YouSaid · the spoken record

Saifedean Ammous

lines on the record: 287
first: 2022-05-11
most recent: 2022-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So Austin Economics, the way that I say it, Austin Economics is economics. We call it Austrian economics because economics has been hijacked by A bunch of frauds, really”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ones that grow whose central banks are the least inflationary. And on the other hand, the ones who supplies more inflationary, similar to copper, end up failing. You look at Lebanon, Venezuela, Zimbabwe. These are currencies whose supply increases very quickly. And therefore, their value collapses, whereas the dollar, the Swiss franc, the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, they increase at a much lower rate in general than these terrible currencies. And that's why all over the world, you see people are looking to get more dollars and more of these harder currencies than the easier ones. So I think this analysis of the hardness of the money and the ease of money is pretty well supported in empirically.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fiat money is predominantly credit. It's also digital currency. So more than 90% of dollars are digital, less than 10% of dollars are physical. So it is a digital currency. And all over the world, all these governments are using digital currencies effectively with some physical manifestations in paper. But yet even within these currencies, it's still the same analysis. And I discussed this in chapter four of the Bitcoin standard. You look at government monies, you see that the currencies that have held on to their value, the ones that have the biggest value, the ones that play the biggest role in global trade, the ones that are used as currency reserves all over the world, are the ones that have the lowest supply growth rate.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're punished when they don't. So if you ride a banana, jump off a cliff thinking you're going to get to the moon. That solves the problem of people thinking the bananas are spaceships by killing people who think that bananas are spaceships. And I think to go back to your question in terms of paper monies, so yes, even though ignoring the original sin of the creation of fiat money and ignoring everything that happened before 1971, all right, well, here we are. People are using, well, it's not really paper money. We should say like...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collective belief. I should say all economics is subjective. I consider myself an Austrian school economist and the starting point of all Austrian economics is that all value is subjective. So obviously value only exists because humans choose to make the valuation. However, the economic reality of the way that money works means that it's just the technology like all others. And so for me, when people say, well, if we hallucinate that this thing can be money, then it'll be money. If we can hallucinate bananas to be money, then it'll be money. For me, it's like saying, well, if we hallucinate that bananas can be spaceships, there'll be spaceships. I mean, you can call them spaceships if you want, but a banana is not going to get you to the moon.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly zero because all of the paper money, first of all, there's never been an instance, and again, um, This flies in the face of a lot of what a lot of people like to think about money. There's never been an instance where a government came out and said, all right, we're printing out these pieces of paper, use them as money. This one is worth 10 apples or use it for buying things. And here's the piece of paper. This has never happened. They've always taken fiat money, paper money, all of these things were always borne out of fraud. Initially, it was a receipt for gold, and then they told you, well, you know, you don't need the gold anyway, and you have to use this. And then if you don't use it, we throw you in jail. And then, so first of all, it doesn't, you can't enforce this thing. So it's never really just happened. And it's never been hallucinated into existence. People can hallucinate this kind of nonsense in writing textbooks and books and in academia, but in the real world, people don't hallucinate money.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be like the inverse of the stock to flow. That's the supply growth rate. So the stock to flow is the inverse. It's around 60.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An enormous amount of copper on the market. The value of copper is going to crash. And the people who chose copper as money are just going to end up with large warehouses of very cheap rusting metal.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Copper miners rich, it would make all of the people who chose copper as money poor, and copper would not be money. It can't work because what happens is because of the fact that the stockpiles are so small, if you buy, you know, even if you get the 1,000 richest people in the world, all of the world's billionaires, they get together and they all dump all of the money that they have, all the stocks, all the bonds, all the gold, all of the Bitcoin, everything that they own, they dump it, and they buy copper with it. What's going to happen? Price of copper is going to go up a lot. But what's going to stop copper miners from flooding the market with even more copper than what the billionaires bought? Nothing. They're going to dump all of that extra copper production. It's the price of copper is going to go up, so there will be a lot more copper mining than all the other metals and gold miners are going to switch to focusing on copper. And then we're going to...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you take all of the companies, I don't have exact statistics, it's very difficult to get these, but it's roughly in the same range. If copper production were to stop completely today, we'll have about a year's production stored in various places. So that makes copper terrible money. Because if you started using copper as money, and this is why a lot of people say, well, money is a collective illusion, money is a social construct. If we all agree that something is money, then something is money. I think this is completely clueless. And it's usually Marxists who believe this, obviously no understanding of economics. It's completely clueless because even if everybody in society decided we wanted to make copper as money, even if we all decided to collectively take part in this hallucination or illusion, it would not make copper money. It would just make everybody who decides to take part in this hallucination poor. That's it.