commodity
money, you always had to have change. But Bitcoin, as it is in every instance, the paradox of paradoxes,
Jason Lowry talked about this with he, he was like, dude, everything about Bitcoin is a paradox.
Like it's, uh, you know, um, the thing that it, the, the class of things that it falls into,
it shares lots of the characteristics. And then there's always this one thing that is just
monumental that sets it apart, which is like, so it's a commodity money. Commodity monies, um,
have historically been really awful to work with because you have to, um, cut them apart and all
this stuff. And it's like, well, it turns out this is a commodity money that you have perfect
change for every time you use it. Um, I don't know. I was just, that was a, that was a paradox
thing that I guess that kept popping into my mind thinking about, um, as we transitioned from
different types of instruments for transporting value that again, back to, back to what we've
said before, which is that there are no choices, only trade-offs. It's like, yeah, there definitely
are trade-offs when you standardize money and you make it so that anybody can use it.
There's no need to circle back to the originating issuing banker or whoever it was that started that
transaction in order to close it out. Yes, that increases the velocity of money. It increases the
amount of people that can use it, et cetera, et cetera. But what else does it do? One of the
things is that it makes it easier to make claims upon the commodity, the underlying commodity. So
that's the fractional reserve banking where that's terrifying. Another thing is that it creates
it creates this inconvenience of having to give change if you ever do have to settle in the commodity.
So I found that – I just found that really interesting.
I didn't have anything to say about it.
I think that's key to this chapter for Alden is that developing negotiability through banking
was this technological innovation that changes the nature of money
because it allows these other more elaborate types of services
that banks are then later going to operate
when you are later negotiating where the subprime mortgage crisis,
they're passing around bundles of mortgages and stuff like that.
Like how far have we gone down the route of abstraction?
And I think that that's what it is, you know, drawing again from Lowry,
just really thinking about the danger of abstraction
as a way that the underlying nature of something is then forgotten.
So I guess to back up a step,
we've already had a few layers of abstraction
on top of commodity money to seemingly make it more workable.
Gold has some drawbacks in divisibility.
We talked last time, maybe it's actually a density problem,
that gold is too valuable,
so you can't really cut it up small enough to buy a slice of bread, right?
So you need some way to make it less dense, quote unquote, and more divisible.
So the idea, first we have innovations like legal tender coinage, which is just a way to make uniform the pieces of gold you're carrying around to mitigate another seeming drawback.
Seeming drawback with gold as commodity money, which is that maybe you need to test it to see if it's gold each time.
Whereas if you have legal tender coinage, maybe you have the emperor's face stamped on the front. So there's some sort of verification there. And if you have the ridges along the side, then you have some other verification that it hasn't been shaved or modified. So you have a standard unit.
But that's legal tender coinage. These are technological innovations, and they're kind of like abstractions. The unit of a coin is the physical shape of the piece of metal, but it's also an abstraction that gets in people's minds that allows central authorities to then debase the currency because you are now accepting a coin as legal tender and not exactly like that amount of gold.
You assume it is, but then the centralized authority can say, now we're going to change the composition of gold in this coin.
So they manipulate those variables separately.
The physical commodity itself is separate from the coin.
You've added a layer of abstraction with legal tender coinage.
Now, banking and negotiability of paper instruments in lieu of that coin, obviously another huge layer of abstraction.
And so I think it's good to keep in one's mind that the more layers of abstraction that are added between the actual quote-unquote money and your use of the money are always layers for potential manipulation, always routes of attack, things that can be manipulated or managed by whoever is defining that abstraction.
the centralized authority defining what a coin is um and obviously with the negotiable paper
instruments if you have a centralized bank um they have various ways to manipulate the currency by
just creating more of the that paper note and so i just think that you know with bitcoin it's a hard
asset and we don't see those layers of abstraction to make it usable it is what it is it's peer to
peer, people can transact directly without an intermediary. And that's a very valuable thing.
