Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] They say the ruler is bent, but then use the bent ruler to measure the table. They say the clock is broken, then solemnly read out the hour. They say the instrument is false, then ask it with perfect seriousness for one final certification.
[00:00:17] This is in itself a form of bondage. To measure gold in fiat terms is in Jung's sense, to deny the shadow, to denounce the paper system in public while continuing in private to let it decide what counts as value.
[00:00:35] The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin. Audible.
[00:00:59] What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin. Audible I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know.
[00:01:08] And I have got a really fun little article or Twitter post. Twitter article A twartical I don't.
[00:01:16] This one is by and and I don't. This isn't somebody that I've like followed. I just came across this and this Craig Tyndale and I thought this was a really cool piece.
[00:01:28] And it also, it hits and misses things and it could be, I'll, you know, give him the benefit of the doubt. And where I think he misses is it could just be in the framing. And I try to clarify that in the take in the commentary following the read.
[00:01:45] But I just think this was a really good thing to read because this does come up all the time. And, and this is also a. This is both a counterpoint and something that it's true and most bitcoiners I know actually take to heart.
[00:01:58] And this is exactly why you can actually understanding this perspective is exactly why you can hold through an 80% downturn is because, you know, fiat is not telling the truth or you know, that fiat is as much noise as it is signal and you have to understand what you hold. And this is exactly why the people who come in this is. This was one of the large criticisms about crypto in general is that it's basically just traders and speculators and when the price goes down, they're out. When the price is going up, they're in. But I think there is also something in this that is worth addressing to counter a counterpoint and understanding why understanding the nature of prices and why it's also not so simple as the way it's laid out when you're thinking conceptually or some sort of cultural purity thing. But regardless, this was really well written, it was a fun read and I think there's a lot of great things to pull out of it to the positive and some interesting counters to actually discuss and get into. So with that, we won't go any farther into it. I will have the link in the show notes.
[00:03:13] It's called Stepping Outside of the Fiat Frame and it's all about gold, by the way. It doesn't even mention bitcoin, even though people talk about it in the comments. But I thought it was a perfect Everybody in bitcoin has heard this or knows this conversation. This is the mantra of one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. So we're gonna go ahead and just get right into it. And I will. Like I said, I'll have the link in the show notes if you want to check it out or following. All right. With that, let's get into today's article that's so stupid and it's titled Stepping Outside the Fiat Frame.
[00:03:49] Gold is what Remains when Money Stops Telling the Truth By Craig Tyndale they say the currency is unsound, political, debased, endlessly managed.
[00:04:04] They say it is manipulated at the source and diluted at the edge. They say it cannot be trusted except as a temporary convenience, cannot be believed except by force of habit, cannot be honored except inside a system that demands more faith, precisely as it deserves less.
[00:04:22] And yet, when gold rises against it, they suddenly treat its judgment as definitive. They say the ruler is bent, then use the bent ruler to measure the table.
[00:04:33] They say the clock is broken, then solemnly read out the hour. They say the instrument is false, then ask it with perfect seriousness for one final certification.
[00:04:43] This is in itself a form of bondage. To measure gold in fiat terms is, in Young's sense, to deny the shadow, to denounce the paper system in public while continuing in private, to let it decide what counts as value.
[00:04:59] The whole argument is that fiat is unstable, political, detached from material discipline, sustained by confidence, coercion, and administrative habit. Yet even those who claim to see this most clearly still run back to Fiat's shadow for validation.
[00:05:15] They buy gold as an escape from paper, then measure that escape in the paper price. They denounce the abstraction, then ask the abstraction to certify the thing meant to stand apart from it. If that shadow is never faced, if fiat is never recognized as the thing still governing the mind that claims to reject it, then that is Fiat's deeper victory. We can never see reality unless we demand to see it.
[00:05:41] Its triumph was that it taught even its enemies to think in its units. It trained them to experience value through its grammar, to seek confirmation through its measures, to rebel within the architecture it built for them. So even the anti fiat mind remains half captive to the fiat imagination.
[00:06:00] Even its descent arrives preformatted by the thing it claims to reject. As Shakespeare warned, make not your thoughts your prisons, so say it to them and say it to yourself. Gold is not Fiat's alter ego.
