Hello and welcome back to the slate money swag special where we talk about all of these amazing asset classes that don't cash flow and whether any of them make any sense.

Last week, we talked to Julia Halperin about the art market and decided that art as an asset class doesn't make a lot of sense.

And we concluded after that one that just about anything would probably make more sense than not, with the

possible exception of cryptocurrency. So now we are going to talk about cryptocurrency. I am

Felix Salmon of Axios, but I am joined by Nathaniel Popper of New York Times. Nat, how are you doing?

I'm doing well. We start it right off with the,

with the understanding that what we're about to talk about is potentially the least significant

financial thing, even less significant than the art market. I think that's a good starting place.

I'm feeling good going into this. I mean, it seems to be significant. There's a huge amount of money pouring into it.

If you compare, I would be interested in this. How much, like actual hard cash dollars are people

investing in crypto every year compared to like how many hard cash dollars are people spending on art

every year? Which one do you think is bigger?

I think art is probably, uh, six billion-ish.

Oh, six billion-ish.

Yeah.

Yeah, crypto's easily got that beat.

I mean, it's confusing and actually it's interesting how little that question is asked.

I mean, you know, what people tend to focus on is the price of a Bitcoin or an ether token, you know, is $8,000, $9,000.

And then they tend to focus on like, if you extrapolate from that, the value of all outstanding tokens, you know, you can see that it's, I think we're around 100 billion today, but it's actually hard to tell how much

new cash is floating into it because a lot of the trading that you see out there is just people

trading ether for Bitcoin or, you know,

many others, XRP, Dash, Monero on down the line. And so it can be hard to tell how much money

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