People's, you know, maybe a good comeback when people say there is nothing to Bitcoin and then
money seems real is begin talking about the abstraction that our fiat money actually is,
of course, it's how many layers of abstraction, even if it was based on a commodity, even if we
were on a gold standard um the how many layers of abstraction are you are there between you and
the gold sitting in a vault somewhere and so with bitcoin if you self-custody you know and do peer
to peer transactions you've eliminated abstraction it's realer and more present in that sense than
gold-based banking is where um you do have layers of abstraction between you and the asset you
purportedly own and are transacting in yeah the i like that she's introducing without like really
jumping up and down and screaming about um the dangers of fractional reserve because that i think
that can take you off into that can take you like deep down into the dark pits of hell if you really
start to think about. Um, and this was something I was still, I was still in banking. I was still
in lending when I read, uh, the creature from Jekyll Island and I started to kind of try to
piece together, okay, I'm actually in this system. What does this mean? And, um, I think the quote
you read from Alden was that, you know, like if a majority or if it, even if like most people,
not all want to come get their money. It's not there. Um, and I don't think that's, I don't,
that might not be an accurate quote, but it's, it's so much worse than that. It's so, so, so,
so, so much worse than that. It's, it's not most people. It's not a majority of people.
It's not even a large minority of people. It's basically if like one in 10 people want their
money. Yeah, it's, it's not there. And like, and that's like that, that's not a, this is not a
campfire ghost story. This is not something that's meant to scare people. This is utter fact, like
that money is not there. And so here's how it works. The Fed, let's say, let's say, you know,
the Fed decides that they're going to create a million dollars worth of money. They create a
million dollars. They give it to the treasury. The treasury takes it and they sell the bonds and then
they put it into one of the banks. And now that bank has a million dollars and it's going to write
$10 million worth of loans on that. And then that's a big bank. Those $10 million worth of
loans are probably going to go to smaller banks. So now you've got $10 million that gets a million
apiece dropped into another 10 banks and they're each going to create $10 million worth of loans
off of that. So we started with, we started with $1 million of money that has nothing behind it.
Yeah. And, and what did we do? We created a hundred million or 110, you know, so that's
like, we're, we're already at less than 1% claim on something that doesn't even exist.
Yeah. And that's, that's before it ever gets to a small town bank. You know, this is,
Yeah. You know, they they talk about like when Silvergate Bank and when when Silicon Valley Bank, when they got taken out in Operation Chokepoint 2.0, they talked about them as, you know, these are regional banks like these are hundred billion dollar banks plus.
Right. I mean, these are these are big, big operations. So these are the like these are they're all they're already like the third, fourth in line.
And then, you know, trickle down to your, you know, farmer state bank, your national, your national federal or whatever you call it.
But the amount of abstraction, it cannot be overstated how little money there actually is in the system to satisfy any claims.
And I'm reading one of Nassim Taleb's books on the side right now.
This one is, this one, Anti-Fragile.
and, um, you know, talks a lot about, you know, fat tail risk and talks a lot about how it's not
the thing that happens every day that you need to be prepared for. It's the thing that happens
like once every hundred years. And that's what you have to, like, that's the thing you need to
protect yourself against because the thing that happens every single day, everybody's protected
against that, you're already immune to that.
And and talks a lot about you know how we we draw volatility out of the system because we think that that a good idea but volatility is what makes that system work It what makes it robust and and strong um and resilient And so yeah I I just
you think about it's like, um, you know, what we did during the global financial crisis in order
to keep people from, from just taking runs, um, was to just backstop these banks with even more
money and then, and then clamp down on the lending standards.
Um, so that we just, all we did was nationalize the banking system wholly, like fully outright,
like the buyouts that all the big guys got, those were, you know, that's just the cost
of giving your soul up.
Um, basically, no, once, once things are too big to fail and you have a centralized entity
that can backstop them all, then the amount of money in the system is infinite.
It's not like there is no limit to the amount of money in the system because the central
bank will just simply backstop any failure. And then, you know, you're then motivated to
the tendency towards increasingly risky fractional reserve banking that all the notes in this,
you've just added another incentive to, for banks to push it even further to the limit.
If they think that a bailout is if they're too big to fail or whatever. I mean, we all hear that.