[00:06:15] It is not the dollar's opposite number, not paper's reflection in a harder mirror, not a theatrical inversion of the same monetary drama. Gold doesn't exist to flatter fiat by rising against it. It doesn't exist to provide a thrill on a screen. And when you feel that surge as the price goes higher, what you are feeling is often your conditioning betraying you, the fiat trained mind still responding to the screen like a lab animal to a lever.
[00:06:44] Breaking that conditioning feels awkward, though that is the very nature of conditioning. Gold exists to hold claim where claims decay, to hold value where value is diluted, to hold continuity, where policy becomes improvisation. And if that is true, then break the habit here.
[00:07:04] Stop asking fiat to explain gold. Stop asking the decaying unit to tell you the meaning of the thing meant to survive its decay. Stop looking at gold as a line moving inside the old frame. Look at it instead as a way of carrying command through time, across disorder, and at a distance from promises that are growing less credible by the year.
[00:07:25] The point is not to invert the old system. The point is to step outside its grammar. That is where the deeper error comes into view. The habit that got us here was the belief that value could be detached from matter, that finance could float free of energy, land, labor, metals, logistics, and physical constraint without consequence. We trained ourselves to think in symbols severed from substance.
[00:07:52] We built systems that spoke in abstractions and then acted surprised when abstraction began to consume the world beneath it, the world we actually inhabit.
[00:08:02] So it is entirely fitting that even the revolt against Fiat reproduces the same mistake. The rebels don't leave the frame. They invert it. They don't break the spell. They perform their descent inside it. This is why judging gold by its price in dollars misses the point twice.
[00:08:20] First, because it leaves the dollar in command of the argument. Second, because it mistakes gold for an asset appreciating within the system when its deeper importance is that it stands partly outside the system altogether.
[00:08:33] The real question is what gold preserves when dollars no longer tell the truth. What does it still command when paper multiplies and reality does not? What does it still buy when confidence thins, when institutions harden, when nominal wealth and actual control begin to pull apart?
[00:08:51] Because we are entering a world of tighter constraints? Energy, food, land, metals, logistics, time. These are the hard terms on which reality is delivered. In such a world, gold stops being a commentary on fiat and becomes something more practical, a stored claim on scarce reality.
[00:09:13] Not because it is sacred or magical, but because when systems come under pressure and people begin looking for some form of value that doesn't depend entirely on central bankers, the solvency of banks, or the credibility of states making promises they may no longer be able to keep.
[00:09:30] So gold is not there to decorate the decline of fiat. It is there to survive it. It is there because in a world of mounting constraint, people may need an instrument with which to pay for reality when reality is no longer cheaply available.
[00:09:45] And if you insist on seeing gold only through the dollar, you will misunderstand it. At the very moment you most need to understand it, you will think you are looking at a trade. You are really looking at a reverse of claim in a civilization that has spent too long confusing price with value symbols, with substance and monetary fluency, with command over the material world.
[00:10:12] All right, so that wraps up the piece. Like I said, it was pretty short and it's good.
[00:10:18] There's elements to take out of this, but it misses quite a bit of nuance and understanding in what prices are and how you can actually. How you actually value things fundamentally. And it sounds better conceptually than it actually means anything in practice. And I'm going to. I want to expand on. That was a lot. I want to expand on what I mean by each of those things. So first thinking about the understanding of value, why is it that if you're looking at gold or obviously bitcoin, that's why I read it on the show, is because you hear this constantly in relation to bitcoin. But I get really frustrated with this one because it's right when you apply it to most people, like the people who come in and think they're going to trade it and then they're happy when it goes up, and then when it goes down, they're like, I'm selling it. This is, this is stupid. They're expecting fiat to give it an accurate price at all times. And that is fundamentally that I think is the heart of what he's getting at here. That where it actually genuinely does apply. And so many people in bitcoin and crypto completely are completely lost on this. This is exactly why we have these huge hype cycles and these swings of this massive run up. Everybody's just chasing green candles and as soon as they're. They're, there are some red candles around, they turn into buffoons. They have, they don't they realize they have no idea why they're even here. They have no idea what they're even holding. They only wanted it because the number went up. So it's correct in the idea of applying it to most people and their behavior in the terms of whether or not they're buying or selling, or whether they come in to gold or Bitcoin and think that what they are doing is trading. That is quite frankly, a ridiculous way to look at it. And then it's also right conceptually in the sense of understanding the value or the weight of what you're holding, gold or Bitcoin, in the context of a dollar price at any one particular time.
