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In this episode of Industry Focus: Energy, NPR's Jacob Goldstein returns to the show for a wide-ranging conversation with Motley Fool contributor Jason Hall and analyst Nick Sciple about the cryptocurrency market, inflation, housing, and more.
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Nick Sciple: Welcome to Industry Focus. I'm Nick Sciple. Every now and again here on the podcast, we like to share a peek behind the curtain, share some of our members-only content, that we make here at the Fool. Back on June 11th, Jason Hall and I sat down once again with Jacob Goldstein, host of NPR's Planet Money, and author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, for a wide ranging discussion on cryptocurrency, inflation, the economy, and more. This conversation first aired for Discovery members back in June and we're excited to bring it to you today. We hope you'll enjoy our conversation.
Yeah, it's a big change. How has the role of cryptocurrency changed in the past month, with the emergence of Bitcoin (BTC 2.79%) on company balance sheets, or Dogecoin, maybe increasingly on company balance sheets? What do you make of this?
Goldstein: The Tesla thing is perfect. It's like, "We're going to buy a bunch of Bitcoin, you can use Bitcoin to buy Teslas. Wait, actually Bitcoin is bad for the environment, and Tesla's supposed to be good for the environment, so you can't use it to buy Teslas, but we're going to keep the Bitcoin anyways." It's like, what's the coherent story I'm supposed to extract from that? I don't know. That to me is where I land. I have to say it, I don't have some grand theory of cryptocurrency that explains it all. The big puzzle to me, still with cryptocurrency, is when are we going to see the killer app? It is this interesting technology that's clearly really clever, really solves a lot of technical problems, and yet Bitcoin was invented essentially in 2008, that's a long time ago, in technological time. About the same time as the iPhone, and it's price has gone bananas in the last few months. It went way up, it didn't back down some, it's still very high. But what is the killer app? So far, I guess the killer app is ransomware. Let's be honest.
Goldstein: If we think about what's been happening, it's been ransomware for a long time. But just in the last few months since we talked last, there was the Colonial Pipeline hack. There was the JBS, that meat company hack. It's like, what is Bitcoin really good for? All right, it's really good for crime, which we've known all along, but it's become more salient.
Hall: Well, the interesting thing too, you talking about those two things, very recently, with the Colonial Pipeline, the FBI has announced that they were able to recover a substantial amount of that money. It happened when the pork traders of the crime actually turned it into money. It's when that transition, they were able to follow the large blockchain transactions. My question for you, because this is a great line from your book is, "Money is something that enough people believe is money," just to paraphrase you, are we there?
Goldstein: They wanted to be, which is also interesting and we can talk about that too. No, would be my shortest answer to that question. It's useful to think about money not in such a binary way. Dollar bills are money, fine. Your money in a checking account is money, but it didn't used to be as money-ish as it is now. If you go back 100 years when the government didn't guarantee everybody's money in a checking account, when you put your money in the bank, you were lending it to the bank, and if the bank went out of business, you didn't get your money back, so it was more like a loan to the bank. Similarly, with Bitcoin, it's certainly money-ish. It certainly could be money. Once in 2011, I bought a falafel sandwich and a smoothie with Bitcoin. So I once bought something with it.
Sciple: It's interesting too. It also reminds me, I think there was a line in your book that was like, "As soon as you need shells to get married or things like that, people start hoarding it." If we all decide it was money, in a way, in that interstitial period, that behavior would manifest, wouldn't it?
Goldstein: Yeah. Again, money is not as binary as we usually think, and so a government accepting something in taxes, that's another classic sign that the thing is money. Because then it's like, "Well, I'm going to have to pay my taxes, so I might as well get some Bitcoin. I might as well accept Bitcoin in payment for my services. The volatility of Bitcoin's price, I think, goes against its moneyness. The idea that a dollar is going to buy twice as much stuff next week, or half as much stuff next week, suggests that it's not working well as money. The notion that "I'm going to get a bunch of dollars so that in a year I can buy a bunch more stuff with the same amount of dollars." That's not how money works. When people say money is a store of value, that's not what they mean. When people say Bitcoin is a store of value, what they mean, I think is, Bitcoin is a speculative asset. It's an asset class. That seems valid. People compare it to gold. Although gold is weird, gold is a weird asset. It doesn't throw off a stream of income. It's this archaic thing that has value for unclear reasons, Bitcoin is better gold, it seems like the best Bitcoin story I know.
Sciple: Yeah. I think to your point of it, it's in this weird role right now. I remember just in recent weeks, there was the Bitcoin Conference in Miami, and I think at one point they were handing out a prize. It said you could win X dollars worth of Bitcoin, and obviously, you recognize the irony of this, a conference about how Bitcoin is the future of currency, pricing their price in dollars. How do you feel about this weird place Bitcoin is in and just crypto in general?
Goldstein: To me, still an interesting question. People compare it to the early days of the Internet or of the web. That to me seems like an interesting comparison, and so then the question becomes, what is the first killer app? That, I think, takes us beyond Bitcoin to crypto more generally. I think there is a good case, that Ethereum is more likely to be useful, smart contracts and that sort of thing. They're things that on their face seem like natural fits for Bitcoin, like remittances, workers sending money back to their home country, and to return to the El Salvador thing, a huge part of El Salvador's GDP comes from workers who come largely to America and send money home. That is an industry, Western Union, that kind of thing, where there are very high fees. If you could use Bitcoin or some other currency to make remittances cheaper for these people who are putting themselves at risk in traveling, and working, and trying to support their families, that's great. That's finance doing what it's supposed to do. Making life better for ordinary people, who are not trying to get rich in some crypto casino, but rather just trying to live their lives. The thing I really want to see in crypto is just some simple, boring, useful thing that helps ordinary people. It's striking to me that we still have not seen that.
Sciple: Yeah. It is striking. It's one of these tough things because I think you've talked about this in the book of Money is Trust and all these people putting their trust in Bitcoin, I think as a future currency more and more folks, but its ability to perform that role. If you have a 2% margin business and this is the currency, the flex rate is 10% a day, I don't know how you run a business on that. But yet more and more people are putting trust in this. It's a weird place to be. I guess another way to go from that is, what does that say about trusting and things like the U.S. dollar or trust in things like other currencies around the world.
Goldstein: Well, a few things you mentioned, if you run a low-margin business, what does the volatility of Bitcoin mean for you? There is a universe where a Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency is just the pipes where you, the businessperson, are still getting paid in dollars, but you're moving money around or in the case of remittances, the El Salvador worker in the U.S. is getting paid in dollars, going to the crypto money transfer store on his phone or whatever. The money is moving via crypto but is dollars on either end. That works fine and you can reduce your exposure to volatility that way. The volatility isn't inherently problematic. In terms of trust more generally, money as trust is a big idea. Certainly fiat currency, it's clearly backed by nothing. People use dollars because they assume that I get paid in dollars because I assume I can buy my groceries in dollars and I can. What we're really trusting when we trust the dollar is the U.S. government. We're trusting the American economy as a going concern. People often say they don't trust the U.S. government, but like everybody kind of does. If you are living in the dollar economy, you are on the hook for what happens in America. 152ee80cbc
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