Yeah. Um, that brings a, that's a really good one. Um, I think to talk about, which is like,
what does protect people in that instance? Like what protects you if your money is in a bank that
gets run on? And it's, that's FDIC, Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation, I think is what
it is. So FDIC is something that came along. Yeah, did it come along in the 40s? I'm not quite sure
when it came along. But anyways, it's supposedly there to insure up to $250,000, all of your money
that's in the bank, right? But what that is, it's a set rate that banks pay. So like for every $250,000
worth of deposits, they pay X dollars in order to have this FDIC coverage. And so that would be like
every single driver in the entire world paying the exact same amount on their insurance, regardless
of what vehicle they drove, how often they drove it, how recklessly they drove it, how
many accidents they got into.
And so that's something I think that's another thing that's kind of alarming about this
situation, which is that the insurance is not insurance.
Insurance is something that you get a different rate than I get.
It's a premium and it's called a premium based on the risk factors because we're taking into
account the risk factors, but they don't do that with banks. And so if you don't do that with banks,
if there is no penalty in terms of a higher premium for being more risky, i.e. having lower
amounts of reserves, loaning out more at a higher fractional reserve, having higher amounts of
defaults, lending to less credit worthy people, like if there's no punishment for that and my
insurance for doing that is the same as your insurance for being a fully custodia bank 100
percent backstopped every asset has its own match like all that that creates this moral hazard
that people are just racing towards the edge of what can we do how fast can we do it how hard can
we do it what are the risks we can take and inevitably i mean that's just that's just it
it would, it's just like, it's like telling somebody that you can't die.
So what are you going to do if you can't die? I mean,
you're going to go bungee jump without a cord.
You're going to go parachute without a parachute. Like you're,
you're going to, you're going to play, um, you, you're going to,
you're going to have whatever, what do they call it?
When you go right at each other? I don't know. Anyways, you're,
you're going to play chicken with a, with a Harrier jet. Like, yeah, I mean,
you know like if you can't die you're going to do really stupid shit yeah and and that's what we see
banks doing like the during the height of the global financial crisis when there's like oh you
know here's the you know this guy's dog owned three houses right like this guy's this guy's
this guy's dead grandfather was the co-signer on three apartment buildings or duplexes like
yeah no so that is all terrifying of course this foray into fraction reserve banking and the
ways that in its modern iteration it interacts with human nature to impel us to riskier and
riskier and a more unstable financial system but if you go way back like fractional reserve banking
I think as Alden describes it
in a gold based system
isn't necessarily evil
or subject to those things
there are these tendencies to take it further and further
but if it's
if the
if it's gold
based monetary system
there at least is supposedly
something there at the end of the day
an asset for which you
deposit and the claims
against a real thing
um and but it's less it's less of the real thing yes but also on that like with flex correction
reserve banking if people have an alternative if they did have an alternative to a fully custodial
bank um and they the risk was made known to them um this is how risky it is and then people buy
into that risk but the problem is that with the bailouts again there is no risk and so like you
You were told there was risk.
You accepted the risk.
The risky thing came about, and you said, you know, I want to do over.
I no longer accept this risk that I said I accepted.
So, yeah.
I mean, like, theoretically, it could work if we did, like, perfectly rational actors.
You accept the risk.
You live and die by the risk.
But then too big to fail comes along, and people begin to whine and scream and stuff.
So I think theoretically it doesn't work because I think the second that you issue more claims against the money than there exists, then you have opened yourself up to Nassim Taleb's black swan to the fat tail risk to the it will happen.
Like it will happen that everybody wants to get their money out.
It's there's just, yeah, you can't predict it and you can't back test for it and you can't use this data to say that it'll happen, but it will happen.
If it's if it's in the realm of possibility, it will occur.
There is a way to mitigate it.
Like in all the notes, this certificates of deposit where you match the duration of the loan with the deposit duration such that someone promises, I won't withdraw this deposit for 10 years.
then the bank can loan it out.
It can be a fractional system because they're not maintaining the full reserve,
but you promise not to kind of make a run on the bank for a certain amount
until the loan is paid back.
Yeah, that only works if all of it is that way, though.
Like every single bit of money that's issued is backed by something that is time-dated.
And even still, then you're being disingenuous to the users of the network unless you're upfront telling them, hey, by the way, you know, we are now operating on a four to one, which means that the money that you have is worth 25% of what it was to begin with, just flat out.
