exchanged but then doesn't let anybody enroll but the whole story from the beginning is a story of being treated with much too much respect so according to those aeronaut lawyers for what is wrong with these constitutional theories it is important the shape of constitutional law is a complicated subject but people exercise power of your life on the basis of constitutional law if you want to understand how power is exercised over you understand constitutional law and in particular this case which very nearly took health insurance away from tens of millions of people. >> host: the tough luck constitution?

>> guest: i was trying to come up with a label for the peculiar variety of libertarianism that says if you get sick and cannot pay for it, that issue are a tough lockett is unjust for government to tax somebody else to pay for your health care isn't there was a revealing moment in the oracle -- oral argument argued on behalf of the mandate that it is fair to require people to buy health insurance because if they get sick and they cannot afford to pay for it we're obligated to give them health care and justice scalia said then don't obligate yourself. that is extraordinary thing to say and it shows the moral cul-de-sac the conservatives got themselves into because it was driven by politics once the bill

was passed the only hope to shut it down was the constitutional challenge to the on the constitutional theories that were out there was extreme libertarian theories that were morally repellent for those people who don't believe this stuff i don't think scalia really believes it is okay to withhold health care from the port but they found themselves to say that tough lot things and i needed a label. >> host: house significant is the case we are currently waiting to appear as opposed to the case that has already been decided? >> guest: i think does a decision in favor of the change -- challenge would do far more damage because with sebelius case the obamacare system was just being set up and a lot was not in

place, not a large population of people already receiving benefits but if this is decided in favor of the challenge bin and nervous money to hospitals will suddenly be cut off a huge numbers that are getting subsidies who would not do it anymore all large number that gets subsidies who suddenly cannot afford health insurance anymore. it would be a bureaucratic nightmare for the health care industry to deal with a radical shift in theory millions of people to zero large sums of money the federal government says we are not entitled in the first place. there are two reasons why i expect the challenge to feel

that the legal argument is terrible. just terrible. and much more with a humanitarian catastrophe within a few weeks or months there will be people standing aside the supreme court holding up signs to say john roberts killed and another. and journalist will investigate to see that is true. >> host: if people read your book what will they learn and what is the conclusion? >> one thing they will learn is the basics of congressional power. one of the reasons it was so hard to understand is a basic understanding of where congress gets its power under the constitution and the real limits on that power and why obama it chose this route to require

everyone to buy health insurance and then to tell me where the challenge comes from. then where it came from and by the supreme court decided as it did and what the supreme court wrote. said it will give you the ability to understand the work of the supreme court in this case. >> host: professor of law at northwestern university booktv is on vacation talking with professors who were also authors booktv now continues.

>> "washington journal" continues. host: joining us from new york city is nathaniel popper, reporter for the "new york times," out with his first book called "digital gold: bitcoin and the inside stories of the misfits and millionaires trying to reinvent money." thank you for joining us. you write for the "new york times," and cover business issues. what made you want to write about bitcoin? guest: frankly, i resisted it for a a while. it seemed like some sort of pet rock type of thing that i could ignore. i was covering finance at the time when i began writing about this. my first story and 2013 was about the winklevoss twins,

famous from the facebook story. at this point, really nobody with a name or reputation had attached themselves to bitcoin. they came forward and -- i wrote a story about their massive holdings of bitcoin at that point. it was something like $10 million. the response to the story was so incredible that it kind of made me sit up and think about what this cap into. this idea of new money tapped i nto. this was what got me thinking about it. it was another year before i was ready to write a book about it. host: lead us through it. the subtitle is that the inside story of the misfits and millionaires trying to reinvent money. how does bitcoin work and how does it reinvent our current

currency? guest: i think the basics of bitcoin still eludes a lot of people including people in technology and finance. that is in part because bitcoin is a lot of different things. it is software that makes different things possible. because it is a lot of different things, it is sometimes hard to understand -- you hear all these different things about it. in a two sublist terms, this came out of a movement of people essentially trying to event digital cash. with cash, you can transact directly with someone. you hand over cash in the old-fashioned world and you do not need anyone else there to do the transaction. and no one even needs to know other than that to know other than the two of you that the transaction happened. when money moved into the

