Welcome to the seventh episode of the “Understanding Bitcoin” interviews from Bitstack, the program that deciphers the Bitcoin universe in simple, clear language that is accessible to all.
Alexandre Roubaud, co-founder and CEO of Bitstack, had the pleasure of welcoming Alexandre Stachtchenko, a recognized specialist in issues related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Co-founder of Blockchain Partner, he recently held the position of Director of Blockchain & Cryptos at KPMG, one of the four most influential consulting firms in the world.
In this episode:
➜ Bitcoin is useless ➜ Bitcoin is just speculation ➜ Bitcoin is bad for the environment ➜ Bitcoin has no interest, long live MNBCs (central bank digital currencies)
It's a very interesting and challenging cliché because often, when someone says “it's useless”, they already have their opinion. So the debate is a bit biased from the start. But someone who doesn't understand the usefulness, already, we have a more interesting discussion.
When I arrived in the Bitcoin and crypto community, we had a orientation that was either very technical, or very libertarian, even anarchist. So in fact, we had a “What is Bitcoin for” side, and the almost spontaneous response from an average person in the ecosystem was “basically it solves the problem of Byzantine generals”... Well, everyone doesn't care about the problem of Byzantine generals, except people who know the problem of Byzantine generals in computer science. So it didn't speak to an average person. And in general, Blockchain France, we positioned ourselves by saying: in fact, we do not come from this world, we are not technicians, but at the same time we are very interested, we are technophiles, we see that there is a technological interest, so in fact it will be up to us to bridge the gap between people who agree to talk to us because, basically, we went to the right school, we are more of a business, etc., we understand how they operate, and a community that at the beginning was also very suspicious when we arrived. I remember being told to me “yeah it's the banker's son coming”, which is not even true. But that's just because he had a form of hostility. What are they doing here? They are not technicians, there is no interest, what is going on?
We managed to talk to everyone and we managed to bridge the gap to try to talk about the value proposition of Bitcoin to people who were not necessarily exposed or for whom the first Byzantine generals were not what kept them up at night.
So why am I giving you all this preamble? Because in fact, when you put yourself in the shoes of a person who arrives with a little bit of intellectual curiosity, but who has no particular predisposition to understand what Bitcoin is for, the mistake that most people in the Bitcoin world will make is answering the question. So why is it a mistake? Because, in fact, Bitcoin is useful as it addresses the problem it aims to answer, and so, as well, as the person you're talking to is exposed to that problem.
Typically, if I say “the car is useless” and “the car is useless as a Parisian who takes the subway”, it's not at all the same thing. So we need to understand the initial situation, not to mention Bitcoin. And now, in most of the talks I give, two-thirds of the time, I'm not talking about Bitcoin, I'm talking about the problem. What is the current situation? Maybe you don't know it. And in fact, most people don't know it. I remember that I had a conference with someone who was the boss of the association of small businesses or SMEs in France or Ile de France, and who, after two minutes of conversation, said “yes, but behind the euro/dollar, there is gold”. And in fact, people don't know that no, it's not true, there is no more gold. For 50 years there has been nothing behind the euro and the dollar. So in fact, we need to explain the initial situation. And so this initial situation, in fact, it's complicated, to say the least, but it can be summed up pretty quickly around three points. The first is that we have a problem with money because it has been nationalized and made infinite, especially during the 20th century. That is, when you take a step back on what money is, an eminently complicated subject because economists still do not agree on it, but basically, for a very long time, centuries, millennia, money was gold. Then it became paper that represented gold, then only in the 20th century, especially with the world wars, it became paper with nothing behind it. So that's a problem because it means you can completely uncorrelate money from the wealth it's supposed to represent. So we are left with what we are seeing today with inflation, central banks printing money, et cetera and so on. The corollary of that is that this currency has been nationalized. So I am not saying with a pejorative point of view, that is to say without judgment on the fact that you can nationalize this or that company, that may be relevant, irrelevant. But nationalize in the sense that typically, for example, today as France, if you want to trade with Iran with which you do not have an embargo, you cannot because the currency used is the American dollar, and therefore American law applies. That's a problem because normally money is supposed to be extremely liquid and as neutral as possible.
And so when we realize that the currency of international trade is for the most part the currency of a particular state, I am not the only one to complain about it in quotation marks, I often quote De Gaulle, who was a great advocate of the gold standard, to return to gold, precisely he, for him, it was a sovereignty problem. In fact, if France cannot choose with whom it trades because for To trade she must ask for authorization from the United States, we have a sovereignty problem. So that's the first problem.
The second problem, which is very specific, and Bitcoin precisely answers it quite well, is that at the end of the 20th century, we had digitization, computing, and computing has a major problem, which is that it does not know how to manage scarcity. Something that exists in the digital world is not uncommon; you can create tons of copies of it. And so that's great for information, social networks, media, whatever you want. But when it comes to value management, we understand that if everyone has the key to the truck and can create as much value as they want. In fact, it doesn't make much sense anymore.
So how did we overcome this computer problem? Because in fact we had the dilemma “either we leave the financial industry out of IT and we do while the rest of society evolves, we are left with physical checks and notes”, so globalization would be extremely hampered, “or we go digital anyway, but we must find a way to overcome this problem”. And this way of overcoming this problem was found with banking. That is to say, when you bank someone, in fact, you are transforming their assets into receivables. And that, receivables, can be followed up on a register. We can very well transform assets into “I owe you so much” information. And so that's what explains a number that I often quote. In the 1960s in France, not that long ago, 60 years ago, there were barely 6 million bank accounts for almost 50 million French people. Today, the banking rate is 99%. The only ones who don't have a bank account are the banned wholesale banks. Those who should have one but are forbidden for a variety of reasons. And it's even more than that, it's that legally to receive a salary above €1,500, you need a bank account, for example to apply for an apartment as a general rule you will ask for bank details, etc. So banking has almost become a non-subject. You must have a bank account to be socialized in social life. So that's really an almost anthropological change because managing your money has been around for 3,000 years now, in fact, what we find in everyday expressions, under the mattress, in our homes, in safes and so on, and all of a sudden, in the space of two generations, and all of a sudden, in the space of two generations, having your money means a login/password on a bank account that is managed by a third party.
