I gave this as a presentation to a live audience at the Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. But you get to watch it without having to buy a ticket and without having to travel. So let’s go. All right, let’s get this thing warmed up. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it, everybody coming. I appreciate everyone coming to the event. First of all, freedom Fest, it’s a pretty important topic. I would ask if you guys like freedom, but of course you do. We’re all here, so appreciate you guys coming. It’s my third year I’ve been at Freedom festival, and again, it’s such an important topic.

I love coming. I appreciate all of you taking the time and wandering into this little room over here to hear me talk. I’m going to talk about something today that I think should be super important to each one of you here at the Freedom Fest, and that is being a sovereign individual. And I was going to talk about the end of the international monetary order. Don’t worry, we’re still going to bring that in there. But I wanted to talk about being a true sovereign individual. And the way that I think about sovereignty is being able to direct my life as I see fit.

How many like being told what to do when that’s not what you want to do, you know, when you’re coerced, like, you know, take the jab or quit your job, right, where either one of those choices leads to somebody else’s end. So for me, being sovereign is being able to not be, not have freedom of choice that are someone else’s choices, but my own choices. And so I want to talk about how we can do that today. And actually what I’m calling the final piece to that. So I think it’s a pretty big topic. Should be pretty fun.

Now, there’s two growing trends that we have in the world today, and I’m guessing each one of you see them because you’re here at the freedom fest. And the two trends are one, unfortunately, an alarming and a rapid rate of increase of authoritarianism all across the world. It’s a trend, and it’s trending the wrong way. We’re seeing this in nations all over the world. And even here in the United States, the land of the free, a democratically state is supposedly, I know, a republic. But in this democratic state, where you’re supposed to be able to vote for your leaders, your representatives to rise to power, and here we might see an installed person taking Biden’s place and become like more of a dictator, they’re preaching to save democracy at the same time subverting it.

And this is in the land of the free. Of course, across the world, we’re seeing authoritarian authoritarianism rise faster and faster and faster. And that’s a problem. On the other end of that, we have another driving force, a growing trend, and that’s this endless debasement. And the problem is that no matter how fast you can make money, no matter how much value you’re providing into the world, you’re working against the tide. And the tide is that governments want to continue to print more money to fund any number of programs that they have. And of course, again, back to the land of the free.

We’re at the same rate in other countries. Argentina, Venezuela, Lebanon, Peru, Turkey, et cetera. You see it happening at a very rapid rate. The technical definition of hyperinflation would be 50% increase month over month, or 50% inflation month over month, inflating against what? The dollar, inflating its gold. And so we’re seeing this endless debasement. But even here in the United States, I mean, Argentina, Venezuela, sure, triple digit inflation, but even the United States, over the last four years, the monetary debasement has been 10% since 2019. And what does that mean for you? Well, that’s what we call a hurdle rate.

So a hurdle rate is if you have a business and you want to borrow money for your business, let’s say at 8%, the hurdle rate is now 8%. I have to make more than 8% to offset the interest I have to pay on the debt. And so what each one of you, or most people are thinking about is inflation CPI. Oh, it’s 3.33.5%. No, no, no. The hurdle rate is the rate of debasement. And so if it’s at averaging 10%, you need to be making more than that. And so we have these two issues. And again, this is even at land of the free, it’s not so bad.

Now, the question I would ask you is, do you think I. Authoritarianism and debasement continue. Is that a trend that will continue, or does that magically go away? It probably continues. So let’s talk about how we can protect ourselves from those two tides. Now, there’s been numerous studies that have been done. I have a couple charts here on the screen. And we can see 16 years of democratic decline. Right? This is globally, we can see this. And this is, of course, at the time when the United States is exporting democracy to the rest of the world, but yet it continues to be in decline.

So it’s not just a feeling that we have. It’s actually happening. We can measure it. We can gauge it here. We can see that eight out of ten people are now living in a partly free or a not free world. We can see the data is showing this exactly this right here, partly free. I’m not even sure what that means. We’re either free or we’re not. But yet this is the world that we’re living in. And so we can see that the debasement is continuing at a rapid rate. As a matter of fact, the trillion dollar conundrum since the founding of the United States, it took until the 1980s before the us government had racked up $1 trillion in debt from inception until 1980.