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much all commodities, all market commodities other than gold and silver they're easy money and they're not suitable as a monetary medium because they're being consumed. So if you look at in the Bitcoin standard I mentioned this metric called the stock to flow ratio which is the ratio of the annual production, the flow to the stockpile, the existing stockpiles. If you look at all the other metals, they're easy money because they're being consumed. So think about how much stockpiles of copper there are in the world today. So copper companies obviously have some stockpiles of copper. Major copper consumers will have stockpiles of copper, but the vast majority of copper is essentially on a conveyor belt of production from the mine straight to the consumer good that it's being used for. So the existing stockpiles are roughly in the range of one year's production.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so hard, I mean, it's a relative thing, but the hardness refers to the difficulty of producing more units of the money supply. So an easy money would be a money that is relatively easy to make. So you can increase the supply by 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent or something like that.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“U.S. sanctions taking, say, Russian reserves or Afghanistani reserves. And this is why we see China and Russia have accumulated a lot of gold over the last 10, 20 years.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even after they moved away from it, you know, central banks until today they still hold a lot of gold reserves. In fact, if you look at 1914 when the world really went off the gold standard, the amount of gold reserves held by central banks was a tiny fraction of what it was. As time went on, central banks accumulated more and more gold. What ended up happening is they prevented their citizens from using the gold, but they continued to use it. So gold continued to be money up until 1971 because effectively the world was on a dollar standard and the dollars were backed by gold. But then after 1971, even then, central banks continued to accumulate gold because why would you as a central bank want to accumulate pieces of paper effectively or credit liabilities of another central bank that can produce them infinitely? And it's a lesson that's becoming more and more obvious to governments today as we see.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, although I would say it's more like the other way around. It's not that the government established gold as money. It's more like gold gave the governments the credibility for their currencies. So governments were not the ones that made gold money. Gold's been money before states were invented. States, if you have a government and you'd like to have some legitimacy and you'd like to be able to deal with other governments on an equal footing, you had to go by the gold standard. You had to have a currency that was redeemable in gold so that you could trade with the rest of the world so that people could in your country use that currency. So it's not that governments were choosing gold. It's more like they were having to adapt their own currencies to gold in order to give their currencies credibility.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. That was the plan. That was what it's supposed to do. But arguably we never had a pure gold standard because the nature of gold means that the people who aren't in charge of the gold, they have an enormous amount of power because the gold is concentrated with them. And as long as not everybody shows up at the same time asking for their gold, then you can make more receipts than you have gold.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The term really, I think, was based out of gold. The first time this came out was the gold standard. So I said gold was money at the end of the 19th century, but it wasn't just that everybody was using gold coins and trading with gold coins, because that got a problem of divisibility. So a lot of things are worth less than one gold coin. So how do you buy that thing? And the answer was that you created monetary instruments that were backed by gold. And so currencies, national currencies under the gold standard, where specific units of gold. And that's how a gold standard functioned. Money was gold, but you had pieces of paper that were redeemable in gold. So you could go to the center. You could give them the piece of paper, the $100 bill, or the $10 bill, and they'll give you gold in exchange. And they give you a specific quantity of gold in exchange. Effectively, the paper was...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silver went down, and so it became economical to use it in more and more industrial applications, so the stockpile declines, and then as a result that Weakens its monetary properties more and more and more. So that's why at the end of the 19th century, I mean, at the beginning of the 19th century, gold and silver were money. By the end, it was basically only gold. And the countries that were still on a silver standard, China and India in particular, suffered enormously from it because their money was devaluing very quickly next to gold. And so Europeans who would come to China or India were able to buy things at practically a big discount.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effectively, you are consuming the stockpile because it's not used as money, it's taken out of the monetary stockpile. So over the last 150 years, since 1870 in particular, and I discussed this in detail in the Bitcoin standard, what happened in 1870 was Germany won the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany was on a silver standard, but the value of silver was declining. So Germany did something very smart, which is they took their indemnity from France in gold and used that big chunk of gold to switch to going on a gold standard. And since then, silver's been collapsing in value next to gold. So back then, the price of an ounce of gold was around 15 ounces of silver. Today it's closer to 100. It's just been declining for the last 150 years. And so because of that, because of the fact that it's lost its monetary role as people shifted toward gold, the value of”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So every year we're adding only around 1.5 to 2%. Compare that to the second hardest metal historically was silver, and that increased historically at around maybe 5% per year or so. Now it probably increases to something like closer to 30% because it's now getting used extensively in industrial uses. So when you use it in industry, when you put silver in a laptop or in a camera or in a machine,”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's just stockpiles that are accumulating. On the other hand, every year we get better at our technology of looking for gold. There's more people all over the world. The population increases. The technology improves. So we keep finding more and more gold, and we keep making the stockpiles bigger. However, because we're constantly adding to a stockpile that is not being devalued, sorry, that is not being consumed because there's no way of consuming gold. You can't eat it. You can't burn it. You can't, it doesn't rust. Because of that, we're constantly adding to a constantly growing stockpile. So if you look at the numbers, you see over the last 100 years, we've got pretty reliable data on gold production worldwide. We see that pretty much gold stockpiles increase at around one and a half to two percent per year, every year. So yes, we're making more every year, but we're making more. So we're adding to the stockpile. The stockpile grows more.