digital world, you essentially always needed some third-party there to move the money, update everyone's records on both sides. there was a group of technologists who saw this. most were privacy activists. they realized that there wasn't this loss of privacy when money moved into the digital realm. they began working to try to create something that was like cash but for the digital realm. that was the simplest idea that inspired this. what makes that possible with the coin -- with bitcoin is new software and networks that allows money to be moved around, much like e-mail allows messages to be moved around. if you have someone's bitcoin address, you can send them money

anywhere in the world and it does not have to go through a third person. that is the simplest way to imagine it. there are a lot of layers beneath that. that notion of digital cash and e-mail for money is the way i like to start. host: this was a currency, ideas started in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. in your book, your -- you write that the result of this complicated process was something deceptively simple but not possible before. financial notes that treat and move money without a central authority. no bank, credit cards, regulators. now we are in 2015, a number of years since the creation of the bitcoin movement. federal regulators taken an interest? guest: they have. it took a few years for the

software to really get going. isaiah got going, it was not living up to its grandest ambitions. that passage incited -- you cited, it did not provide an alternative to central banks there was surviving. it was becoming clear sooner regulators, central bankers, prosecutors, that this was something new. it was a way to move things around without oversight from any central party. whenever you have something moving around without oversight, regulators get worried. in the financial system, banks are the front line in law enforcement, because they can overseeing the movement of money. regulators began looking at this hard in 2013.

there were two senate hearings in one week, if i am not mistaken, one right after the other, in which people from the di and good service and doj all got -- from the fbi, secret service, and . .most of the law enforcement folks at the hearing essentially said there are dangerous with the new technology is interesting and it can be used for more than just lawbreaking. so let's watch this, and we are watching it carefully. that one even probably gave as much of a boost to bitcoin as any sort of event during its lifetime. since then, you have people from a whole bunch of different regulatory agencies trying to figure out how to deal with it and also trying to dig your out

what is it. should we treat it like stocks, treat it like a currency, a commodity? should we treat it like a financial institution? i think a lot of that is still going on. one of the things that points to is that this is something new. it does not a into the old categories we have for the financial realm. host: nathaniel popper is our guest, author of the book "digital gold." we invite you to the conversation. (202) 748-8000 four eastern and central time zone's. (202) 748-8001 for the mountain and pacific time zones. if you are a user of bitcoin and have used in the past, call (202) 748-8002. a story in the new york times about one of the campaigns using bitcoin. this was a couple weeks ago.

in accepting bitcoin, rand paul raises money and questions. they write, presidential fundraising, never known for its transparency, may have come more secretive. in announcing his candidacy for president, rand paul waited into new waters where he said he would accept campaign contributions in bitcoin a largely untraceable virtual currency, in amounts up to $100. interested donors were given three options for making a contribution: a credit card, paypal, or bitcoins. while some state and federal candidates and california, colorado, and elsewhere, rand paul is the first presidential candidate to do so. in the age of wanting transparency and presidential elections, is it a good thing the paul campaign is allowing bitcoin contributions? guest: i do not know if i'm qualified whether to say that is a good rain.

the way it is doing done in election politics now, it is limited to relatively small sums. in that sense it is like someone giving a $20 bill or a $50 bill to a candidate. it is not like someone giving $10,000 of unmarked bills to a candidate. the most notable element of that story is that rand paul decided to do that on day one of his candidacy. it shows the degree to which the bitcoin technology and this movement that grew up around bitcoin has been driven by a law of this sort of libertarian sentiment that is also driving rand paul's candidacy. it drives home just how much bitcoin was a result of the

anxiety and unhappiness that came out of the financial crisis that has also given rise to the popularity of libertarian candidates. this suspicion of central authorities. that is so deeply embedded in bitcoin. the suspicion of the federal reserve and central banks and also of big wall street banks that are -- were blamed for the financial crisis. bitcoin was viewed as a system that would allow us to circumvent that and have a financial that existed without those central authorities that was raised and run by the people used it. when rand paul made that announcement on the day his candidacy was announced, it was a sign of how intertwined bitcoin had become with the rise of libertarianism, tea party

all of this stuff after the financial crisis. host: we have calls for nathaniel popper on digital currency. columbia maryland, jim. caller: thank you. god bless c-span. you have been talking in general terms with government. bringing it to an individual level, as an entrepreneur i went through the loan process and banking and it was a mess and a bureaucratic nightmare. why is it that we, as people and a society, feel this need to regulate bitcoin just because we have always regulated these things? why can we not just move on and look at different ways of doing it? this is a new form of currency why are we so determined to regulate it like it needs to be controlled? it does not make sense to me.