Currently, this slide is actually a little out of date here. Currently, we’re adding about $1 trillion of debt I to the us government every 90 days, every quarter. And even that is understated the goal. So every single time the government puts out, the treasury puts out what their funding requirements are for the year, they revise them later, and it’s going faster and faster and faster. And I put here. Does this laser pointer works? I put these red lines here just so you could see the trend. So right here is this vertical red line. That’s 1971. Anybody know what year that was? The significance of that? Right.

That’s the year we got off the gold standard. And so you can see that this red trend line was tracking pretty horizontal right here. But right around 1970, you can see this trend line started taking off. And so you can see the rate of debasement is accelerating, right? It’s going faster and faster and faster right here. Around 2000, the.com crashed. It took a whole nother turn up right here. 2008, it took another turn up here. 2020, it’s taken another turn up. And we’re almost going straight up. How much faster could this rated debasement be? And again, this is in America.

This is where it’s not even that bad. And this is a global situation that we’re dealing with. We can see that the whole world is dealing with this situation at the exact same time. And a lot of people get caught offsides by this because they look at the United States, look at the Federal Reserve, of course we have the dollar system. And so they say, well, the Fed is tightening the monetary supply. They’re trying to slow down inflation, but the rest of the world is not. So we have to be paying attention. We can see right here the world’s major central banks.

We don’t have to pay attention to all 160 of them, but at least the major central banks, which would be the ECB, European Central bank, the BOJ, the bank of Japan, the PBOC, China Central bank, and of course, the Federal Reserve. And we can see that they’re all rapidly debasing the currency as fast as they can. And look, nothing ever goes up or down in a straight line. So we can see that it’s zigzagged here, but we can see the direction and the trend that we’re on. So this is a major problem for us. It’s the reason why even though you look at your retirement accounts and you look at your 401K, you look at your mutual funds and the valuation went way up, but you don’t feel more rich.

It’s why, on paper, you should be more wealthy, but you don’t feel it. And it’s because this rapid rate of debasement is continually stealing the power, the purchasing power, from those currency units in your bank account, even though the money’s still there. It just doesn’t get you as much as it used to. Now, again, bringing this back to home, here we are at the Freedom fest, and we’re talking about sovereignty. But I want to talk about specifically financial sovereignty and the reason why we bring it back to financial sovereignty. I was speaking to Congressman Thomas Massey yesterday, and he asked me, hey, Mark, just tell me one reason why people should care about bitcoin.

And this is something I would typically hear someone says, explain bitcoin to me like I’m five years old, and in two minutes, and I’m like, I can’t. Like a five year old just won’t get it. But he said, boil it down to one statement. And I said, the reason why financial sovereignty. The reason why is because all freedom sits at the ability to transact. The freedom to transact. If we don’t have freedom to transact, then we have no other freedoms. Let me give you an example. In the United States, we have this wonderful document called the Constitution.

It’s being disregarded, but hopefully we’ll get that restored at some point. But we have this constitution that guarantees our freedoms. For example, freedom of assembly. However, if I don’t have the freedom to transact, how do I put gas in my truck to drive to the assembly? How do I pay for a hotel room when I get to the assembly? How do I get food when I go to the assembly? And so if I can’t transact, I can’t go assemble. We have guaranteed the freedom of speech. But in today’s day and age of the information age. If I can’t pay to get a computer, to get on the Internet or a phone, how do I have any speech? And so at the underpinning of all freedom comes the ability to transact, which, of course, they understand that, which is why they want to take that away.

Now, there’s a newspaper or a website and a newsletter called Sovereign man. And I pulled this off of their website, sovereign man. And these are some steps that they would recommend for each one of you to become a little bit more sovereign, to get more freedom in your life. And you walk around this show floor out here, there’s no shortage of people out here offering you types of solutions for this as well. A lot of gold dealers are out here. And these are some of the steps that we’d see directly off of the sovereign man. This is a shift sovereign.

And so they said, hey, number one, we should go online and you should buy a safe. Why would I want to have a safe? Well, that way I could have assets in my control that I could keep them at my location, in my custody, and I could try to keep them safe. Cool. I should get some physical cash, and I should probably put that physical cash in the safe, and then I should buy some gold and silver coins. That’s how we get more freedom right now with three steps. And the thought process behind this is that, well, if I have custody, if I have control of these assets, then nobody else does.

