Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is March 15th, 2011, and my guest is Gavin

Entrieson, principal of the Bitcoin currency project, Gavin Welcome to Econ Talk.

Hi, Russ, great to talk to you. Well, I have to say I get a lot of emails from listeners

encouraging me to interview somebody or talk about some issue, and I think I've gotten

more encouragement about Bitcoin than any other topic or person. So I think that's a good

thing for Bitcoin. There's a lot of interest in the project, and what we're going to talk

about today is what is Bitcoin and what are its prospects for the future. So let's start

there. What is Bitcoin? Well, the short geeky answer is Bitcoin is the world's first distributed

electronic currency. If you're not a geek, some of those words probably don't make any

sense to you. The non geeky short answer is that it is a new kind of money that we're

using on the internet. Are you a geek, Gavin? I have to clarify that to start with. I am a

geek. I'm a programming geek. Okay, so I may have to translate from time to time if you

don't translate yourself. Okay, so the non geeky, this is internet money. This is

money available on the internet to use. Where's it come from? Well, that's the interesting

thing about it. Unlike the money we typically think about, you know, dollars and euros and

credit cards that have a, you know, kind of one central organization that creates it

and controls it. This is distributed. So it's people running Bitcoin software on their

computer, and the people running the software are actually the people who generate the

...