[00:12:18] But then it fails miserably from a practical sense, because if you actually do hold something scarce and you do hold something of genuine value and the other currency is politically manipulated and debased, then that thing, that scarce thing, will in fact gain more purchasing power in the debased currency over time. You should expect it to. And the dollar price of those scarce assets can just as easily or more accurately be thought of as the declining value and the declining trust of the fiat currency. This is literally why one of the main mantras of the Bitcoin culture is one bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. That is literally what it's addressing. And it's exactly why a 70% or 80% crash in the price. A real bitcoiner doesn't run away scared. They just recognize that it's being mispriced. And often that's a fantastic buying opportunity if you have the capital available.
[00:13:21] And all of those swings are exaggerated by the leverage that the fiat system enables, by the debt and the constant unbacked leveraged trades and naked shorting and all of this stuff, stuff that doesn't even have to settle and stuff that's being multiplied in the price action, where someone actually is going to get margin called way before they actually have the value to hold up the trade, which is why you get these cascading things. This is the fiat exaggeration effect, if you will, being seen in a harder asset that can't be manipulated, or at least can only be manipulated at the edge, within a single exchange or within a single, like, isolated network, but can't be manipulated at its base market. Now, I want to read a quote because I want to go back to the idea of fundamentally what pricing even is.
[00:14:11] So it says quote. And yet when gold rises against it, they suddenly treat its judgment as definitive. They say the ruler bent, then use the bent ruler to measure the table. They say the clock is broken, then solemnly read out the hour. They say the instrument is false, then ask it with perfect seriousness for one final certification. This is in itself a form of bondage. To measure gold in fiat terms is, in Young's sense, to deny the shadow. End quote. Again, I think this is conceptually accurate in a couple of different senses, but practically useless except in the pure sense that when your asset or when your your Bitcoin or your gold is being mispriced in fiat terms, that you don't run scared because you're not an idiot. That is the only practical reality in which this framing should denote or should alter your behavior. And maybe this is all he's trying to get at, but it seems way more targeted on this idea that if it never goes up in fiat price, and that doesn't mean anything because it definitely would mean something. It would mean that either fiat is not being debased or it means that the network of your scarce asset is declining specifically because pricing is only relative. And I'll get to the analogies because he uses a couple of different analogies here that I think are really good in relaying one aspect of money, but fail when you really get into the nuance of how money is a different measurement from all of the things we usually analogize it to. And I'll say that as someone who uses these analogies all the time to explain one particular relationship or one particular facet of what money is, but have to admit where those analogies fail. So going back, all value is relative. It is only and completely relative. There's no standard measure of value, and the comparative usefulness of any particular measure of value is not based entirely on its scarcity. It's also based on its liquidity. How large of a network and how many other things is it being weighed relatively against?
[00:16:36] This is exactly why people thinking that Bitcoin is going to turn around and be a unit of account tomorrow have come have so deeply and profoundly made a staggering path dependent error about what a unit of account is and why it emerges. To begin with, you cannot possibly have a unit of account that is in a money that has a small liquidity network.
[00:17:00] It necessarily does not come about until it is the most liquid network.
[00:17:06] In the economic network, it's always the most liquid thing that is the best unit of account, even if the most liquid thing is crap. This is why monetary transitions are so slow and so unbelievably painful. Or at least historically speaking, I guess it's probably not every single monetary transfer has been insanely painful, but pretty much that's the rule. It certainly is for those in the declining money, without question. But liquidity isn't a switch. Liquidity is a process.