That would be what we call counterparty risk. If I leave my cash in the banks, then my money could be at risk in the banks. If I leave my gold in a safety deposit box, that gold could be at risk. But if we take a step back and think, what is it that we’re really trying to do here? What is it that we’re really trying to do? Well, as I said, we’re trying to take custody. We’re trying to remove that counterparty risk. Well, we have to understand that all of our assets actually have this. All of our assets actually have counterparty risk.

So what am I talking about? We can see this across. So let’s just start on the right financial assets. There was a world, maybe some of you remember this world, where, like, stock certificates actually used to be physical certificates, and you actually used to have that physical certificate. Today, you’re not allowed to own stocks anymore. Do you guys know that? You think you own stocks, you might have Tesla, Apple, Google in your account, but technically, you don’t own that legally. That stock is owed to you. It’s a big deal. It’s a big difference. Anybody heard of that book, the great taking? I’ve asked about that recently.

Nobody here. It’s pretty interesting. At this conversation, usually this conference, people ask me about that. But in the great taking, he basically breaks this process down. But we don’t have this instrument, this stock certificate anymore. Now it’s owed to me. We’re in a debt based system, a debt based economy. And so if that broker doesn’t want to give me that stock, I don’t get it. The same as the money in the bank. The money in your bank is no longer your money in the bank. The money in the bank is now owed to you. And again, usually it’s not that big of a deal, but legally it is if something were to happen to that bank.

And it’s also a problem when that bank doesn’t want to allow you to even access your own money. I gave a talk in another room yesterday, so I won’t go back through the whole process. Some of you are here, but currently I’m in the process of raising money. We have a publicly traded company we’re launching. It’s licensed, it’s regulated. It’s launching on the Toronto stock exchange. And we’re raising money. And one of our investors in the company is banking with Fidelity. And he’s trying to wire money from his fidelity account into our company, into a regulated public entity.

And Fidelity told him no. They said, well, we don’t know what this money is for. Can you give us some information? He pulled up a website. Well, we don’t see what this is really for. Okay. We need to understand who these people are. How do you know them? He went through this whole process, multiple levels of authorization. And he said, finally, look, hey, I need to get this through the deadlines coming. And they said, we don’t see it’s going to be possible for us to send that money for you. His own money in his own bank.

And it happens every day. People get their bank accounts shut down. My friend, Doctor Joe Mercola, probably a lot of you know who he is. Not only were his bank accounts shut down, the people that worked for him, bank accounts were shut down. And even their family members banks accounts were shut down. So we see that happens all the time. Real estate, same thing. Counterparty risk. Of course, you own your house, hypothetically. Just don’t stop paying your property taxes. We can see what happens with that, as well as a house isn’t really very portable. And then, of course, gold.

Now, for the most part, we can have a few ounces of gold in our home safe. Any more than that, it’s probably going to need to go into a vault somewhere. And that’s a big problem, because once I put that gold in a vault again, it’s no longer in my custody. And I’ve now introduced counterparty risk. Now I’ll kind of set the stage to understand where we’re at in this society today, where we are under this threat of authoritarianism that want to tell us what to do, and we have this rapid debasement. Some solutions would tell me that I should get a safe, I should get some cash, I get some gold, and I should hold it.

But the problem is, if we step back and go, what is the actual problem we’re trying to solve? We might see there’s another solution. So what I want to do is just run quickly through here what is even money? And a lot of people think they understand what money is because we all use it, we all depend on it. And everything that we have in our society is denominated in dollars. It’s in money. But if we think about money specifically, I like to say that nobody wants money. I said this at lunch just now, earlier, and I said, what do you mean nobody wants money? We don’t want money.

We want the things that money buys us. We want the goods and services that money buys us. We don’t want the money itself. It’s just a placeholder until we’re ready to deploy that. And if we understand that, then we can understand that it’s sort of a medium of exchange. It communicates value. It’s a way that I can trade that money that good for something that I want. And when we understand that, we can see that throughout thousands of years of history, we’ve had all different types of money. And money is a natural and emergent process. And so we’ve had rocks, we’ve had feathers, we’ve had seashells, and of course, we’ve settled on gold.

And gold has been that form of money for now 5000 years. But what we can see is that it’s this emergent, it’s this evolutionary process. And so it sort of looks like this. It starts down here at the bottom as a collectible. Oh, look at this rock. This is a pretty rare rock. This is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll collect it. Look at this feather. It’s pretty rare. Look at this painting. Whatever. It’s a collectible. Now, if this collectible is able to make this next evolutionary step, this next emergent step, it could become just a random rock or a feather, and it could become a storm.

