BREAKDOWN: How 2,000 Years of Monetary History Led Us to Bitcoin, Feat. Nik Bhatia
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2021
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A conversation with the author of the new book “Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies.”
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
Nik Bhatia is a financial researcher, a CFA charterholder and an Adjunct Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.
Nik’s new book “Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies” puts the rise of bitcoin into a larger historical context - from the first coinage of Rome to the introduction of credit in Renaissance Florence to the beginnings of interest rate trading in Antwerp to the genesis of the central bank system that shapes money today.
In this conversation, he and NLW do a rapid tour across those two millennia of economic history, ultimately helping reframe what it means when we say that bitcoin is the new “digital gold.”
Find our guest on Twitter: @timevalueofbtc
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I've always thought of Bitcoin as digital gold, but the analogy needed a story. |
| 0:05.8 | It's not digital gold now. |
| 0:07.5 | It's the first layer money of the future using gold as the first layer money of the past as an example to set up. |
| 0:14.9 | Why? |
| 0:15.6 | It's more than digital gold. |
| 0:17.9 | It is a first layer money that can anchor a whole financial system. Gold failed |
| 0:23.5 | at doing that. So we don't want to emulate gold. We want to take the important properties from it, |
| 0:32.6 | but then build a better system on top of it. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:40.9 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:47.7 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:54.4 | What's going on, guys? |
| 0:55.7 | It is Thursday, February 18th, and today I'm so excited for this conversation. |
| 1:01.3 | You know I geek out when I get to do a historical episode, and that is exactly what we have |
| 1:06.8 | for you today. |
| 1:08.1 | There are many people, especially in the sort of bull market we're in, |
| 1:12.9 | who will extol Bitcoin's virtues. It's hard cap, its unconfiscatability, its censorship |
| 1:19.0 | resistance, it's predictable and unchangeable monetary policy. There are far fewer people |
| 1:25.1 | who can actually explain Bitcoin's place in the evolution of money |
| 1:30.0 | over millennia, who can help make it clear why the innovation contained here is so historically |
| 1:37.3 | relevant. |
| 1:38.4 | That's exactly what Nick Batia's new book, Layered Money does. |
| 1:42.6 | I started following Nick years ago when I was doing a Sunday |
... |
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