the process we have now is so convoluted and makes no sense. this seems like a much easier different way of doing things. is there a reason it cannot be done like that? guest: i think there are regulators who are trying to take a new approach with bitcoin. over the last year, the effort to regulate bitcoin has been led by the top financial regulator in new york. he came up with something called the bitlicense, which was his effort to create a new regime for this technology. to the question of does this thing needs to be regulated, one of the elements that comes through so strongly in the story of bitcoin and is such a theme in my book is that this new

technology that allowed money to move around drove home how much, once money comes involved, people's worst instincts are drawn forth. bitcoins history has been marked by enormous instances of hacking and theft and fraud. and often served as a reminder of why regulations, into existence in the first place. you have this universe where people control their own money but often times, those people are less sophisticated. bitcoin makes it possible for you to control your own money with what is known as a private key, a password. if a hacker gains control of your computer and get that private key, the essentially have your money. that has happened many times. probably more people have lost

money using bitcoin then made money using bitcoin. a lot of money has been made, but a lot of people have lost money. you have understood -- unsophisticated people holding their own money. or when people stop trusting themselves, they have given their bitcoins to what our essentially bitcoin banks to hold their money for them. not too surprisingly those acorn banks, the biggest of which known as mount gawk, have often proven to be not up to the task of protecting that. this has brought forth arguments of if you have something like this mount gawk, a company in tokyo that held half $1 billion of people's bitcoin money, you need someone looking at it to make sure it has reasonable

security, make sure it is not a way station for hamas or hezbollah to move their money rum toured in wars area to the united states or vice versa. there is a reason you want someone watching the financial institutions. that can go too far in the other direction and you get this convoluted process we have now that you talked about. payments are another indication of that. it can take three days to make a simple money transfer to a friend. there are certainly middle grounds, but the story of thefts and wrongdoing and fraud through the bitcoin story have in a reminder of why regulations about. host: oregon, neema is on the line. caller: i am hearing how volatile it is. it looks like it was going off a

hundred ohm, which scares me more than anything. what about a country, disliking us so bad, that they would hang on to a line of bitcoin and then flood the market. let's say you have $1000 in the bank. if a nation that hates us does that, we could end up with only five dollars and that it. my concern is china's coming out with their own money. and our friends, germany france, south korea, thailand, they are joining in with the china banks. can you explain something about that as well? guest: i think you are talking about, essentially, these currency wars that, particularly china's effort to supplant the dollar as the reserve currency -- i think what bitcoin is now

is a long way from being able to provide an alternative in that sense. when you look today one of the coin when it was launched, the initial description in 2008 when it was released, people talked about the fact that this could one day be a sort of new global reserve currency. that has come up through acorn story. at this point, all the bitcoins in existence are worth something like $2 billion or $3 billion. that is less than the stock of urban outfitters. host: what is an individual bitcoin worth today? guest: something like $235. there is something like 14 million of them in the world. that gives you the total value of the bitcoins.

when you have seen in one of the stories i tell in my book is the story of argentina, where bitcoin has caught on, in part because of the problems with their own currency. they had numerous instances of hyperinflation, and they had a deeply troubled financial system. people there have used the coin as an alternative to their financial system. it is not half the country but it is ordinary people realizing that this new technology may provide an alternative. for now, to the degree that bitcoin is used in that way, it is more likely to happen in smaller places like argentina. places with troubled financial systems. the u.s., for all its problems, has a credit card and ranking system that works pretty well

for most people on a day-to-day basis. you hear a lot of people in this movement talking about bitcoin saying that -- the u.s. is not the first place that needs this technology. it is needed in places where people do not have it bank account or have a credit card. host: you talked about argentina, ecuador is the money initiative outlaws bitcoins and makes it mandatory for banks to follow that dictate. a couple tweets, the reason there has been speculation is because the dollar has been debate. also, if cash is only legal tender, how can it coin be legal , is the core not another pyramid scheme? that reflects the title of the peace that meant o'brien in the washington post a week ago or so. part of what he said in his

comments on wondering what bitcoin is, he says it is not clear what bitcoin is or what it will be, but it is clear it is not a currency. people do not set prices in bitcoin and do not buy things with it either. that is the only function of money, he writes. it comes close to performing as a store of value, but it does not even do that well. a lot on that play. -- plate. guest: that gets right and a lot of deep questions that have swirled around bitcoin. b problems bitcoin have encountered have been just as interesting as the success it has had. the problems it has, including the front we were talking about earlier, serves as a reminder of why the financial looks like it does today and serves as a reminder of what money is. what are the qualities of a good money?