And so we see today many of the rich people, billionaires, et cetera, they store their wealth in collectibles today. Fine art, watches, old cars, things like that. And so we see a lot of wealth about, I believe, $6 trillion is parked just in those collectible assets right now in the world today. But here’s where we get to the next step. Maybe if sometimes if there’s a collectible that becomes a good enough store of value, it could potentially maybe emerge to the next final step, which is a medium of exchange, and we can start to use that collectible, that store of value, to exchange for other goods and services if it has the right attributes.

We’re going to come back to this in a second. And then maybe, potentially, if it was a medium of exchange, it could move to the final step, which would be called a unit of account. And so this is how we’ve seen things. And, of course, the dollars were based off of a unit of account, of a measure of gold. Obviously, the pound sterling talked about a pound of sterling silver. Just a month ago in Russia, President Putin had a meeting, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, which is their counter to the World Economic Forum, and they introduced at that meeting a month ago that they are going to launch their own BRICS currency.

We’ve been talking, hearing about it for years. They finally announced it, and they’re going to call this new currency. It’s going to be called the unit, and that unit will be backed by 40% by a weight of gold, not a dollar amount of gold, but a weight of gold, and 60% to a basket of currencies. But again, it becomes a unit of account. That’s the final stage, but only if it has the right attributes. This is another page that I had taken from Peter Schiffden off of his website. And this goes back all the way to, I believe, Socrates.

But in order to have a good money, that becomes a medium exchange, it has to have the right attributes. Otherwise it stays a collectible. It never makes the emergent step, which would be, it needs to be durable, portable, divisible. It needs to have intrinsic value, fungible scarcity, saleability, etcetera. So, for example, it needs to be durable. Bananas would be a horrible form of money. They go bad in about seven days on your countertop. They need to be portable, they need to be divisible. So, like a Mona Lisa works as a store of value. It’s gone up in value, but it’s not a good medium of exchange because I can’t divide that Mona Lisa down.

It needs to be fungible. One unit has to be worth one unit. If I cut up a cow, maybe the ribeye is worth more than the liver, right? So it needs to be all of these things in order to actually be good money. And the problem is that most things don’t make money because the world has changed. If some of you maybe haven’t realized that, we’ve come from what was known as the industrial age into now what’s known as the information age, and what we’ve used for money for 5000 years, which has been gold. Gold is natural money.

Fiat is fake. What we use is money. What has emerged as the best form of money because it met the best attributes. It was the most scarce, the most fungible, divisible, portable, durable, et cetera. The problem is it’s just not very portable, not in the information age today. And the reason why is because things change. And what changed specifically? Well, starting in about 1500, the world started to expand at a pretty rapid rate. And it expanded through a rapid rate, through something known as globalization or global trade. You grow the food, I’ll make the clothes, and we’ll just trade.

And trade started expanding across the world, across the seas. We had the silk road before that, etcetera. But the problem is that, again, gold is not very portable. So if I want to trade with somebody in the far east or in the middle east or something like that, how do I pay them? Well, I have to get a whole bunch of gold, which is really heavy, and I have to transport it across the seas. Hopefully my ship doesn’t sink and I don’t lose all the gold, which, of course, happens. Hopefully the pirates don’t steal all my gold.

Hopefully I can get the gold across the continent under hostile territory, and I don’t get it taken from me. And so it became a very big problem that we had. Now, of course, problems create solutions. That’s the way the world is supposed to work. We’re all supposed to be looking for problems and finding solutions for that. And so we came up with a problem in 1500. Luco Pagliali, there’s an image of him right here. Came up with a new technological invention in 1500, and it was called the ledger. It was the ledger and double entry accounting.

And basically what that said was, hey, you give us the golden, and we’ll just keep track of who has what. You see in a physical world. Like, I have this clicker in my hand right here, and everybody can see this. It’s physical. And if I were to give the clicker to you. Then everyone could see that I’ve given the clicker away. But in the information age, how do we keep track of that? And of course, there was no way before 1500, but with the ledger, we got the ability to do that. Now, when we got the ability to do that, it opened up free trade faster.