And so that, in itself, we could say that if we have the alternative of doing it or not doing it, it's not a drama, besides, banks have not only existed since the 20th century, it has existed for some time, but where it becomes a problem is when we have no choice. This is the case today. And when you have no choice, it creates a lot of major problems, and especially among these problems, as we saw with the 2008 crisis, is that banks are becoming a bit “too big to fail”. That is to say, as soon as we are forced to have banks to participate in social life, in financial life, these banks have an almost blackmailing power to say “but if I go bankrupt, I take the whole economy with me, so I can't go bankrupt anymore, so the State must save me”. And you have no choice in fact, it's blackmail. We can consider that it is deleterious for competitiveness, for competition, for the market economy, for life in society because even in a democratic way, it is not great to have people who decide whether you have the right to have money or not. So that's a problem in itself.
The third problem is a very rapid corollary, but it is that from the moment you mediate, you have lost your privacy since someone can obviously watch what is happening in the middle. Today, there is a small atmosphere that floats in democracy, not only French, which is a bit of a “if you have nothing to hide, then that's okay” side. This is an absolutely terrible sentence from the point of view of fundamental freedoms. So no, we remind you that privacy and confidentiality are a fundamental right in the Constitution, in the Declaration of Human Rights, in everything we want. Because without privacy, there is no Voltaire, there is no George Sand, there is no Orwell, etc. Privacy is important for whistleblowers, for minorities, for lots of people. And so this private life disappears almost completely with the necessary intermediation. To the point that now, if you pay in cash, you are shady. I would go a step further since it is a device that exists in French law, it is that there is a presumption of guilt, which is still not frequent in law since normally the presumption of innocence is still supposed to be the heart of the law. But if someone opens your glove box and finds €5,000 in cash, you are presumed guilty. What the hell is that? Why are you not in a bank account? So that's quite serious because it changes our relationship with the law, our relationship with society, it's “you have nothing to hide, so why do you want to hide something?” And that's terrible. So this problem of intermediation that creates this problem of confidentiality, also creates a social problem around confidentiality, and precisely the right to preserve things in one's private life, the secret garden, put curtains... and Bitcoin also tries to answer this problem.
So the three problems in a row (national and unlimited currencies, intermediation, confidentiality), that's the problem, and that's why I spend two thirds of the time on this. Because in fact it is a major problem, money is everywhere in our economy, it is all around us, we use it every day, we make payments with it, we measure the economy with money, we count in euros, in dollars, so it is absolutely everywhere. And it has three major fundamental problems. If you are not exposed to these problems, if you are French, average, banked with SEPA transfers that work well and contactless payments at the local grocery store, in fact, when Bitcoin arrives and says “in fact I am not national, I am not national, I am limited, so I am limited so I limit inflation. I maintain confidentiality and you can use their bank account”, as someone who is already banked, for whom things are going very well and who has a currency that is one of the two or three four currencies that are “stable”, in fact, it is difficult to see the value proposition. But, if you zoom out, well in fact 90% of humanity doesn't experience that at all. And these are people for whom it is particularly useful to be able to say to each other, and what is happening in Argentina right now is quite eloquent about it, is that even without talking about Bitcoin, the reason why the newly elected president wants to dollarize the country is that the Argentine peso is doing nonsense. 140% inflation, nobody believes that this thing will ever work again and so you can't create a economy based on a currency that is losing value every day. Venezuela is an even worse example with its million percent inflation. Roughly half of humanity lives with more than 10% inflation, which means “losing half of your wealth every five years.” That is how it should be understood. So on the question about the usefulness of Bitcoin, we have to make this preamble, because if you answer the question right away by saying “That's the point, to have an incensurable currency”, the person in front will answer you perfectly, naturally, “I don't care, that's not my concern”. So we have to do that preamble. And then, “are you exposed to this problem?” If yes, in fact, in reality, we don't need to explain to you what it's for. The average Lebanese, the average Greek, et cetera, not many people need to explain to them what it is for them to take control of it. I often cite the example of Nigeria where almost 50% of the population has cryptocurrencies because there they demonetized the tickets, then then they said to the population “sorry, we won't have any new ones”. When you look at that in the face, you don't need to be told what Bitcoin is for. But in fact, for the average French person, he is less exposed to this. But it still has the potential usefulness of saying “OK, I'm not exposed to it, but if I zoom out, is my vision of the world compatible with the current monetary system?” If you adhere to the current monetary system, don't buy bitcoin, it doesn't make sense philosophically. But if you think that this thing has a non-zero probability of failing, and Yves Choueifaty has a phrase about it saying that, in fact, it's much easier to understand the antithesis of Bitcoin than his thesis. What is the antithesis of Bitcoin? It's because you think that central banks are going to remain orthodox in a sustainable way. So if you think that this is not 100% likely to happen, you have a thesis for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is just a speculative asset
A lot of people say that Bitcoin is speculative... And yes, Bitcoin is speculative, like everything, it is the principle of a market economy. Speculating just means having a vision of the future. So anyone who thinks they're not going to die tomorrow is speculating. That's a lot of people.
So if tomorrow you say “Am I taking the subway?” or “Do I take the car?” , it's speculation. And in the same way we will find this speculation on basic necessities by speculating on wheat, corn, rice or electricity. It's the market economy. That is the principle. We will rely on economic agents to trust them by saying “they are perhaps more relevant, each at their own level, to make a calculation on what is interesting for them tomorrow, rather than a centralized office that would decide for everyone what is good for you or not good for you on a scale of the next 20 years.” So the “it's speculative” argument adds absolutely nothing to the debate. It's speculative, like everything else. And so in fact we are a bit disarmed when it comes to this thing because it's not really an argument. Now, people who say “it's only speculative” are not exactly the same thing because it comes back to the first point: it's only speculative, for you, if you're not exposed to the problem that Bitcoin aims to answer. Yes in this case, and that's your problem, you do what you want, you don't buy them and then there you go, you stop bothering others. But for anyone who sees an interest in it for them, it's not just speculative. Even me, because Bitcoin is a unit of account and also the payment system, if I want to send €2,000 to the other end of the world in ten minutes on a Sunday at 11 pm, I can't do it with the traditional banking system. So I have a use already there. So it's not just speculative, but it can be speculative for you if you're not exposed. There is really this personal exposure aspect in relation to a problem that is being answered. I reiterate that for me, as a Parisian in the 2nd arrondissement, the car is useless. This is not the case for 60% of French people for whom they could not live without a car. And am I suddenly telling the rest of the world that the car is useless? No, it's not the same thing at all.
Does Bitcoin protect your savings?