Like there's, there's no way around it. You can pretend as long as, as long as the music doesn't
stop. And this is why in modern, so this is why you hear these macroeconomist guys always talking
about the velocity of money. Like in order for our modern system to continue working, we have to have
a high velocity of money. We have to have money keep moving because if the money ever stops,
then that means that we don't have people taking out new credit and injecting new life into the system by basically mortgaging the future.
If all of that money went and sat, then the whole thing would collapse upon itself.
And so velocity of money decreases when you have higher interest rates.
And that's what we're experiencing now is like on the, probably the verge of, um, of, of, of a, of a depression recession type of thing.
Maybe I think we've been, I think we've been in a shadow depression, shadow recession for two years.
Um, but yeah, I, I just think fundamentally you can't get around.
And look, if I mean, if you offer more claims on something, then the thing exists like.
It's the game is over at that point.
It's just a matter or it's just a matter of time.
Like we all know, we could do fractional reserve with Bitcoin if a bank said we'll accept we have three Bitcoin in deposits or four Bitcoin in deposits.
But just so you know, we're only going to maintain 75% of those deposits here.
We're going to loan one of those Bitcoin out so that other people put the money to work and then charge them interest on the loan.
You're taking the risk.
If you come here, the loan might not have come back.
So you could have – as long as people accept that risk, their Bitcoin could be loaned out.
They're just accepting the risk that if they go there to the bank, it's not going to be there.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
It's just a matter of time.
like that loan eventually won't pan out.
Well, there could be defaults, that's for sure, but that's not every loan.
Well, no, it's not that there could be.
It's that there's a guarantee that there will be.
If it can happen, it will happen, right?
Yeah, to some, right.
I'm just saying I think that there is probably a way,
if the risk is stated up front to people and they're savvy financial customers
that you can't have a fractional reserve system.
So I'm not saying I want to do it or it's a good idea.
The velocity of my Bitcoin is zero.
It's dead.
It doesn't go anywhere.
So it's still, but it doesn't, it doesn't matter what the, it doesn't matter what, um,
what, what claims they make to the customers.
It doesn't matter how savvy the customers are.
It still only ends one way.
It ends with the money not being there.
Like that, and, and, and that, and that, that may be that it lasts a million years before
it happens.
Yeah.
you know so let the ponzi play on let the people keep on doing it until yeah yeah so i see there's
it's risky it is risky and that risk maybe asymptotically approaches 100 so i don't know
yeah yeah i think i just yeah i just think it it gets there um yeah the uh the knight templar
that's the uh that's the forebearers for the masonic knights and the shriners did you know
that oh no i didn't i wonder if they have some sort of whole wallace system they use i was wondering
I was really wondering that too. If they have this thing where maybe you can just like somehow, I don't know, or if maybe they used to, obviously they used to, but like it would be cool.
Oh, one of the things that I read about the whole wall of system was that the amount that they charge for their services can range from like 0.5% to like 7%, but also in some instances, like up to 25 or 50%.
And so I found that really interesting because I like the idea.
I think I was in grad school when I first heard of this idea.
And I think this is the proper term for it, which is called third degree, third degree price discrimination, where it's basically like every customer is, is assessed individually.
And so therefore everybody gets charged a different, there's no, there's no standard.
and so who you are how long you've been doing business with the wall how much money you're
sending how fast you want it to get there where it's going who it's going to etc etc like these
things can all factor in and to me this makes it much more like a much more like a consumption tax
type of approach where it seems to me way more fair. Like it seems to me, um, that the system
is assessing the risk, um, individually. And that means that the risky actors are the ones,
you know, so maybe there are terrorists, maybe there are criminals, et cetera, et cetera.
But, um, you know, one thing, you know, I think so many, so many people I've heard that were
criminals are like, what would you do if you had to do it all over again? They're like, I'd go
legit. Like it's way easier to just go legit than it is to be a good criminal. You know, they always
say about like, the thing about being a criminal is you have to be right every single time. And if
you're trying to catch the, trying to catch the criminal, you only have to be right once.
Yeah. You know, you only have to be in the right position once. And so, um, I actually think that
that sort of discrimination in terms of pricing is a wonderful deterrent to crime.