matt o'brien, i think he is right. bitcoin is frequently referred to as a virtual currency or digital money. right now, it could be that one day. it is true that you can exchange bitcoin for other things. you can buy things online or bitcoin. it does meet some of the characteristics of a currency. but its volatile price has meant few people have been willing to do that. i do not think currency or money is the best way to describe it now. what it does do now is serve as this new network for moving money around. you may not want to keep your money in bitcoin, but when you want to make a transaction for the four minutes you are actually making the transaction you may want to have bitcoin for

that long to use the network to send money. that network is what a lot of of people have focused on recently. wall street banks got into this. goldman sachs making its investment. nasdaq, new york stock exchange, getting involved. what they are looking at is not the currency but the financial network. this goes to how many things bitcoin is. one of the reasons it has ended up confusing is it is not just one thing. that is one of the reasons it is confusing and that is also why it is asked of in, to me. it gets you thinking of the layers of how money works and what money is successful. host: miami beach, larry. you are on the air. caller: i have two questions. do you believe the coin is a good bet against the dollar or even wall street? what are your thoughts on

gemini.com. guest: this question is bitcoin a good investment, all i can say is it is entirely speculative at this point. bitcoin is not something right now. to the degree that people are betting on the price of bitcoin they are betting on what it will be in the future. that is still undecided. wall street firms are getting involved but their project their experiments, are not complete. they will not know if or how they will use it. it is still an experiment for them. the price of bitcoin, if we can get into more of the price is set, it is an open market.

people offered to buy it and sell it for something. the willingness of people to buy it is a function of their you of how useful this may be. people want to own it because they think someone else will want to own it in the future. do not know yet why people wanting in the future. we have guesses and we have people who are willing to put their money on one use or another, or it is still speculative. against the dollar, this will be a wild ride for a while. on the winklevoss twins they were two of the first names people with reputations, to attach themselves to bitcoin to say we own large quantities of bitcoin. they began by buying it up, made an investment in a startup

called the instant that ended up going under. but they winklevosses have dedicated themselves to it completely. i did an event with them last night that said -- where they said this has become the entire life at this point. they have to dig projects. one is an exchange traded fund. they plan on having it trade on the nasdaq and will move with the price of bitcoin. the other is an exchange where you can buy and sell bitcoin raised in new york and regulated. the winklevi, as i call them, have thrown their lot in with the idea that bitcoin needs be regulated. that is their view. they are trying to build these etf exchanges that will play well with regulators and try to gain confidence in that way.

both their projects have been a long time in development and are not yet out there. the exchange called gemini, the etf, will run under the ticker symbol coin. it they seem very dedicated to this. i think there is the possibility that their projects, they have every intention to bring that out there. at this point, they have a lot of competition. that is the toughest and for them. host: from new york city, our guest is nathaniel popper of the new york times. his first book, "digital gold," is out. we hear from jim in illinois. good morning. caller: i have a couple questions. i am curious as to how the supply of bitcoin is managed in terms of the volume of bitcoins that are in existence. i was going to ask about how currency exchange rates are set

for bitcoin. but from your previous answer about the buying and selling on the open market, it sounds like the value may be set on sort of the way a stock price is set. can you elaborate on how a bitcoin is valued? guest: our site with the first question asked to how many bitcoins exist and how is that limited, regulated. the bitcoin software, released in early 2009, it is run by all the people who join into it. everyone who joined in downloads the software, which includes a set of rules, which is how bitcoin works. some are very complicated and technical. one of the central roles to the bitcoin system is how they will be generated and how many will be generated.

the limits set from day one was that 21 million bitcoins will eventually be released to the people who use the system it was prescribed how they would be released. about every 10 minutes, a new lock a big one would be released to someone using the network. it is essentially a lottery. from day one, there were zero bitcoins. 10 minutes in, the first block was released and someone got that. that has been going on since then. it jobs in half, the number release, every four years. now, every 10 minutes 20 five bitcoins are released to someone on the network. we are about halfway through the process of all the bitcoins being created. it is anticipated we will hit the 21 million number in 2040.