In fact, it is a bit of a perversion of the current monetary system that is the so-called “Fiat” system, since Fiat means “so be it”, because precisely, there is nothing behind the currency. So basically, it's “the system as it is.” And when you believe it, it works.Why is it perverse? Because from the moment in the DNA of this system, we aim for inflation, and again, this is not a bug, it is a feature, it is a feature, since the mission of central banks if they do their job well, which has not been the case for some time, which has not been the case for some time, but let's assume that they do their job well, the goal is to lose 2% of purchasing power every year. Why is DNA so vicious? Because what that means is that, as an economic agent, every time I receive money, I have the choice between consuming, investing or saving. In a system where money loses purchasing power every year, the alternative of saving no longer exists. Because saving is just losing money.
Hence the analogy of the melting glacier. That's the expression Michael Saylor used when he spoke to his shareholders. He said, “My cash flow in dollars, I feel like I'm seeing an ice cube melting,” which is true. He loses money every year if he does nothing. But at the same time, I reiterate that from the point of view of economic theory, it is intentional. Why? Because consumption is GDP. So it must be made to grow.
Consuming, your interest is that there is no pleasure, you are doing something, an activity,..., in any case you are transforming it into an experience. Investing, you are betting on the future. You want to recover more tomorrow. You're taking a risk, but at least you're making something out of that money. Incidentally, investing means that someone else consumes for you. For example, you will invest in a company that will pay employees who themselves will find themselves with the same dilemma of “do I consume or do I invest or I save”.
But if I am told that nothing is happening on the third way, that is to say “if you store €100, in ten years you will be able to buy €100”. In fact, for me, the economic calculation that I am going to do by schematizing to simplify the reasoning is that basically I will consume for what I think is necessary (eat, sleep, drink, see friends, everyone makes their own estimate of what they consider necessary), and then I will be left with too much, without the best of cases, since indeed there are people who do not have “too much” and it is therefore more difficult for me Of course, but for all the people who have a little extra that goes beyond, they have the choice between investing and saving, which is not the case. same thing.
What does investing mean? It means “I am taking a risk of losing capital, so I expect a return.” So if I put money into an X or Y project, I expect you to pay me, because I'm going to deprive myself of this money for a while. I wait until tomorrow or in a year, in three years, in five years, I won't get back €100 but €105 or 110 because I took a risk. But so it also means that potentially in five years, I have zero because the company went bankrupt. So that's a risk. Let me point out here that, as far as I remember, more than 80% of asset managers in the world do not beat the main indices. So to say I want to invest as individuals, why not, but you have to do it on subjects that you know particularly well. Because investing is already a full-time job in itself. What people don't have time to do. You have a job, you come back at 6 p.m., 7 p.m., 8 p.m., you don't have time to say to yourself “Well, before going to see the children or whatever if I invested”. So in fact, you are in front of this thing that presents a capital risk and for which you have to be professional if you want to beat normal assets.
And you have the third alternative, which is to say that if today I have five projects in front of me and which require my savings, but there are none for which I think the risk-benefit is worth it, then I have an alternative in a system where there is no inflation to say “OK, in this case I don't do anything with this money”.
Why? Because I am waiting for a better opportunity. Maybe in two weeks, a better project will come up and I will want to finance it. Or maybe, as the future is uncertain, I want to protect myself against a flood in my cellar, I want to protect myself against an illness, against a hazard in life, and so I need this mattress and I don't touch it. But that, that choice, unfortunately, from the moment when we tell you that as soon as you make the choice to save, you lose 2% per year when things go well, in fact, you are encouraged to tell yourself go away that suddenly all that's left is to consume or invest, because saving is completely stupid. I am not doing anything with this money and I am losing money. Not only do I deprive myself but I also lose. So I'm going to do one of the other two. Once one of the other two is left, what do you do? Do you want to become a professional investor in the evening at 22:00 at home? Where do you want to consume? In general, people will prefer, and this is perfectly normal, to consume.
And so the ecological implications of what I am saying are monstrous. Because what I am saying is that the current monetary system is not compatible with achieving climate goals because we need sobriety. Everyone says it, but you can't be sober. It is impossible. As soon as an economic agent chooses sobriety, they are hit. So all that's left is consumption and investment. So that, in fact, is really terrible. You have to understand it from the point of view of the monetary system, because it means that when you want to be a saver, you cannot, so you will have to choose one of the two other solutions.
In reality, today, every time someone sells you a savings product, it is a paradox. It is an antithesis. A savings product that generates returns is not savings. Saving is “I'm doing nothing”, except that since “doing nothing” is stupid, nobody is saving. So in fact, saving in common language has become a synonym for Livret A. But Livret A is an investment. It goes into social housing, it helps people, et cetera, so it works this capital. I reiterate once again that everything I have just said is not even heterodox. It's in mainstream economic theory. It's perfectly wanted because money that doesn't do anything is unproductive money, so there's no growth. So we don't want people to save because you have to consume, you make someone work, or you have to invest, you make someone work in the future, or in any case you use your capital to produce wealth.
So why is the cursor idea important? Because every time we raise the slider towards the punishment of savings, in fact, anthropologically what we do is we shift the individual's temporal preference. So what does that mean in concrete terms? This means that the more savings are punished, and this can be seen very well in hyperinflation situations, which are the extreme cursor, that is to say the money you save, tomorrow it is no longer worth anything, now it's really the worst of the worst. What happens in hyperinflated societies? It is very simple. I used an article from Bloomberg, when inflation returned to the United States, which said that Argentines who are familiar with inflation give advice to Americans, and what was his advice? Spend your money right away! So, it's counterintuitive because you say to yourself “But wait, if there is inflation, you may want to save because life is hard.” Not at all. If the rule of the economic game is that everything you keep tomorrow is worthless, or even tonight is worthless... what is the point of keeping change? None. So you want to get rid of it as soon as possible and everything gets better. And when I say everything, I mean the restaurant, the chair, the local banana, anything is better than change. So in fact, you're actually going to have your cursor ridiculously oriented to the short term. You have to consume. If you don't consume, you've lost 100%. So it's stupid. Why deprive yourself to lose? So you are consuming.
So this shift in time preference is absolutely crucial because what it means is that, on the contrary, the less we punish savings, the more we encourage people to see the long term because in fact, we tell them “the future is uncertain”, so we must protect ourselves from it. You have to plan, you have to put a mattress aside for the vagaries of life that I was talking about earlier.
Before Covid, we were in a situation that conceptually made absolutely no sense with negative rates, for example. The interest rate is the price of time, it is the price of future risk. A negative rate is translated in everyday language as “tomorrow is more certain than today”, which makes no sense. That can't be the case. By definition, today is now. Tomorrow can't be any safer than it is now. Except that this is the rule of the game that we will give to all economic agents. It's because tomorrow is so certain, tomorrow is hyper-certain, more than the present, so why worry about tomorrow? “Consume, there is no point in making a mattress for yourself.” So you have moved people's temporal preference to the present, who are beginning to consume, to overconsume. And I need an eighth coffee machine, I don't know why, and I need a fourth car, a fifth iPhone, et cetera et cetera. All this in a situation where saving is not punished, or even encouraged.