[00:17:36] And it's a slow, grueling process that takes an enormous. It is its own feedback loop. It's a chicken and egg problem. So you have to bootstrap one side of it. You have to. It's kind of like a lopsided trying to, trying to fill something up that needs water. Let's say there's like two different buckets of water. This is probably going to be a crappy analogy, but let me see if this makes any sense. There's two big, giant buckets of water, and then there's like tiny little tube at the bottom that moves the water back and forth. And you can pour water into each side of the bucket at about 10 times the rate that it transfers back and forth between the two. So you understand if you pour a whole bunch of water into the left side, there's going to be water going in the tube, trying to go into the bucket on the right. Right. You're going to, it's going to try to balance out, but the, the, the liquid is going to be able to go into either side from the top way faster than it will equalize at the bottom. Well, this is kind of what your medium of exchange phase of a monetary transition looks like. What the dynamics look like is the difference between your merchants accepting bitcoin and your, your population or your consumer base having bitcoin. So if you get a 10,000 merchants really, really fast, you on board like square does, right? You have 10 million merchants or something like that can now just turn on bitcoin. And so one side of the bucket just, just, just gets a. Pours a gallon, A torrent of water goes into the bucket on the left. But what happens, they have like no customers because nobody actually has the bitcoin. And so then that bucket is just going to slowly pour out as everybody's like, what the hell? Why, why did I even do this? We're so out of balance that this doesn't make any sense. We have like 10,000 merchants fighting over like 20 customers. But the fact that you have 10,000 merchants accepting Bitcoin are going to make bitcoin itself more valuable. They're going to make the liquid more relevant. It's going to open up a liquidity network or a new, new area of the network for expansion of liquidity. And for the people that do have bitcoin, they can now use it from day to day. So you have this little tube at the bottom that's slowly moving the water back into the other bucket. Customers are seeing, people are seeing that, oh, this is actually a useful thing. Oh, bitcoin. It's at the store. I didn't know about that. I can spend it at Walmart. Maybe I should get me some.
[00:20:00] And so some water goes back into the other bucket and then the same thing in reverse. You get this huge boom in price and everybody's like, oh my God, I want bitcoin. It's so. Look at the green candles. I need green candles. Fiat price is so important. It just exploded upward. And so you get a massive increase in the bucket on the right, but there's still no places that you can use it. And no hype cycle lasts forever. After you have a big run up, you're going to have it dump again. And there's a ton of people who think they're just trading that this just. They're going to get green candles forever and they have no idea what they purchased, just like this article's kind of suggestion or suggesting. And so what do they do they sell on the way down? Oh, no red candles.
[00:20:41] Bitcoin isn't actually worth anything. Gold isn't actually a stable asset because Fiat's told me that I should, I should be afraid of it. I'm going to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. But you know what happens? Institutions and merchants who just saw the low of bitcoin's previous cycle go from 2,000 and the new low going to 10,000 are like, this thing won't die. And the slow movers in the market start to pay a little bit more attention. The producers in the market start to pay a little bit more attention about a long term position, about what they should be holding over 10 years, as opposed to caring about what the eight latest candles are on the weekly chart. And more and more people read articles like this that make them realize they are in fact judging it by something that doesn't make sense, that isn't actually giving them a strong signal, but importantly, it doesn't give them an accurate signal at any one particular point in time, but it does give them a signal over time.
[00:21:46] I want to say that again and then try to expand and explain what I mean.
[00:21:53] It doesn't give an accurate signal at any individual point in time, but it would give an accurate signal over time.
[00:22:04] If fiat is being debased, if trust in fiat is being lost, if the network of bitcoin, if the economic system that is using and saving their value in Bitcoin or gold is expanding, it will show up eventually in the price of fiat. And whether you're saying Bitcoin's price is this many dollars or the dollar is this many sats, you're measuring the same thing, the relative weight in the market of a scarce asset versus a non scarce asset, or I guess a non scarce credit instrument. And if over 20 years that doesn't go in the direction of your scarce asset, you need to reconsider your thesis. You need to reconsider your principles. You need to understand, is this actually scarce? What is it that's preventing this from being scarce? What is it that's controlling the pricing in this market? And what do I understand or not understand about fiat? In other words, you need to check your work. But in the very nature of money, the very nature of what relative value is and how things receive prices, the best money, even if it sucks as money, even if it isn't scarce, will be the most liquid one, at least for the short to medium term. And here's a very simple example. Why. How much does a banana cost in Bitcoin or gold?