Now, we didn’t have to luganous this heavy gold around the world, because remember, gold is not very portable. And what we can see happened is global trade just started to take off. So it worked. It added what’s called velocity to money, right? So as transaction times got faster, it became much easier for me to get the goods and services that I wanted. The transactions sped up and it allowed money to move faster. The velocity of money picked up. But here’s the problem, all right? Now we’re talking about bitcoin and the future of the financial system. I want to make sure you secure it properly.

Millions of bitcoin have been lost. Myself personally has lost a lot of bitcoin, maybe worth millions of dollars in today’s dollars. And so I’ve learned the hard way that I want to secure it with a hardware wallet like this. Keep your private key safe. This is a Trezor hardware wallet. You plug it in, you do your transaction, and you unplug it. Don’t leave it on exchange. I’ve lost it that way. Don’t leave your bitcoin on a phone. I’ve lost it that way as well. Secure it with a hardware wallet like Trezor. I’ve used it for over a decade.

I think it’s the easiest one to use. It’s open source hardware, so you don’t have to worry about some backdoor and someone rug pulling you and taking your bitcoin. That’s why I like the trezor, and it’s pretty cheap. And if you’d like to save even more money, there’s a link in the description down below that you can save some money with it. But look, whether you use a trezor or not use something, don’t leave your bitcoin on the exchange or at risk of getting hacked off of your phone secure with a hardware wallet like this trezor.

There’s a link down below. Now, let’s go back into the video. The velocity problem is that in order to get gold to move faster, in order to add more velocity to gold, it caused a big problem. And that big problem is what I call a bug. It put a bug into the system, and that’s a trust bug. You see, the thing with trust is that trust is very fragile. I’m sure you guys understand this. If you’ve ever had a business partner or some other partner that maybe was embezzling from you or stealing from you or cheating on you, you have your suspicions.

And then once you find out something like that happened, the trust is gone. And it doesn’t just come back. It doesn’t come back very easy. And so trust is very fragile. But when the ledger was introduced to gold, to speed it up, it created the trust problem, because now all the gold went into a bank. This person is keeping the ledger saying that, well, the gold’s going to come from this guy and go to this guy. But how do we know that he really moved it from my account to your account? How do we know that they really have the gold that they say they have? And all of these other problems that we had, and more importantly, what it did is it created debt on top of the asset.

So in order to get the velocity onto the system, we had to introduce debt, which means, like I said earlier, the gold is now owed to me. I don’t actually have it. Now, we can see that throughout history, every time we’ve used this bug, the trust bug, it turned out to be, well, let’s just say, not good. We can see that trust is very fragile. So we can look back all the way to England. And so in England, sort of where the creation of the first central bank started, we can see that they created the central bank to create more paper dollars, more fiat, of course, to fight war.

And then what they had to do is, because they had printed so many dollars, they didn’t have the gold to back that up. So what they do, suspended convertibility, you could no longer redeem those dollars for any gold. They printed a whole bunch of fiat. And then, don’t worry, we’ll go back to gold. We’ll get your trust back, and then we’ll suspend the convertibility again. And they went back and forth and back and forth in the United States. I’m sure most of you guys know, here at Freedomfest, but in 1933, the United States government seized all the gold.

So, remember, gold is heavy, gold is slow. Gold’s not portable. Just put it in the bank. Don’t worry. We’ll just mark it on the ledger, and it’s the same thing as gold. And we’ll give you these paper gold certificates that are, again, debt instruments, ious claims to the gold that you have in the bank. And that worked out pretty well. That allowed for the US economy to flourish. But the problem was, again, we trusted the government, we trusted the banks, and they printed way too many of the paper claims didn’t match up with the gold in the bank.

The problem is, they owed the gold. So what did they do? Well, they just took it from you. And they didn’t even just take it from you. I wasn’t alive at the time. Most of us weren’t. They didn’t take it from us. But they also made it even illegal to own. Remember, they, the authoritarians on the rise don’t want you to own anything. You can’t own your stocks, you can’t own your bonds, you can’t even own the cash in the bank. It’s all owed to you. So we saw that in 1933. Again, somehow we continue to trust the government.

They continue to print more paper certificates than they had gold in the bank leading into the 1960s. The governments of the world realized this and said, we don’t want these paper certificates anymore, we want the gold. They started reclaiming the gold, and then president Richard Nixon in 1971, defaulted. The United States defaulted on what they owed. We’re not going to give you the gold back, but we’ll just give you a bunch of these funny money paper gold certificates. Back then, we saw. I mean, we can see it in China. Like China supposedly has, what, 30,000 tons of gold, but in an audit, they were found to have a whole bunch of fake gold, tungsten painted gold bars.