Bitcoin shifts the cursor by saying “we're going to stop punishing you” (because Bitcoin's value proposition is this limited quantity of 21 million, so there's no longer an inflationary system like we could have today) and we shift people's temporal preference to the future. And so, of course, from an environmental point of view, it is 100 times more compatible with sobriety to say “but in fact, if you don't need something, it becomes a possible alternative again than saving for tomorrow. And so, from the point of view of classical economic theory, we will fall back into the fear of the economist who will say “yes but if people do not consume for the economy, it's terrible, I will bring down GDP”. Yes, to bring down GDP. But today, there are some of the growth points we make every year that don't make sense. It is the communist joke in quotation marks which is to say “is it better for someone to dig a hole and the neighbor to fill it up, or for nothing to happen”. Except that, I put the ecological variable back into the balance, today it's not “someone digs a hole where someone fills it up, it's someone runs an engine and spits oil all day long while burning it to dig a hole, someone does exactly the same thing to fill it up, and in the end, we're happy because we created two jobs”. And Christine Lagarde said it officially because a while ago, she said, “I prefer to keep my job to save.”
Again, what I'm saying isn't even heterodox, it's just an environmental translation of economic theory. We prefer to keep jobs rather than save, that's all that means.
Is Bitcoin an ecological disaster?
I am going to make the same remark as for the first question, that is to say that you have to understand the initial situation before going into Bitcoin. Especially since on Bitcoin, there is almost a moral aspect to it. There are a lot of people, and I have experienced it myself, if you remove the word bitcoin and replace it with “Zoublabla”, you can make the same speech and people say “Oh yeah, it's true, it's interesting”. On the other hand, you say “Bitcoin”, it's over, “Goodbye! No, no, it's total chaos, it's destroying the planet eight times a day.” So there is really a moral hazard around the word bitcoin which means that, in fact, I often recommend that people, when they have a debate on the subject of environmental ecology with bitcoin, to postpone as much as possible the moment when they talk about bitcoin, because it is divisive and there are people who will object even though they would Could agree with the theory Underly.and What is this underlying theory? That's all I've just said about the systemic part, that is, before saying “Bitcoin pollutes”, can we talk about the current system? The current system does not systematically, structurally, make it possible to achieve climate goals. So I mean to say that Bitcoin consumes x terawatt hours, but maybe we have a bigger problem, which is that you can make the efforts you want, it's useless because if you ever get sober, we will create money to make fictional growth. And I don't even have to go very far back since that's precisely what happened during Covid. It is in the DNA of the debt money system since it dies without growth. So we have to invent it. So we have a subject that is 100 times bigger than Bitcoin. And when we get into this, we understand the value proposition of Bitcoin much better by saying “but if it consumes 60 terawatt hours, but it allows me to be sober, that is to say that 8 billion people are capable of achieving climate goals, well I'm doing the trade-off”. But you have to keep in mind what you are replacing, because in fact, if you don't have it in mind, if you're convinced that it's useless, every terawatt hour at Bitcoin is a wasted terawatt hour, so it consumes too much, so it pollutes. But in fact, the question is not so much about the environmental footprint. A lot of people use it as a very greenwashing side. That is to say, “Ohlala it pollutes a lot.” Yes, but the same amount of energy is taken up by dryers in the United States.
You have to think about the equation between utility or benefits with cost. And if the perceived utility is zero, that equation can't be positive. So in fact, we are fighting a mill because we have not solved the utility problem. Bitcoin could consume one kilowatt hour, that would already be too much. If it's useless, it's too much. In fact, this is the reasoning that Jean-Marc Jancovici used in the exchange I had with him on LinkedIn. Basically, he relayed an article that was that banks were interested in cryptos, and his argument was to say that since each point of growth or each additional activity is correlated linearly, or almost exactly, to an increase in energy consumption, and therefore fossil fuels, it is better not to start. That was his argument. It is better not to create a new addiction to something that we will no longer be able to remove from the economy, since we are moving towards sobriety. In fact, activities that we are not doing today might as well not start them. But that's actually if we haven't understood the current system. Why is money important as a subject in ecology? And I was saying it recently, I don't understand, in ecology we make green financing, we look at the origin of funds, we make CSR funds, finance has often got in tune with greenwashing, in fact, in carbon credits, we have a good bunch of them which, when you check for 30 seconds what is behind it, it's not terrible. On the other hand, the currency, which is at the center, everyone uses it every day, all economic agents, and it is radio silence. Nobody talks about it.
The first part is to say money, what is the purpose of money in society? And systemically, is Bitcoin's proposal better or worse than the current system from an environmental perspective? For me, my opinion on the question is that there is no photo since it is structurally impossible to do sobriety in the current system. So for me, “the question is quickly answered” as they say. Now, there is also the question behind it, why do people say that it pollutes? Because operationally speaking, Bitcoin consumes electricity to function. So there are machines that run, what we call mining, dedicated machines that do computer calculations to try to solve an equation that makes it possible to build a consensus on the state of the Bitcoin network. And so, of course, behind, the image we are going to have of Bitcoin, and the media are having a blast, as a rule, we will have an image of a container with lots of machines running next to, if possible, a coal-fired power plant, et cetera, and so on, and so on, we can say “look, it consumes, it pollutes” .Already, there is the gross figure, of how much does it consume, on which there are of the debate. The current order of magnitude is around 60, 70, 80 terawatt hours per year. The media love to compare countries because it's shocking to say “Bitcoin consumes more than Argentina.” We say to ourselves “Ooh now, we have a country of tens of millions of inhabitants, consumes less than Bitcoin for which I, the average French person, see no use, but it's an environmental delirium”. And that's normal, that's the reaction we're trying to elicit. Now, of course, the comparison in the other direction is never made. I always use the following two comparisons because they are quite striking. The first is that this electricity consumption by Bitcoin is lower than the consumption of clothes dryers in the United States alone, so basically, spitting hot air on a heating element because you don't want to hang your laundry when you are in the top 1% of the richest people on the planet consumes more than Bitcoin. Perhaps this is an opportunity to rethink selective outrage over something whose social usefulness, perceived for 8 billion people, is zero. So that's the first thing. The second comparison I often give is that if we annualized the consumption of Christmas lights in the United States, it would also be more than Bitcoin. To make light. So now, there are people who say “yes, but it's nice for children, et cetera”, but in fact, that's not even the debate. The debate is to say that these types of comparisons are of little use.