[00:23:35] What are you going to do? How are you going to determine what the value of a banana is in Bitcoin or gold? You are going to have to convert it to a network that has a liquid market trading bananas. You're going to have to convert it to pesos. You're going to have to convert it dollars. You're going to have to convert it to rubles, anything. Any network that does buy bananas directly with its currency will have to be converted to Bitcoin. For Bitcoin or gold will have to be converted to it first to then weigh it against bananas. Which means you can't escape the lies, the misinformation of fiat currency if it is the most liquid of your networks. But you should not treat it as definitive judgment. You should understand it as an incorrect measure. But that doesn't mean that bitcoin or gold is a better measure. It just means that you shouldn't trust the measure of fiat for the exact same reason why you shouldn't buy houses in 2007. Because fiat is lying to you about their value, about the actual resources that are available. But that doesn't mean that gold would have done a better job of figuring out how much, whether or not to buy that house.
[00:24:50] Quite the contrary. You now have to figure out and make a decision based on false information.
[00:24:55] This is where both the concept and the analogies fall short. In Understanding the reality of money and value.
[00:25:04] So the concept fails because to denounce the fiat measurement does not immediate as as inaccurate or as, as as a signal with enormous amounts of noise.
[00:25:18] That means you cannot rely on it does not immediately mean that gold or Bitcoin is a better immediate measure. It only means that our best measure is still garbage and it should not be trusted at face value. It should be understood as a very, very messy measurement. And the analogies fail. The ruler is bent, but we're using it to measure the table. The clock is broken, but then solemnly read out the hour.
[00:25:46] I have used these exact analogies. Understanding the weight, the monetary weight of something as a measure that it's like trying to measure your house with a ruler or a tape measure that literally stretches. It's not accurate. And you can't compare your house versus your neighbor's house because you might have stretched yours to a different degree. And this is exactly how money works. This is why finance is so bloated. And everything super expensive is because that's where all the money pulls in or pours in at. And then you can go to completely different areas. You can go from, you know, city to, to rural. Like money is, it literally has different prices within the same economic system. Some of those are natural differences in the geographic conditions and production. But a massive amount of it is just because you're pouring in money into one. Like you can think of the, the entire economy going back to the bucket with the little tube, the two buckets analogy. Well, the entire economy is also just like hundreds of these buckets of various sizes. And they all have small tubes in, in between each other to level out. And there's just massive amounts of water specifically going into just some of the buckets. And so the pricing in those buckets is going to be arbitrary in relation to other, other things. This is exactly why, this is actually relevant to the idea of why gold is actually a subpar money for every industry in which it is actually used for its utility. And it's so funny because somebody like Peter Schiff will explicitly say that's what makes gold better, but that's actually to the contrary. That's actually what makes it a worse measure. Because in those utility in those industries or those specific use cases where it's actually being used up, it actually isn't being used as a pure measurement system. A portion of its market is actually being obscured or is actually introducing noise because you're using what should be a non consumable measuring system and exchange system. You're Actually using it up for something in that industry. Jewelry is a little bit of a special case because jewelry is kind of like a self referencing thing, right? You, you get jewelry in a thing because it's valuable rather than the, the valuable thing being good. There's plenty of things that are good as jewelry or that could be used to make good jewelry but that are cheap and that people don't value. But maybe the idea of like electronics as you're using it in HDMI cables is. Gold isn't going to measure HDMI cables quite as well as it will other things in the market is a bad analogy just because gold isn't really used for that much in the market. But the principle stands. But all these analogies are good in one sense of what money does, but then fail miserably to explain another sense of what money is and how, how it is actually able to provide a measure of a unitless metric of something that can't actually be concretely measured. It can only be relatively measured. And this is in the nature of liquidity and the nature of a network.