that scarcity, that system are releasing bitcoins, was designed to create this sense of scarcity, sort of like gold. the idea there will only be a limited quantity, and you can always tell if the apart from anything else, just like you can tell gold apart from any other metal. that was part of the design of the system. giving them away was designed to get people to join in. that incentive is viewed as one of the brilliant elements of it. we are moving towards that 21 million and we are about halfway through. once people get the bitcoins, they join the network, you can do whatever you want with them.

you can hold onto them, send them to other people. you can send them to people for nothing or you could request a price. that is generally how it works now. people go to exchanges and they say i have 10 bitcoins, i am willing to sell them for $250. someone comes along and says i have 10 bitcoins, i am willing to pay $230. they strike a deal. but it is like the way stocks are priced and the way the dollar is priced. the price of the dollar against the euro and the yen is set on the open market. bitcoin prices are set in much the same way but they move around a lot more. host: we're from alice in colorado. go ahead. caller: i am getting to learn more about the coin from this program. since we have legalized

marijuana, and our transactions are done in cash and we cannot use ranks, because it is against federal law, i wondered if they could do something through the bitcoin industry. i know you say it is not really secure at this point, that there could be a lot of corruption but to me they pay people in cash, everything is secured in cash. that is scary to me. to have that in my neighborhood. guest: that is a great question. the question you have is at the front edge of the coin -- of bitcoin. i am not an expert on this. i know stuff is going on and people are going -- playing with his intersection between legalized marijuana and bitcoin.

people are saying this is enough of a controversial industry on its own, we do not eat to get involved with another controversial industry. but people have been making moves. you are right to notice there is an opportunity there. bitcoin, the way he has been able to take off so far, is in places where the existing financial setup is not working. i mentioned argentina as one of the first cases where ordinary people began using bitcoin. bitcoin is still hard to use. you have to have a good reason to want to use it if you're going to use it. that all cash economy that has surrounded legalized marijuana is one opportunity for that. the original usage of bitcoin perhaps what made it most famous, was an online drug market called the silk road, where marijuana and a lot of harder drugs were available for

coin -- bitcoin. that was a case in which the need for it, the alternative was so bad, that people were willing to play with the experimental element of bitcoin and take that risk. the alternative buying jugs on some street corner, was worse. host: some twitter comments. @cspanwj is our twitter handle. jan said that people would just get greedy with bitcoin. another one says bitcoin may become viable in emerges in -- in emerging markets and rural areas without a financial banking structure was cell phones. also a question on what is the official obama administration policy on bitcoin? guest: the obama administration, i do not think of the white

house it self has said much about bitcoin. the treasury department, which is part of the administration, has been looking at this. they have been slow to act, but to the degree they have said anything, they said this is an interesting technology and we are looking at it and we the existing rules are enough for now, but they have let it develop slowly. an interesting note is the administration did recently take on as one of its tech guru advisors, a princeton professor named ed felten who has been invited -- excited and involved with bitcoin. he has been a math and computer guy fascinated by the new things bitcoin makes possible. this is not a guy saying everyone should go out and buy bitcoin, but it is interesting they brought on someone who is

in this movement and is excited about bitcoin. host: we hear from dan in wisconsin. good morning. caller: people have to realize that, i believe bitcoin was introduced by the u.s. government as a one world currency. people have no clue where bitcoin came from. there is no one listed as the official person who invented bitcoin. they can take your money anytime they want. the u.s. government can take your money or a can be hacked. host: we hear from nathaniel popper on the founding of bitcoin. guest: it is possible, but i would say that it is very unlikely. there is no sign the u.s. government has any control over this. in fact, the opposite.

the u.s. government has tried to gain control at various points and has tried to get more inside access to the system. that possibility is out there. there is someone listed on the internet as the inventor of bitcoin. that name is satoshi nakamoto. that is a name on top of the original paper that describes bitcoin, attached to the software that brought the bitcoin system into existence. it became clear that satoshi nakamoto was just e-mailing with people. he would never call people, chat with people. it became clear this was probably a pseudonym for someone. after two years of communicating with some of the other users just as bitcoin was getting going, he disappeared. host: you mean he disappeared from online? guest: exactly. that is the only existence had