So that's on the raw numbers part. Now, what is interesting to understand with Bitcoin is that the way mining works is very particular and that makes it particularly interesting in certain aspects of the energy transition. Why? Because Bitcoin mining is an activity that is electro-intensive, uses a substantial portion of energy to function as electricity, but has characteristics that no other industry has. In this case, it is geo-independent. That is to say, no matter where you are on the planet, you are mining, you are doing mathematical calculations. It will be the same in Africa or Asia. You don't need massive connectivity, all you need is a 3G stick. You don't need uptime as they say, so 99% availability. Conversely, go and set up a data center for a website in an isolated site, well in fact you are forced to have a backup generator because if your website falls and no one can access your service for 3 hours anymore, that's not great. So in fact, there is only Bitcoin. If your machines are ever unplugged or do not work for 2 hours, the Bitcoin network continues to run.
So it adds up a certain number of characteristics which means that very often, it is the only relevant, the only relevant industry to find either surplus energy, and people do not know that there is such thing as surplus energy, so we talk about it later, or waste. And so that's very interesting because surpluses actually come with the energy transition because energy transition = more renewable, renewable = intermittent, and intermittent means that we don't produce when we consume. So it's a bit like the sun's curse. I say it all the time, but the peak of solar production is the zenith, that is to say the trough in consumption. And that every day. So structurally, you know that your solar produces the max when the consumption is at a minimum. And that's because solar and wind power are more diffuse during the day, but it's completely unpredictable. Solar at least we know that globally, there will be daylight every day. What is interesting is when a place like Texas, for example, where there is a lot of mining, there is about two gigawatts of installed mining power, the Texas electrical network called ERCOT (the equivalent of ENEDIS in Texas) regularly positions itself in favor of Bitcoin by saying “in fact we have a blessing”. Why a blessing? Because Texas is already almost 35% renewable in their electricity mix, so they have some counties where, a quarter of the time, 1 hour out of four, the electricity price is negative. So from a consumer perspective, great. Except that from the producer's point of view, it doesn't make sense. That means that one hour out of four, he has to pay money to have an economic activity. So what does that mean in concrete terms? This means that the deployment of renewables on the grid is capped because no one wants to move in until this problem is solved. Only Bitcoin mining is capable of saying “I switch off when the energy is too expensive and when no one wants it anymore, I switch on again and I use its energy”.
So that, from the point of view of the business model of renewable energies (renewable energies), it is exceptional. They can be assured that they will never have negative electricity again. So obviously, it favors deployment on the network. So that's in the case of electrical grid management. And that's what Texas does. TEPCO in Japan said it was doing it. In Norway they also talked about it, the Swedish electricity company talked about it, et cetera. So it's something that's starting to become accepted, like what we call a “flexible load”, so you're able to take it off the network whenever you want to balance that network.
The second subject is also very important, that of waste. The example we often take is that of methane, a gas that is absolutely terrible for the atmosphere because it is 80 times worse than CO2 in the short term, over a period of 20 years, but the problem with this methane is that it is produced on the planet in a decentralized manner. Approximately 35 - 40% comes from agriculture, especially cattle breeding, but you are not going to put a thing on each cow to catch methane, you have a substantial 30 - 35% that comes from the oil industry because when you dig an oil well, you have a co-product that is gas, it is there, but it is in too small a quantity to justify putting a gas pipeline out of hundreds Kilometers when you are in the middle of Siberia or the ocean, so you don't do anything with this gas, it's a waste that you don't know what to do with , and you have some of it that comes from landfills. When you, when you throw waste away, when you put it in a garbage dump, in a landfill, by decomposition, it generates methane.
All of these sites, in fact, are sites that nobody wants. In reality, no one wants to put 400 kilometers of gas pipeline, or even 1000 kilometers, to fetch oil on an oil platform. Nobody wants to set up their economic activity at the bottom of a landfill. Nobody wants to go and put their methane catchment on every cow. So in fact, we end up with a problem which is that we have 200 billion cubic meters of methane per year that are either burned up, so we don't do anything with it, we simply burn them, or just let them escape into the atmosphere. 200 billion cubic meters, to have an order of comparison, to have an order of comparison, with that, if we transformed it into electricity, that's 75% of the annual electricity consumption of the entire European Union.
So it's monstrous. Every year you burn that, or you let it slip out. And now, we have a consumer of last resort called Bitcoin mining, which has a cost structure in its business model that has 80% of electricity, and therefore for which it justifies deploying capital to settle next to landfills, at the bottom of a farm, or at the bottom of an oil farm.
And when you factor everything you've just said to yourself, the picture is no longer the same at all. That is to say, one, it is a necessary condition to change the monetary system, otherwise we will not succeed, regardless of everything else. Two, from an operational point of view, we have something without which we cannot make an energy transition to renewable energies, because it is the consumer of last resort, and I should point out that at the moment, for all the systems that were designed before the emergence of bitcoin, I have an example in New Zealand where they are considering spending 100 million euros on an infrastructure that allows electricity to be balanced in the ground. So these are the alternatives right now, in concrete terms, today, compared to using it for Bitcoin. So it is obviously absolutely not profitable and you have to find 100 million euros, in general, you will take it from the taxpayer. So that's on the network balancing part, which anyone who's been a bit interested in the subject feels is a blessing. And in addition, what I am saying about the last part is that within ten years we will be able to transform the Bitcoin network in its carbon footprint into something that is net positive. That is to say, it removes more methane from the atmosphere by consuming it than it emits CO2. So the panorama is completely different and we almost come to think “Bitcoin should consume more”, because as soon as it consumes additional kilowatt hours, it is kilowatt hours that we are encouraged to look for in order to reduce methane in the atmosphere. So this is a subject that I am personally trying to develop, we will see if it comes to anything, but there are already miners in the world who are doing this, who are going to search on landfills, on oil farms, because they, once again, with a kilowatt hour above 4-5 cents, they are no longer profitable. So they are never in competition with the average French person who consumes energy at 20 or 24 cents per kilowatt hour. If a person can sell their electricity on the grid, it is in no interest for him to sell it to a minor, because the miner will not buy from him at that price. So this consumption, even if it is 70-80 terawatt hours, there is an extremely substantial proportion that is not electricity production in addition, which is the consumption of things that nobody wants. So in fact, the carbon balance at the end is constant.