[00:28:47] A, a ruler is not a network good. You know, I can, if my ruler is stretchy, I can just go get a good ruler. And it doesn't matter if anybody else in the whole world uses my ruler or not. I can still measure my house and then add to the house and then measure it again with the same ruler and it will show as bigger the ruler is accurate. And if I have an accurate clock, I can use an accurate clock all by myself to keep time. I can't do that with value because value is inter subjective. Not only is my personal value of something subjective, but value measurements are an intersubjective phenomenon, which means it is only actually discovered in direct exchange. Which means the more exchange that is happening in your money or your asset or your network, the better your measure is, even if the tool itself is a weaker measure. The easy way to understand this is to think about it like a social network or a social networking technology. Think about it in the context of the telegraph versus the telephone. The telephone. I can concretely say this telephone is a better communication mechanism than the telegraph. I can't tell. There's very little information I can give over a telegraph. There's lots of nuance in speaking. It's much, much slower. It's way more costly. It's far less, you know, it's far less dense of a signal. There's like 20 layers of communication that can happen when you can listen to someone's voice at and can happen at a far higher rate than then you can actually do on a Telegraph. But if 30 million people are plugged directly into a telegraph network, and I have five people in existence who have a phone, the telegraph is still a better communication medium, not because it's a better tool, but because it's got a bigger network.
[00:30:44] The phone is still the better tool, but the telegraph is still the better communication system. And that's even if the telegraph literally puts in like 10% or 15% errors into someone's communication, that literally says something that the person is not trying to say. The telegraph still communicates better than the telephone simply because it can communicate to people that the telephone can't communicate to. This is the nature of money. It is not simply a measurement tool. It is not simply a set of characteristics. It is also a consensus and social liquidity network, which means there's a lot more dynamics at play than merely, is this ruler better than this other ruler? Which is exactly why pricing something in Bitcoin or pricing something in gold does not immediately make it a better measure of value, a better way to measure relative value between goods and services than the dollar. Simply because we can recognize that the dollar is a terrorist measure, and it is manipulated and it is debased. And at any one point in time, it could be giving wildly inaccurate signals. It simply means that you should understand price in context, and you should understand the fundamental nature of the asset or the money that you are holding, because otherwise you're just gonna sell when it dumps 80%, and you're gonna have no idea what's going on. When really what's happening is that the fiat market is actually restoring to some sense of signal after it's been bloated and inflated out of, you know, out of any normal sense or any sense of reality of a pricing structure. And then you've had a big credit crisis and a massive contraction. And what you're seeing is you're seeing gold and Bitcoin reflect the exaggeration, the leverage effect of the fiat system. And I'll address one more thing before we close. This is Young's story, like the philosophy story, because I love this one. And it's so accurate conceptually, to some of the things you want to think about. And understanding what value is, understanding the failure of fiat and why gold and Bitcoin are better measures. Except for there's one little oddity. There's one interesting element about money itself, and Young's story is the. And everybody knows, right, is that, you know, everybody watches the Shadows. And then you have the person who climbs out of the cave realizes that it's just shadows being put on by somebody else and they can go out and they can see the world and they can live free. So he says to measure gold in fiat terms is in Young's sense to deny the shadow, to denounce the paper system in public while continuing private, to let it decide what counts as value. Well, there's a little bit of a problem in Young's philosophy when it, when you try to directly apply it to something like a price or to something that is only intersubjective and relative because there's actually no analogous version of going outside and living in the real world and seeing things.
[00:33:47] When it comes to price, you can do that when it comes to the reality of the asset, when it comes to the reality of the thing that you hold. This is why you would hold gold after it fell 50, 50% or you would buy more, and why you would hold or buy Bitcoin after it fell 90 or 80 or 70% whatever is because you're aware of what's going on, but you can't actually see outside the cave.
[00:34:11] Here's the thing about economic prices and economic value.
[00:34:16] They are derived, they cannot be seen directly, they can be understood, but not weighed. The price is always a shadow, it's always a mirror. It's always an attempt to create some sort of concrete signal out of an enormous amount of incalculable information and exchange and data. The price doesn't actually exist.
[00:34:44] It doesn't actually. It's never accurate, it's always in shift. And every single price, every output of the price is then an input that changes the price. So it's always self reflexive, it's always a shadow. It's like trying to fly a plane through perfect dense fog. You can't see anything, you can't see the mountain. And it's fundamental that you can't see. In fact, there's just no window. There's no window out of the plane. All we have are gauges and, you know, measurings, but they're all noisy, they're all inaccurate. They don't work as well through fog as they do through clear skies. And we don't even know if there's fog or clear skies because we don't have a window. All economic data is basically that.
[00:35:33] So all economic data is in some sense a shadow. And it can only be a shadow. It's only a vague extrapolation of exchanges and valuations that are happening in the market So I don't even really know how you.