Right? And so over and over and over and over. We continue to see how this trust bug continues to get exposed. But yet for some reason, we continue to trust it, probably because we don’t really have any other option. We saw the United States seized all of Venezuela’s gold. The UK vaults seized all of Venezuela’s gold. It wasn’t in their own vaults, it was in the UK. And the UK seized it. Again, it wasn’t in their possession. We saw the United States seized Afghanistan’s central bank’s money, I think about $7 billion. Anybody remember the canadian truckers that went on during the pandemic? A peaceful protest.

They just started freezing all their bank accounts. And then finally, what I believe is the final nail in the coffin, if we’ll call it that, was the Russia bank accounts got frozen, and just recently, they decided to go ahead and auction them off. Now, if you’re one of three superpowers in the world with nuclear weapons and you can’t even keep your money safe, what does that have to say for any of us or any other nation, for that matter. So every nation on earth was basically put on notice. Well, if Russia’s money’s not safe, none of our money is safe.

I think most of us woke up during the canadian truckers, but the whole world woke up when the Russia situation happened. And so we realized that trust is gone. So where do we go from here? And this kind of brings it back to the topic of the conversation, which is the end of the international monetary order that we have. So where do we go from here? In a world where it depends on trust, but trust has been completely ruined over and over and over and over again. It’s like an abusive relationship. Why would we continue to go back and trust them? So where do we go from here? Well, what we’re seeing right now is most of the world, the BricS nations, which make up more than half of the world’s population, are moving to something like back to a commodity money.

So gold was a commodity, right. It’s a physical property that came out of the ground and then moving back to that. So we see that now nations like Saudi Arabia are trading oil outside of the us dollar. And the reason why that’s important for us is because they’re no longer putting their surplus, their savings, into dollars. They’re putting it into gold. Instead. We’re seeing China go around and buy half the lithium mines in the world. They’d rather have the lithium in the ground than the dollars. Even GM, General Motors spent $650 million on a lithium mine.

They’d rather have the lithium in the ground than the dollars. What does that tell you? It tells you that they think that lithium will be more important than dollars in the future. It will cost us more dollars in the future by the lithium. I’d rather have it now. We see, it’s part of the reason why we see the OPEC nations wanting to put less oil out of the ground. They’d rather keep the oil in the ground, then hold these dollars that are required to have trust on them. And so the world finds themselves at this inflection point right now.

For about 5000 years, for most of recorded history, the world has used commodity money again, feathers, rocks, seashells and gold for 5000 years. Around 1944, the world got onto what’s known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. And the Bretton woods agreement is that the dollar would be backed by gold, and then all the other nations of the world would peg their currencies to the dollar. And so we were still sort of semi quasi on a gold standard because the dollar was backed by gold. But it was kind of like part gold, part fiat system. That’s why I kind of have that overlapping there.

So we had gold bars and we had fiat 1971. We got off the gold standard, as we talked about, and went on to a purely fiat standard. Right? So there’s nothing backing it. There’s no gold in the bank. And now we find ourselves at this inflection point. And the question is, where do we go from here back to the end of the international monetary order? We’re not talking about the death of the dollar, we’re talking the death of the entire fiat monetary system that we’re seeing today. Now, as I just said, last month, the BRICS finally announced to come out with this new currency, which is going back to gold backed.

We see what’s happening with these nations. As I said, these BRICs nations are starting to put their savings into gold. As a matter of fact, for the last central banks around the world have been net sellers of treasuries, us treasuries, which used to be the reserve asset, and they’re net buyers of gold. And so we can see this trend where trust is lost. They don’t want to buy us treasuries. Those are going to be taken from them. Nor do they want to buy us treasuries because they know they’re going to be debased at the same time.

So I guess we’ll just go back to the way we used to do it, and we’ll go back to commodity money. I’ll take the gold. I’ll leave my oil in the ground. I’ll buy the minerals right now while I still can. The problem with that is that that worked in a world from 100 years ago, that worked in the industrial age. And so it’s what I call de evolution. We’re not evolving. So while the world is globalizing, why technology is changing the world that we’re in, because trust is lost. The option is we go back to the dark ages, the stone, not the dark ages, maybe more like the stone ages, and we have to trade physical rocks old school.