So the panorama of the environment is very annoying because it is very difficult to deconstruct. It takes a lot of time, we exchange for a very long time, although it is one of the ones that upset me the most because when you know the subject, you realize that you see ecological movements that are against something that we think is necessary for the transition. So it's not even “they're bothering us because they're preventing us from growing in our business”, it's “They're playing against themselves, they're scoring goals against their side, you're preventing us from getting methane out of the atmosphere.” I am investigating this subject personally, I am forced not to talk about bitcoin when I approach people who have excess methane. That is to say, if I tell them “I, thanks to Bitcoin, can allow you to sell your excess methane with an exceptional carbon footprint, and by exceptional, I mean that on an average landfill, I will have 25 times more carbon impact than the largest carbon sequestration project in the world”, so it is a monstrous impact on the climate. But if I say “Bitcoin,” that's it. So we all have to, and I'm not the only one, everyone contorts. “We are on a flexible and mobile data center”, “we are doing high-performance computing”... but “hide this breast that I can't see”. We can't talk about that and so it's extremely annoying as a person who has a strong environmental conviction and is in Bitcoin to see that he has a part of his camp that is playing against himself, by preventing people from moving forward with the energy transition. And so it's true that it's one of the most annoying cliches, but it's also the longest to unpack because it requires taking a particular height.
Bitcoin has no interest, long live central bank digital currencies (MNBCs)
In fact, there is a major problem, it is a problem of definition. That is, no one defines central bank digital currencies. Even Christine Lagarde, whenever you see her on set talking about the subject, if the question “what is it” is asked, there is never an answer. And to the question “what is the point?” she will respond to you with a contortion by saying “There's the promise”, it's not exactly the same answer.In fact the normal, basic journalist will tell her “but in fact I don't understand, my euro is already digital”. Which is true. We make a transfer or a transaction, there is nothing physical that circulates. The physical version of the euro is cash, and it represents only a few percent of the total money supply. Everything else is digital, it's already digital. So we can understand that people say but I don't see the point. The interest in the theoretical value proposition, at least what's being proposed, but I think that technically it's infeasible so in fact it's not going to go well, but what the defenders of central bank digital currencies say are already saying is it “big” or not. “Big” is not really a political subject, it's to say we are going to replace Swift, we are going to make a better interbank system. Well why not, if there are economies of scale, great. On the other hand, if we make a central bank digital currency called “retail”, in fact, it means that the central bank wants the average citizen to have access to central bank money directly, digitally.
Why central bank money? This is what we said just before, it is that in reality, when today, and this was one of my first points, I was saying “we don't know how to do without intermediation”, so the money that you almost all own, except physical money, except physical money, so except your cash, but everything else is not your money, it is the bank's money, and therefore it carries the bank's counterparty risk. If you have an account with BNP, Crédit Agricole, whatever, you open your bank account and you see €2,000, it's not €2,000 that belongs to you, it's a claim from the bank against you. And so it's not central bank money that you have, it's commercial bank money, since money today is created by commercial banks at the time of credit. So if you borrow to buy a house, money is created ex-nihilo. It doesn't come from anyone else. Once we understand how it worked like this, in fact, the central bank says “I would like to go back in the loop, potentially disintermediate the banks in fact, I will find a link with the average citizen and he will have the equivalent of cash, which is a liability at the central bank, in digital format”.
But the problem is that the value proposition is contradictory and doesn't hold up. It does not hold water technically because today, the only way to create a digital asset, that is to say, one that has the same characteristics as cash, that is, incensurable, privacy preserved (cash does not have your name written on it) et cetera, and so on, well that in fact, the only way to do that technically that we have found since the dawn of time is to remove the central bank. It's called Bitcoin.
So a prima facie, the ECB (European Central Bank) is not going to remove itself, so it will reject this technical solution, and so today, when we talk about a technical solution from MNBC, we don't have the answer. “It will do that.” “We swear to you.” Technically, I don't know how it's going to work, because it's not possible.
So as it is not possible to do it in digital active format, we will mechanically do it in passive digital form, i.e. account management, which is currently happening for commercial banks, central bank version. And so you will have a central bank account, which is not exactly the same as having cash. Because here we are coming to a subject that is not terrible, that is to say what is happening in China: social credit. Political control. Are you allowed to use your money like this? And this is not conspiracy because the only examples we have today of MNBC that are being tried, I was talking about Nigeria earlier for example, they tried to do it, with not great success, with total distrust of the population, and they already mentioned that they were going to make conditionality: “You can only spend in Abuja, you can only spend in these stores...”. So it's already official that they want to do this.
For some defenders of the central bank currency model, and therefore of the Fiat system where you create as much money as you want, one of their criticisms of the current system is that as it is very intermediated, the effectiveness of monetary policies is not transmitted well enough. In other words, in a very cartoonish version, they don't like the fact that when the central bank creates money to stimulate the economy, it has to distribute it through the banks, and that the banks, in fact, in the heap, there are lots of them that take the money, put it in financial markets, put it in financial markets, they create bubbles, and in fact, that doesn't benefit the real economy at all. So what they are saying is that if there is a direct link between the central bank and the citizen, in fact, we can fly a helicopter, we can throw money at everyone. This was done in the United States, but in check format: the Trump check, “everyone gets $2,000.” Terrific. But that, precisely, we don't know how to do it in digital format. That's why people got a check. So now, they would like to do it in digital format, in a simpler way. And so you also have the concept of fondant money that comes backwards, which is that you could very well say “here's €1,000, but if they're not spent in six months, it's worth zero.” So that's even more to force you to consume, because I'm reminding you of “consumption, GDP, growth, economic activity, employment, et cetera.” But the second problem, in fact, I was saying that it was technically impossible, except to actually cut into this value proposition, namely anonymity and so on. Agustin Carstens, who is the boss of the BIS (Bank for International Settlements), which is the central bank of central banks, has already said that it would not be anonymous. He said it in an even more worrying way, is that he said “the difference with $1 and one pesos in cash is that we don't know who he is using, with a MNBC, we will know perfectly well who is using what and we can impose/enforce the rules”. He said it very clearly. That's about the technical feasibility part where suddenly we will inevitably move towards a system of keeping accounts, of registers, and therefore with political control. And now the question becomes “By whom? Who has legitimacy?” It is not in the mandate of the ECB. The ECB's mandate is price stability. This is not to say I want to promote this or that economic activity. It's not “hey, ecology is good”, “health is good”, and then if we start that, why not “Couldn't we create money for school?” , etc. And in fact, well, that will end in hyperinflation in general. So that's the first point.