It's a, you know, like it's, this is kind of flipping around what Alden had in the book
where she talks about how those networks have come under scrutiny as being channels for
terrorist money, et cetera, et cetera.
But I think that they probably do as good of a job of anything at dropping, you know,
And of course, you know, if if it's somebody who supports the action and they're encouraging it, then that's probably not great.
But then again, yeah, I think it all comes back.
And and of course, like, I don't know, just just read like terrorists have their money in every bank in the world.
Like they prefer the U.S. dollar like that is the preferred.
I know Special Forces soldiers who have told me stories about carrying literal duffel bags of cash to warlords and giving it to them.
Like, you know, like it, I just think it's funny.
I think it's hypocritical as hell that, um, the system that created the perfect currency
for, uh, illicit activity would ever complain about somebody like, no, like you're stealing
our market share.
Like that's really what you're doing.
Right.
And I think that critique is often disingenuous and an attempt to, you know, gain greater
surveillance powers for sure yeah i yeah i think there's a scene in the movie war dogs have you
seen that it's about arms dealers and it won't ruin anything to say that there's a true story
right it's based on a true story and there's a scene where they're they get some arms to iraq
and the u.s military there just has a warehouse full of u.s dollars that and i think it was like
seized dollars like that's that that is the um what would you say the briefcase of cash that you
mentioned they just had warehouses of it and then you know just give it out and they introduce that
money into the system or whatever um but i i know i think i have two final points to make both of
them just utterly ridiculous like hoala hoala koala um i just want to say that yeah the word
koala probably has no rhymes it seems like an orange situation and so if you know the word
hawala and you are a rapper and you stumble upon the word koala accidentally use it i don't know
how rapping works you have something to pull you out like that what do you mean i don't know but
i i was gonna say not like that and then i regretted the second i said it because i'm like
oh actually it probably works exactly like that so it's like if you're is like if you're like free
what do they call it? Free, free, free flow, whatever it is. Like you're just like free verse
and something like that. Um, I suppose you have to think like two lines in advance or something
like that because you got to get to the word that is going to become your subsequent rhyme. So it,
um, I suppose you don't often end sentences with koala, not knowing where you're going to go,
but if that should happen though, you do have a walla now in your repertoire. That's, yeah.
I hope somebody finds a rap with koala in it now.
Yeah.
I want to hear it.
It uses, talks about the koala system,
and it just breaks down the history of money and protobanking
through the metaphor of a koala.
Koalas have pouches, right?
I don't know anything about koalas other than-
Maybe that's a kangaroo.
I think they're marsupials, so they probably have a pouch.
Yeah.
I don't know any koala facts.
So the other thing was, I'm going to go down to the local Masonic Lodge
and ask them if I can join the Crusades.
not because I'm interested in any sort of religious warfare.
I just want to see if there's a holdover policy on the Crusades
that's still in the books.
Like, oh, shit, our bylaws, we've still got a crusade,
like a section 37.A, B.6.
He says the magic words, give him a sword.
That's right.
Break out the shield.
Yeah, so I suppose they're not too involved in the Crusades at this point.
the Knights Templar is now totally dissolved and they are just Masonics.
So handshakes.
Supposedly.
You never know.
There's probably a front for something even better.
The,
the,
the declaration of independence movies,
whatever they're called,
the ones with Nicholas Cage,
they were really good.
I enjoyed those.
Yeah.
I didn't really have a whole lot to say about the double entry bookkeeping.
Like,
I just,
I don't know.
Like that was the second,
kind of the second part of what we talked about.
It excites many souls.
And like when you hear double entry bookkeeping, you know, people get going.
It's exciting enough as it is.
I don't even, I can't even add anything to it to make it more exciting.
So.
It's a good point.
Yeah.
That's like a Ferrari doing a burnout on top of a chocolate cake with a stripper inside.
So yeah.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Nope.
On that, I think that's a great place to end it.
Are you good?
I am good.
Huala huala.
Let's get out of here.
Awesome.
All right.
I am at Lucas Matty on X.
That's at the whole frame.
And we will catch you guys next time as we go into what would be chapters seven and eight, I think, of Lynn Alden's fantastic wander through money and money as a technology called broken money.
Thank you guys for joining us and we'll see you guys later.
Bye.