Or there could be another option. Now, before we jump to the other option, let’s just talk about how this works. Let’s just set this up for a minute. So there’s a lot of people talking about going back to a gold standard. Like I said, Russia’s talking about going back to a gold standard. Of course, you have lots of people, Peter Schiff, talking about going back to a gold standard. So how would this work? Work? Let’s talk about this for a second. So remember, we don’t want the money. We want the goods and services that money buys us.

And so really it’s just a medium of exchange. If we were going to go back to a gold standard, what we would do is we would look at all the dollars that are in circulation and we divide it by all the gold that’s in circulation, which would give us a new dollar price of gold. So before we got off the gold standard. Well, let’s go back to before they. Well, okay, so it’s $35 per ounce of gold. So that means that there was supposed to be only $35 for every 1oz of gold that was in the bank.

But now they’ve printed so many more dollars. So we have to go. Okay, here’s all the new dollars we have divided by the gold. So we can see, in the US, supposedly Fort Knox has about 8000 tons of gold. Supposedly. We haven’t had it audited. I don’t know. I’ll let you guys decide if that’s true or not. It’s about 282 millionoz of gold. Now, if we take the US m two, the us money supply, there’s about $20 trillion out there in circulation. So we take the $20 trillion, we divide it by the 282 millionoz, which would give us a new gold price of about $70,000 an ounce.

Pretty big jump. That’s why a lot of people hold gold waiting for that eventual day. Maybe one day, if we looked at it globally, we can see globally there’s about $87 trillion of golden currency in the world. And we can see there’s about 6 billionoz of gold. If we did it globally, it’s more about $13,000 per ounce of gold. Still pretty good. I don’t know what gold is that today. 2300 bucks an ounce ish. Move it to 13,000. Pretty good. But I just want you to understand the mechanics of how that works real quick. But again, as I said, it’s not going to work and it can’t work.

Because remember all the way back to Socrates, the attributes of money are portable, divisible, durable, recognizable, saleable, etcetera. The key piece being portable. And unfortunately, gold is not very portable. Not today. Not in the information age. Remember I talked about transaction times getting faster, faster, faster. Today I can push a button on Amazon and I can have something delivered to my house before the day is over. Instant transaction times. But yet settlement still take days. If you guys run a business and run credit cards, you know that it typically takes, what, 72 hours at least before those funds show up in your account.

And even up to six months later, they could be charged back on a credit card. So we have instant transactions, but yet our settlement time is still in the stone ages, so it’s incompatible with the world that we’re in at this point. So the re evolution might look like something different. Remember, as I said earlier, problems are, solutions are supposed to come to problems that we have. And so I’ve set this up. We have a lot of problems with inflation, right? The government is debasing at a very rapid rate inflation. And so maybe it might make sense to have something with a fixed supply.

With fiat and gold, there’s no transparency. Does China really have the gold in the vaults? Or is it tungsten bars painted as gold? Does Fort Knox really have the 8000 tons, or do they not? And so there’s no transparency. And so bitcoin offers us an open and transparent base layer that everybody can see. A big thing is that as the world has continued to globalize and global trade has continued to take off, we’ve continued to flourish because of that global trade. But the problem is that if everybody has their own different money, how does that work? And so we might need something borderless.

I’m in the process of building a house down in Mexico right now, and I’ve been seeing this firsthand. In Mexico, the labor is cheap, but most of the stuff has to be employed. And we’re importing stuff from all around the world. Some appliances come from Europe, some tiles come from the US, different places. And the problem is trying to figure out what the price will be in the future. And so my builders in Mexico want to price me in pesos, but they don’t know what the euro exchange rate will be or the dollar exchange will be in the future.

Even at the gas station, they’re speculators, so the official exchange rate is pesos to $1. But at the gas station they give me 17 because they don’t know what the exchange rate will be in a week by the time they get those to the bank and change them in. And so everybody’s forced, with all these different dollars, to be controlled in these borders, we need something borderless. The big one that I’ve been talking about here is this permission system. So in order to use the fiat gold system, it requires permission to join. And a lot of people don’t know if you haven’t left.

The United States is. There’s 1.5 billion people in the world right now. Today, 1.5 billion. I should say adults, not people. 1.5 billion adults who have no access to banking because they don’t have permission to join. If you open a bank account, you know, it takes a paperwork stack about that thick, and they don’t have that. So, for example, they just happen to be born in a country that has sanctions on them. No bank account for you, like the soup Nazi on Seinfeld. You know, maybe they had to flee their country because it got bombed, and they don’t have the paperwork they need to get a bank account.