The second point is that it is indeed paradoxical because the central bank today, in particular because of this digitization that we talked about today, has created these “too big to fail” (too big to fail). So there is a game of “I'm holding you by the goatee”. Commercial banks don't want to be disintermediated. The central bank has become accustomed to relying on commercial banks to disseminate their monetary policy, but also to apply various and varied controls, the famous KYC (know your customer), “who are you?” , “Why use your money?” et cetera, surveillance in a way as well. And so she's actually an addict. It cannot return to a situation where in fact it is the central bank that keeps accounts, manages savings, provides financial services, acts like a commercial bank, what. And so, since she doesn't want to, it's a bit paradoxical the situation she's in. And that's why we have the subject of limits, thresholds.It's that indeed, suppose that tomorrow, assuming that it is technically feasible, you have the choice between an account at the central bank and an account with a commercial bank such as BNP, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale... Indeed, suppose that tomorrow, suppose that it is technically feasible, you have the choice between an account at the central bank and an account with a commercial bank such as BNP, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale... As a normally constituted person... As a normally constituted person, you therefore have two possibilities of having euros, say 500€, except that 500€ at BNP Paribas and 500€ € to the European Central Bank do not have the same value. Because the €500 in the BNP Paribas account, they have a risk that BNP Paribas will go bankrupt. This is not the case for the central bank, which, in economic theory, cannot go bankrupt since it can always create money in order not to go bankrupt.
So what do I, as an average consumer, do I do? There is no point in staying at BNP Paribas, so I'm going to take all my money out of BNP to go to the ECB. Except that if I do that, I create a bank run (a phenomenon marked by massive and simultaneous requests for money withdrawals by the customers of a bank, which then runs the risk of becoming insolvent). BNP is bankrupt. And so in fact, we find ourselves in an ubusive situation in which the central bank wants to disintermediate commercial banks that do not want to be disintermediated and have advanced enough “taking them hostage to the economy” to be able to blackmail by saying “But if you allow people to hold as much as you want in accounts at the central bank, you are killing the financial system by making it unstable. So you have to limit what people can own.” And so now, the debate is, the European Central Bank said “OK, we see your point well, we are going to set limits to €3,000”. Commercial banks say “no, 3000 is too much, wouldn't that be 500€?” So there is still a debate in the upper echelons about how much you have the right to own, which is not terrible from the point of view of democracy and private freedom, but in any case, it is the contradictory injunctions to which MNBCs bring.
In reality, this MNBC subject is very little related to Bitcoin technically, because it will most likely not be a blockchain, it has no interest. But on the other hand, where it particularly echoes Bitcoin and stablecoins and Libra-type attempts, is that it actually acts a bit like Nemesis. In other words, really, if you project yourself a bit, you in a certain way have a positioning to take as a citizen: “What is my desirable future?” I am doing it in a very cartoonish way, but that is to explain the point. Tomorrow I want a system similar to Chinese social credit where public authorities can decide if my currency melts, why am I allowed to spend or should I spend, et cetera, but “for your own good and with controls”, or an open system like Bitcoin?
And that's a positioning that everyone must have. As I said earlier, a lot of economists say “no, no, we want to be able to make money, we will continue”. Others say “Well no actually, now it's starting to go off the rails severely”. So it has nothing to do with it, but at the same time, it still acts like Nemesis to say “Guys, if you don't choose Bitcoin, in fact, the probability that we will go there is very high. So even if you don't like Bitcoin, maybe it's not as bad as the other alternative that you're sliding towards almost irretrievably.”
And I will end by saying that, too, the reference to social credit is not completely innocent in my mouth because it is also assumed. Christine Lagarde often repeats “We are behind China”, while for me it is one of the subjects on which I would like to stay behind China. If we can catch up on AI, et cetera, that's fine with me, but yeah, on social credit, if they can stay ahead of me, that's fine with me.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the same thing: anything. The real innovation is blockchain.
Bitcoin is not the blockchain. Blockchain has existed for 40 years. It's not asymmetric cryptography, which existed before. It's not peer-to-peer, which existed before. It's the combination of all that, plus one tiny thing that Satoshi Nakamoto added: the reward. This is the only addition from Satoshi who says “I'm going to take existing technologies, we're going to do a great thing, but I'm missing something, it's an aligned economic interest for all stakeholders.” This is called the Nakamoto consensus.
That's why at any time on the network, anyone, by following their personal interests, is in fact following the interests of the group and that's what makes it work. For me, Bitcoin is much more an economic and social innovation than a technical innovation. There's not much that's technically new in Bitcoin. It's a combination of things that already existed. On the other hand, what is very new is the fact that he said to himself “But in fact, we are going to pay people”. It is perhaps more reliable to rely on greed, which is something that has been working well in humanity for some time, than to say “we hope that people will maintain the thing”, although it works in open source, in free software, et cetera, and so on, but in any case, there was really this “there is money at stake” side, so if they don't maintain it, they need them Give a little something. So once we know that, that is to say, the only innovation is that we get paid in a native token. Indeed, the whole subject, “we are going to do blockchain without crypto” makes no sense. Because you have just created a gas plant, you are creating an Excel table. You have a register with hashes that follow one another, decentralized but since there is no interest in maintaining the network, it will remain decentralized for about two seconds, and then we will send it to a cloud provider who will maintain it and we will pay for it. So in the end, it's like almost all private blockchains, it ends up on a cloud.
I often quote a sentence from the director of the cloud part of IBM a few years ago who said “for every euro we sell in the blockchain, we sell ten in the cloud”. It was assumed that it was their business model. The aim was not to sell blockchain at all. The aim was that for each blockchain mission, he sold the cloud because these nodes had to be hosted.
So the whole subject Blockchain without crypto now is good, the dust is starting to settle. Everyone has invested hundreds of millions, nothing has happened, so people are starting to think that maybe there is a topic. Now, there's actually the topic “in crypto, what are the differences?” And now, in fact, I am more of the camp of those who say “there is Bitcoin and there is the rest”, but I am not of the camp of those who say “there is bitcoin, the rest sucks”. It's just not the same value proposition.
That is to say, Bitcoin really has this very purist side: we don't know the founder: we don't know the founder, so there is a way of pressure that has just disappeared, there was a “fair distribution”, that is to say, there was no fundraising, there were no shareholders, there were no shareholders, there were no VCs, there was an organic adoption, it is the first so there is a side “it is an unrepeatable event”, and it is the only one that almost even has in its DNA this “you cannot trust central banks” side. Almost a political currency project.
When you read Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, the abstract is “The fundamental problem with conventional currencies is the trust they require to function. You have to trust the central bank not to devalue the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” He does not start by saying Bitcoin, he first says “we have a problem, and I am offering you a solution”, but you have to explain the problem well.