[00:35:50] And you know, obviously he probably doesn't. I mean, this analogy or using that story is being that literal. So this is probably slightly pointless to really to get into.
[00:36:00] But I don't know how you would fix the analogy either, because it does. It makes perfect sense in the concept of your understanding of value and your understanding of what it is that you're holding and why you would not trust the fiat price at any one point in time.
[00:36:20] But it doesn't mean that you should not be thinking about the fiat price on a long enough timeline, because the fiat price will not only. It's not. It's not a declaration of what Bitcoin is worth. Bitcoin's price in Fiat or Fiat's price in Bitcoin is also a reflection of the manipulation and the conditions in the fiat market.
[00:36:44] It goes both ways, just as easy. And it's the same measure no matter which way you like, toss it. Like, you know, I can, I can flip something over and it's still the same thing. But mental framing makes a big difference. And this is exactly why, if you want to understand what's happening to Fiat Bitcoin in relation to each other, I think the best way to measure it is to smooth out the noise of the Fiat system, the leverage cycles, and the gradual debasement and distrust of Fiat. And you can get a somewhat accurate picture of what is happening purely in a relative sense by looking at the SATs per dollar price on a weekly chart and a 200 moving average line. And you can probably do the same thing in gold. I haven't done it personally, but that will give you some sense of an accurate measure over time as to what is happening and what the conditions between those two assets or those two economic instruments are in relation to each other. And if that is not going in the favor of bitcoin or gold, then you should stop and reconsider your thesis and look at the conditions of the fiat market.
[00:37:59] Because maybe you're in a prolonged bubble or maybe you're wrong about your assumptions. And I'll also bring up one more thing, just because a comment brought it up as you saying that bitcoiners all say that, you know, bitcoin's gonna be worth $10 million in, you know, X years, 10 years or something.
[00:38:17] And if they believe that Bitcoin will replace Fiat, why do they keep pricing it in Fiat? Well, the simple answer to this is just that pricing can only be relative. You have to price it in something and then the rest of this episode is that the only price that gives any sense of signal is in the most liquid asset that is available, or liquid currency, I guess. But if you actually talk to any real bitcoiner and you'll see it in any mention of something like It'll be worth $10 million in 10 years or 30 years, whatever he said, there is inevitably a comment underneath. It says, but it will only be $2 million in purchasing power in today's dollars, because you have to factor in the 7% increase in the money supply of fiat every single year over that same time period.
[00:39:04] Any real bitcoiner knows this very well and very simply. And most bitcoiners will also tell you very flatly that there will be a day in which bitcoin will be priced infinity in dollars, because you won't be able to buy bitcoin for dollars. No one will sell it for that, because eventually its liquidity will break to the downside in a feedback loop, until the dollar is worth what its actual utility is, which is nothing if it's not worthwhile, is money. If it's not a trustworthy money, and there's a more trustworthy, more liquid money than its value is zero. This is kind of where the everything divided by 21 million comes in. And the fact that there's. It's not going to be an S curve in the dollar price, it's going to be a J curve. It will go parabolic until it's essentially straight up. Because there will be a day when we simply don't accept fiat for bitcoin.
[00:40:01] The fact that someone might say that bitcoin is going to be worth $10 million or the price of Bitcoin will be $10 million worth is a word that he added importantly, that the price of bitcoin will be $10 million in X number of years is not relevant, does not tell you anything about whether or not that person understands that that's an inaccurate measure, or if they think that that is actually a genuine value measure, or if they're accounting for the fact that there's a massive amount of noise in that signal, or there will be debasement and loss of trust over that time period, or if it had then fell to $1 million, whether or not they would sell or not. So anyway, I thought that was really fun article, really fun read, and there's a lot of. I think there's a lot of mental exercise to pull out of it, but I also felt there was a lot of nuance worth digging into. So hope you guys. Enjoyed that episode, enjoyed that read. Shout out to Craig and until next time, guys, that's my two zats.
[00:41:17] The Cypherpunk's digital cache wouldn't have the threat of state violence to scare counterfeiters away. And most ordinary digital files can be counterfeited by anyone who can type Control C Ctrl v Jacob Goldstein Money the true story of a made up Thing.
