I recently wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing for radical drastic reform of the Federal Reserve. Making the case that our

Federal Reserve has gone so far off the reservation in taking on a broad mandate that the Fed should have never had, hitting two targets

effectively with one arrow, inflation and unemployment, and doing a disastrous job of each.

That's a longer story, but that's actually in many ways

contributed to some of the financial crises

we've experienced in the year 2008

and even some of the banking instability this year, where the Federal Reserve, when it's trying to balance inflation on employment, makes a whole host of errors.

One of them is it treats inflation as a leading indicator,

traits wage growth as a leading indicator, when in fact wage growth is a trailing

indicator of the business cycle, which means they've consistently tightened monetary policy into a downturn in the business cycle itself,

turning into a actually a boom bus cycle that then results in the calls for bailouts. I think that's actually been the signature

pattern. 2008, now repeating itself in the year 2023. But beyond reform of the Federal Reserve what many outside of government make the case for in the

Bitcoin communities where we're going to spend our time today is to say that we should opt out of that system altogether and

transact in a currency that's not backstopped by a federal government at all,

but is instead independent and finite in its quantity and is decentralized in a way that isn't

subject to the same manipulation as the Federal Reserve.

And today we're going to end up talking about one of those leading alternatives, probably the leading

alternative today, Bitcoin.

And in particular, I think it was apt because a big part of the piece that I wrote last week

arguing for radical reform of the Federal Reserve

was the Fed's role in catalyzing financial crises, including 2008.

Well, turns out that it was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis that

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