online, e-mailing with people. it is one of the fascinating elements of the bitcoin story. you have this anonymous creator. there have been many efforts to tie satoshi to people in the real world to essentially find the wizard behind the curtain of bitcoin. most have failed. in the course of my writing, i encounter the guy who a lot of people talk about as the most likely candidate to be satoshi nakamoto. this is a guy who had been working on similar projects for decades before this had -- released similar software that did not quite work. a computer programmer in california, grew up in washington state. but it is still a mystery and one of the many fascinating elements of bitcoin, that we do

not fully know who created this. but we know the name satoshi nakamoto. host: san antonio -- i am sorry that is not san antonio. good morning paul. caller: inc. you for having me. -- thank you for having me. happy birthday to the army. the armed services birthday. my dad and my best friend and my new wife were army. that said, the differences between that and gold and similar compromises with identity theft and how they are looking into that situation to make sure that it is not compromised and so forth and the other thing i had to do a report on high school in nixon. great reporter. inc. you for your time. host: -- guest: the difference

with gold -- my title indicates "digital gold." this was envisioned as somewhat of a digital equivalent to gold. we are getting again at the layers of bitcoin. scarcity is the thing that makes it like gold. the other thing that makes it like gold is the fact that -- every bitcoin is: to another bitcoin like every ounce of gold is equivalent to another ounce of gold. that is one of the reasons people have viewed it as his way and placed store money. the advantage over gold is that you can move it around the world instantly. with gold, when the french national bank wanted to get

their gold back, they had to essentially get a specially equipped ship to move it across the ocean. moving gold is not easy. it is not as easy to break it down into its constituent bits, whereas bitcoin can be divided into eight decimal points with the click of a cursor. it is like an easier to use gold for the digital era without the same as a call backing and the sense that you can hold in your hands or to make jewelry out of it if everything else failed. host: in your book, some of the curtains or in -- some of the concern of early supporters, you write that the problem to libertarians was there ingrained belief that money has to be backed by something with physical value like gold.

one of the patron saints of old books, carl manga, argued that all successful money arose from commodities. how did they overcome that? guest: there are different theories about what successful money needs to have. this gets to the heart of it. one argument about successful money says as i wrote, has to, from some commodity that had value before. that is why cigarettes are viewed as having taken off money. if all else fails, you still have the cigarettes. if all else fails with gold, you can still make jewelry with it. a much more popular hypothesis about what makes successful money these days is that money

is a centrally a ledger, a way to keep track of who has what and who owes what to someone else. the theory goes that gold took off because it was essentially a ledger. you knew it was one piece of the ledger of all the outstanding gold. and by wearing it around your neck, you were wearing your piece of the ledger. if someone else had a piece of the ledger, you could tell they owned that. banking systems since then have been based on ledger. our money today, most has no physical form. it is just entries in a ledger. bitcoin to the idea of a ledger. some who support bitcoin say it is more perfect than the current banking system, then gold. according to this theory, money does not have to, from any commodity.

it is not have to, from anything with intrinsic value. the fact that it is a ledger, that is the value. i think that is the way libertarians who have gone behind bitcoin have argued that this is going to work, that this will be as successful as gold. host: michael in dallas, texas. good morning. caller: i am sorry if you answer this question already but is the u.s. government or other governments considering developing their own digital currency is -- currencies. guest: ecuador has gone the farthest in saying they want to move their national currency on to the bitcoin technology. they wanted to be separate from bitcoin. that is the furthest you have heard any government going. the winklevoss twins, when i talked to them last, expressed

their believe the dollar would eventually end up on the bitcoin ledger. in the case of bitcoin, the ledger is known as the block chain, a record of all the bitcoin transactions that have happened. by looking at the bitcoin block chain, you can see every bitcoin ever created, you can see when money was transferred, and you can add up however many bitcoins a particular address had. the idea was you could basically attach things to a piece of bitcoin. you could attach ownership of a particular stock to a bitcoin so that when you traded the bitcoin, you are also trading the stock. you can even break it down so that one millionth of a bitcoin is essentially a contract that says i own this stock or that i own this dollar or this $100.

this is how some people imagined national currencies could move to a block chain. the value, the believe that should happen, is driven by the math and cryptography that underlines the bitcoin system and that some people think is more secure and stable than the existing financial arrangement. so far, it has not proven to be so, but i think there is some hope that the math and cryptography that makes bitcoin work could be more secure than the systems we have, where j.p. morgan or credit suisse or bank of america is in charge of the ledger and you have to trust bank of america to handle that properly. banks themselves have been