So indeed, the problem that Bitcoin seeks to answer is very identified: money, banking, intermediation, et cetera et cetera. And so that's the almost political project for Bitcoin, so it creates a community, so it creates a community, so it creates excesses, a form of religiosity sometimes, it creates toxicity, maximalism, it creates a lot of things, but it also creates an organic adoption and a form of apprehension of public authorities that end up with no one to call. It's like this thing that often makes me laugh, it was the round table at the French Senate in 2018, where the senator says “yes, but so Bitcoin SAS domiciled in Cyprus...” He is lost because, for him, the question is “who do I call?” , “Who is in charge of Bitcoin SAS?” And this question, obviously, when you know the thing, you know that it doesn't make sense this question, there is no Bitcoin SAS. It's a protocol, it's a set of rules. There is no CEO of HTTP, it's the same. So that's what makes it very difficult to grasp. And so Bitcoin is a form of purism in this because since it is an asset without compensation, well it is the only crypto for which, when you hold bitcoin, it is not anyone's debt, so it allows you to have real self-custody (self-custody). Do you have a bitcoin? Nobody owes you anything and you don't owe anyone anything. You have your bitcoin.
It is absolute property. After all, the challenge is to get it accepted as a currency, because obviously, if you have your bitcoin alone, it may be rare, if everyone doesn't care, it's useless. So there is a social aspect. And now it's been fifteen years, quietly, organically, we take millions, tens, hundreds of millions of people who adopt it. It's going to take some time. I often point out that, for example, in France, supported by all public authorities, the Euro was voted in 92, adopted in 2002, and francs can be exchanged until 2012. So 20 years for one of the most densely populated economic zones on the planet, one of the richest, et cetera. And Bitcoin is all alone, without ads, without CEOs, with everyone banging on it saying “it's useless”... And after fifteen years, there are already more users than the Euro. So it's still quite a failure, isn't it?
And other cryptos are not political at all. It's financial most of the time. That is to say, if you go into DeFi and you don't have an appetite for financial engineering, it will quickly get complicated for you because in DeFi, it's financial products. Certainly more innovative, more open, we are trying to reinvent things such as mortgages, loans, Lombard loans etc. There are things that are very interesting, such as tokenization (tokenization), the fact of representing assets by a cryptographic token. I don't see how in fifteen years there would be assets left that wouldn't be atomized, that wouldn't make sense. It's faster, you can own it yourself, you can send it whenever you want, et cetera et cetera. So there are not even questions about “Why wouldn't you throw something away?” But that, what I want to say, is that it is not a political proposal.
The problem that I am going to solve with a TotalEnergies action token is the accessibility to an underlying asset that already exists and is called the TotalEnergies action. I will have threshold effects because if I improve operational effectiveness, operational efficiency, I may be able to list more companies on the stock market, therefore democratize capital/investment. It's a real subject, but it's not the same project as Bitcoin.
That's why very often, in the cliches, when there is a “cryptos” side, I turn things around to try to make people understand why it's absurd to say “cryptos” by saying “Does it happen to you in normal life to do analyses on 'the assets' and to lump together art, real estate, stocks, bonds, a car, etc. and to say 'all of this, well I'll do an analysis for you. '” It doesn't make sense. We are not going to start saying “yes, a Picasso is in the same bag as a studio apartment rented to someone”, that makes no sense. But we allow ourselves to do it for cryptos. It makes no sense until you specify which one you are talking about and therefore your value proposition. Without that you can't express yourself about it. If someone says “cryptos are a scam”, I answer “which one?”
In the heap, there are plenty of scams, but there are a lot of scams in the traditional world too. If we look, Enron, we didn't stop making energy after... So there are frauds, yes, they exist, but it's just that it's not the same subject. So indeed, there is really this side “there is Bitcoin and there is the rest”. We can do analyses on the object, which is a UFO, which is Bitcoin. Everyone is lost when they see Bitcoin coming. This thing is not supposed to work. It has been fifteen years since it has died, it does not die, it does not want to die. So in fact this thing is giving everyone a slap in the face and everyone has to take a humbling slap in the face before coming to bitcoin to say “OK, that's asking me questions. What does this call into question in the way we think about the world of finance and money? I thought that was it and maybe it wasn't. I agree, I don't agree, but it raises questions.” And it is often said that one of the main interests of Bitcoin is that it makes people ask questions, who otherwise don't really ask questions. The rest, if tomorrow we keep the banking industry that makes real estate documentation, I don't see the drama. It will even be better. But real estate was not invented with it, the underlying was not invented with it, we will have changed financial infrastructures. We will have modernized financial infrastructures, we will have switched to an Internet of banks. It's great, it's great, it's just not the same subject.
Money is a complex subject. In the 3,000 years that we have been trying to define money, economists still disagree. So if even people who have dedicated their lives over 3,000 years can't say what money is, it's normal that a person whose job or main interest is not in it can't answer the question or say to himself that it's complex. Now, there are a lot of complex subjects, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be interested in them, because they have an impact on your life.
Bitcoin is structural, it is systemic. It is as if you were playing a game and being told “There you go, that's the rule of the game”. In fact, if you say “OK” and learn it and play the game a lot of times, there will come a time when you are no longer going to ask yourself “why the rules”, you are just going to play by the rules. And in fact the rule is absolutely fundamental, it defines the game. And so money is part of these rules. In other words, we're going to say “OK. So the rule of economics is that if you save, I'll beat you up. You do what you want now.” Yes, you can do a lot of things with these rules, but it's as if you want to go up the hill. If it's 20 degrees, it's more difficult than if it's 20 degrees. So now it's a bit the same. Do we have a slope that takes us behind us against our will? And for me, is that my opinion on the current monetary system, or is it the opinion of other people to say “Yes, it's systemic, but it doesn't influence behavior that much”. That is not my opinion.
But in any case, in fact, it is present in our lives all the time, without us noticing it. Because that's the rule of the game, it's the definition of the game we're playing and so we end up not questioning it anymore. I remind you that at the moment when the current system arrived, that is to say 71 based on a defect of the Americans, it must be remembered anyway, who said “No no, we will not give you back your gold. Now the dollar is worth $1.” For a few years, the world was shocked to say “but as a result, we need an alternative, the United States is not worthy of its word.” But it's just that since you don't have an alternative that comes up, after three years, you say “it's actually not working that bad.” Four years, five years, ten years, 20 years, then now it's not “it doesn't work that bad”, it's taught. “That's the currency”...