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The gold standard is basically when money is gold, or at least government currencies backed by gold. But the reason gold became money and not copper, not nickel, not bananas, is that gold is the hardest metal in the world, and it is the hardest metal to increase the supply of. And the reason for that is based in chemistry. Gold is indestructible. You can't destroy gold in any meaningful sense. It's been accumulating stockpiles for thousands of years. The gold that was worn by Nefertiti back in ancient Egypt is today probably in somebody's necklace or in somebody's gold coin. It's still there. So for thousands of years, humans have been digging for gold. They dig it out of the ground. They refine it. And then they put it in a jewelry or a coin. And then it just stays there. It gets melted down into new other forms, you know, the jewelry gets turned into coins or coins get turned into bars.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there's a conscious effort of some people might recognize the hardness and the scarcity and choose this as money. But I think what's more important is just a natural evolutionary process whereby people choose all kinds of random things as money, bananas maybe even. But then the people who end up making these bad choices don't end up with any wealth left, whereas the people who store their wealth in the things that are hard to make end up acquiring end up maintaining their wealth and maybe even increasing it over time. And of course this culminated in the 19th century, in the end of the 19th century by basically the entire planet being on a gold standard.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Bitcoin standard, I present the argument that money is always whatever is the hardest thing to make. Historically, I think we see many examples of that. So, for instance, in prison, people use cigarettes as money because nobody can make cigarettes in prison. In societies, we have the example of Yap Island, for instance. It's an island that doesn't have any limestone, but there's a nearby island that has a lot of limestone. And it's very expensive, obviously, with primitive technology to move limestone from Palau to Yap. So on Yap, limestones were money. Seashells, rare seashells that are not easy to find end up serving as money in places where they're rare. Glass beads where money in West Africa where there was no glass making technology because they were imported from abroad and they were very hard to make.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our most advanced technology and our best technology for moving value into the future. And so I think history really, I argue this in all my books, is that really history we see, we can think of it as a process of our money gets harder and so our money gets better at holding on to its value for the future. And by harder I mean harder to produce. We find things that are hard to produce that are better at holding on to their value so they hold on to their value better for the future. And that allows us to plot and plan for the future. That makes the future less uncertain and that makes us more future oriented. In other words, it lowers our time preference. And the harder the money is, the better it is allowing us to think of the future.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money ends up being the best mechanism for providing for the future because the future is uncertain. So you can save your apples and oranges. You can save the spears. You can save the animal that you hunted. But these things, you know, first they rot, they're not very good at holding on to their value over time. But even if they were, even if you have objects that are durable, the problem with them is that you don't know if you need them tomorrow or next month or next year. You're not sure if you're going to be needing them. And you might end up not needing them and you might end up not finding anybody who needs them or finding somebody who needs them but doesn't value them much and won't give you much in exchange. Money allows you the optionality of saving the most liquid good, the most saleable good. So it's something that you can sell tomorrow with the least uncertainty. It has the most liquidity, the most ability to be sold without a loss in its value. So money is...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's our ability to think of the future. And as we start building durable goods, we start thinking more and more of the future. We start becoming more and more future oriented. And that's really the process of civilization, the process of denying our needs now in order to think for the future. So instead of spending all of our day on the beach, enjoying ourselves, we take time off from leisure on the beach and spend some time making a spear or making a fishing rod so that our productivity in hunting or fishing tomorrow is going to be higher. And so that ability to think for the future is enhanced by our ability to provide for the future. And we do that with durable goods. But then...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it allows for the market system to grow. And the second thing is that money is a mechanism for storing value into the future. So again, as humans, we develop the capacity to think for the future. We make a spear so that we can hunt and then we see that it works and then we take it out of the animal that we hunted it with and we keep it for the next day's hunt. And then we start making a better spear and we make a better fishing rod and then we make a fishing net.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find an opportunity. You've got a lot of oranges. I've got a lot of apples. Then I'll take some of yours. You'll take some of mine. We're both better off. This is just a naturally emergent thing. And money is what makes it enormously powerful. Money is what allows it to scale, really. Money is what allows it to go beyond small societies into just something that is global. Because with money Again, as I was saying earlier, all you need to do is specialize in doing one thing, the thing that you do best, and then you exchange that for money, and you don't have to worry about whether the other people involved in this want what you have and have what you want. You just sell it for money to whoever wants it, and you buy whatever you want from whoever has it. And that's an enormous reduction in the mental burden of how a market economy functions. So the first thing that I would say about money is that it allows for the division of labor.