No bank account for you. Maybe they live in a country, you know, half the world lives on less than $5 a day. Maybe they don’t have enough money to pay for a bank account every single month. No bank account for you. So the world has this permission system. So we might want a system that’s permissionless, like with bitcoin, where I can just download an app right now. We can instantly send and receive money instantly, and then ultimately we have this trust ledger, the bug that I called it, the trust bug that was put in there. And so whether it’s back to fiat or whether it’s back to gold or back to any commodity for that matter, it’s always going to require trust.

Does this person really have the gold they said they have? And can I trust them to give it to me? You know, like those movies, like the drug deal? Like, give me the money. No, give me the drug. Like, how do we work in a world like that? And so it might make sense that we have a system that’s trustless, that we don’t have to trust. And then ultimately, here at Freedomfest, we’ll talk about centralized control. So all fiat, all gold requires that centralized system that somebody manages it. And so ultimately, in a world where trust is lost, in a world where we can no longer trust each other, what we need is a decentralized system that nobody can control.

You see, I talk about the BRICs having their own currency. Each one of those own BRICS nations wants to use their own currency, but none of them trust each other. Well, I certainly don’t want to trust the United States to hold my money anymore, but I don’t really trust Russia or China either. And why would I want to hold whatever bolivar, whatever currency you have, the Turkish lira, that’s losing money very fast. And so ultimately, we need a decentralized system that nobody can control. And really, that is the digital revolution. So for those of you guys don’t know how bitcoin works, I can basically remember these, like, twelve words in my head right here, and I can get on a computer anywhere in the world, plug those twelve words in, and have my entire bank account, my entire balance with me instantly.

A system that nobody controls, a system that nobody has access to other than myself. It’s a digital revolution. We’ve seen everything become demonetized or demerit, materialized, I should say books, music, movies, etcetera. And the last thing left we finally have is value. Now, real quick, I’m running out of time. I got like two minutes left. Let’s talk about where it’s going, because a lot of people, maybe the most common question I hear is, it’s too late, it’s gone too far. Maybe I should try to find something cheaper and something like that. Now, there’s a whole bunch of ways we can think about bitcoin’s future value.

One way that we do it, I run a fund. You can see it marked down here, bitcoin opportunity fund. It’s a venture fund. And a way a venture capitalist would invest money is you’re trying to invest into a startup and imagine how much this company could be worth in the future. And you think about it, in a way of how much value is it going to pull? So if I was going to invest into Uber, how much value will it pull from taxis, or from limos, or from vans, etcetera? And so, if we think about bitcoin, bitcoin is a lot of things, but it’s not competing against new technologies.

What bitcoin is competing against is value itself, which is why I wanted to build that up from the beginning. Right? It’s competing against value itself. And so if we think about it, people store their wealth, store their value in a lot of things. Like gold, for example. It’s about a $12 trillion market cap. Cars and collectibles. I told you it’s about $6 trillion fine art, 18 trillion. A lot of people hold their wealth in the stock market. Your 401K, your mutual fund, 115 trillion, their real estate. Obviously, you have your house. But a lot of people invest into real estate as well.

330 trillion there bonds, 300 trillion. That adds up to about $900 trillion of assets that people just use to store their wealth, just their savings, if that makes sense. So then we might ask ourselves, from a venture capitalist perspective, how much value do I think that a new store of value that might be superior to all those things might pull? Well, maybe it gets a little bit from gold. Maybe it gets 5% from collectibles, 5% from art, maybe it pulls 15% from the stock market, 15% from real estate. We’re not saying it’s going to take 100%, but maybe it pulls a little bit from each one of those.

About every 50 years we have a new technology that changes the world. And so we’re, this is where we’re witnessing bitcoin take off right here. And ultimately again, are we too late? New technology cycles work in these 50 year cycles like this and we are right about here, right now. So it’s just barely getting going right here about 2023 2020 and it’s just getting going. And I’ll leave you with this slide. So the creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, he left us a lot of messages on message boards and he left this quote right here and he said it might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.

So I’ll leave you with that. I ran out of time, so I don’t have any questions, but I’ll be hanging out if you have any. So thank you.
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See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.