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A market is just the name for the naturally emergent phenomena of people voluntarily exchanging things. At any scale. At any scale, yeah. It could be a market of two people on an island on their own. It could be 8 billion people across the planet. Naturally emerging. Yes, this is the thing I think that is very hard for many people who don't have a good understanding of economics to grasp that capitalism in markets are not something that you need a central planner or a government officer to make happen. Capitalism is just what happens when people are left to their own devices. It's just our cognitive capacity allows us to develop tools that we can use for production. And that's what we do. That's what humans have been doing since they started making spears to hunt. That's the first capital good, probably. So we're constantly accumulating capital. We're constantly trading with one another.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of both the wants they have and the capabilities they have, and you wanted to create a system that kind of exchanges those things. So when you imagine what is a good, what is markets, when you imagine a market is like a hierarchical system, what do you imagine? What is a market?”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It or using it, then that's a medium of exchange. So when we look at the entirety of human society of millions of billions of people, you think of them just a bunch of individuals running around. I love the term coincidence of wants. So each one of them, it's like a stochastic system. They have desires. It's like a random collection of desires, somehow rooted in our evolutionary history, but mostly random in terms of preference of banana or apple, that kind of thing. And then they also have the capacity for competence and excellence in particular kind of labor. So specialization. They're able to be like incredible at a particular set of tasks. So there's a bunch of ants running around with consciousness and intelligence. And they have desires and have capabilities. And then there's a coincidence.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of wants. And that's really the problem that money solves. So you make apples and I make oranges. I'd like to have some of your apples, but you don't want my oranges. We have a problem of coincidence of one. So what do I do? You want bananas. I need to find somebody who has bananas. Give them my oranges. Take their bananas. Give you their bananas. And then I take the apples. In that case, bananas are a medium of exchange. So it's natural that a medium of exchange will evolve and will emerge in an economy as an economy becomes more sophisticated. As we move beyond 10 people and 10 goods, it's inevitable that we're going to come to a situation where we have the problem of coincidence of wants. And the way to solve that is to use a medium of exchange. And it can be anything. It can be a banana. It can be food stuff. It can be any kind of good. As long as I acquire the good with the purpose of it passing it on to you, not with the purpose of me consuming.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of us produces one tiny little thing and they exchange that thing for all the things that they want. And so because we specialize, we become more productive in doing the thing that we're good at. So there's people out there who are engineers who are designing windshields in cars. It's a very specialized thing. They sell windshield design to Mercedes-Benz. And then from that, that windshield design is added on to millions of cars around the world. And from that, they're able to get enough money to meet all of their needs. So the division of labor is enhanced enormously with money, because without money, it's very difficult to be able to exchange a large number of goods. It's very difficult to have a sophisticated economy with a large degree of specialization because it's very difficult to find people who want the thing that you have and have the thing that you want. We call this the coincidence.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we're only 10 people isolated from the world, there's only very few things that we can make. And therefore, we can exchange those things directly with one another. But as if we get in contact with other societies that have more people, then the opportunities for specialization increase. If there's 10 people, the only thing that you can make is the very basics you need for your survival. But if you're part of an economy of 10 million people, there's much more room for specialization. You can make a car, you can make a house that's very sophisticated. And that relies on the division of labor, that relies on you specializing and doing one tiny little thing, which is not what you consume. And you trade that thing for all the things that you consume. So as the economy becomes more sophisticated and involves more people, and currently we're all part of an economy of almost 8 billion people.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which would not be possible at any kind of sophisticated level without money. So if we live in a small society of 10 people, then think about all the things that we can make, all the things that we can produce”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money is a medium of exchange. The thing that defines money is that it is a good that you don't buy for its own sake because you want to consume it itself or because you want to employ it in the production of other goods, which is what capital goods are. So we have consumption goods, we have capital goods. Money is distinct from those two because it is a good that is acquired purely to be exchanged later on for other goods. So it's not something that you acquire for its own sake. You acquire it so that you can then later on exchange it. And that's a market good. That's a market good like all other goods. You acquire food because you eat it. You acquire a car to move you around. You acquire money so that you can exchange it for other goods. And that's something that many people have a hard time grasping of the concept of money as a market good. But it is a market good just like all others. And the importance of it is that it allows us to trade. It allows us to develop the division of labor.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source