we're giving therapy at the posters or just talk to us about whatever you want. thank you again to red emma's and everybody for being here. appreciate it. thank you. [applause] [inaudible discussion] >> the name of the book is though o'scandal of money: while wall street recovers but the economy never does" the

author is george gilder. you open with a quote from free rick hayak, the source and root of all monetary evil is the government monopoly on the issue and control of money. is there an alternative to government controlling money? >> guest: there sure is. >> host: what is it? well, gold this most obvious alternative, money is really a measuring stick. it has to measure value. a measuring stick can't be part of what it measures. and if the government treats money as the magic wand to summon economic growth, like fooling entrepreneurs about the meaning of the crucial price signals that govern all their opportunities, then you have the kind of stagnation that we're

experiencing today. it's a worldwide stagnation, which means that it's not simply bad policy of the united states. it's some systemic affliction of capitalism around the world and the systemic affliction is the erosion of the meaning of money. so, this question throws all valuation into question because it's like you -- we float money today. international exchange trading today, just trading currencies back anding for, is 73 times bigger than all trade and goods and services put together. it's 25 times bigger than all

global gdp. and it doesn't even arrive at monetary values that anybody can trust. so when money is a model of the horizons of the economy shrink. >> host: is this become a call to return to the gold standard? the so-called gold standard. >> guest: not a return to the gold standard because money is real, and gold is real, and gold is the standard of value, and money is measured against gold. the particular paper, fia currency around the world, are ultimately measured by gold and will increasingly be measured against new crypto currencies that are emerging on the internet and the -- it's not going back to anything.

new technology is making possible the restoration of money in the spirit of hayak rather than in the spirit of keynesian innings in. >> host: -- keynesian manipulation. >> host: when talk about internet currency, what are you talking about. >> guest: bit coin was the first, and bitcoin is a global currency store of value that was launched on the internet and transcends national borders and enables the bypassing of all big third-party walled gardens of the internet, like goggle, facebook, apple, all these giant companies, amazon, that dominate the internet or bypass by a new

economy based on global money that is emerging now through crypto currency like bitcoin. >> host: but does this crypto money physically exist? >> guest: no. all money is -- money has to be scarce. if money is not scarce, it can't really function as a measure of the value of other things. if you imagine what remains scarce when everything else becomes abundant? time is what remains scarce when everything else becomes abundant. and gold is a symbol of time, the time it takes to extract it.

and bitcoin is rigorously scarce and measured by the time it takes to virtually mine it across the internet. and time is really what money does, and when interest rate goes to zero, it zeros out time, and that jim grant, you may know jim as a great expert on currency, and he says that zero interest rates are like eliminating the shot clock in a basketball game. if you eliminate the shot clock, everyone would just throw the ball back and forth and for the

whole game, keeping it away from to steph currie or -- steph curry or lebron or whatever. what zero interest rates do is not spur the economy. they blur the economy. they just -- they remove the influence of time. so, nothing happens. what is happening in the u.s. economy is the number of companies in the stock market is about 50% since 2007. 50% the number of shares has dropped 50%. so so-called stock market boom is a massive shrink, and i think that the -- a key problem is the lack of any global money that is

increasing financialization of the economy. almost 30% of corporate profits are now in finance. from this massive $5.1 trillion a day of currency trading. >> host: how does one buy a car with a bitcoin? >> guest: one can buy a car by -- with a bitcoin. you -- i sure a lot of cars have been bought by bitcoin. i don't know which consider -- i think maybe you can buy a tesla with a bitcoin. some companies announced they'll sell them. you can convert your bitcoins which have been appreciating recently, to dollars. that might be a good thing to do, and purchase a car with it. >> host: could anyone buy a bitcoin if they had the resources. >> guest: anyone can buy bitcoin. >> host: how many dollars it would tike buy a bit coin today? >> guest: today, over a thousand dollars. >> host: over a thousand dollars.

so it's almost like an ounce of gold. >> guest: it is almost like -- it is -- bitcoin are tending to converge, and to the extend that bitcoin really matures as a currency and as a store of value and as a form of money, its price will tend to converge with gold because gold is the authentic money throughout history, and the abandonment of gold in 1971 began this long era of stagnation and n the global economy. >> host: george gilder, back in the 1850s, 1860s in this country, everybody was printing money and there were all sorts of currencies, and it led to chaos-didn't it? >> guest: yes. well it didn't, actually. cato institute has done a lot of studies of free banking in scotland and canada and the

united states, and actually it worked pretty well. but the fact was that a lot of other things were going on during that time, and the transition from free banking to a central bank, there was a lot of change, and so free banks located in all the different states was not -- were not suitable for a national economy. just as free banks today should be global banks rather than banks -- restrict, confined to pick -- specific states, like medical insurance is confined to specific states. it doesn't work very well when you break up your market into 50 segments.

>> host: so back in the free banking days -- that means basically anybody could print their own currency? >> guest: yeah. >> host: competition judged its worth? >> guest: yes. you can good back. we now increase -- >> host: went around with the internet. >> guest: increasingly we now have an internet after knew for new growth globally, and global internet really needs a global money, and that is what the digital age is supplying. various digital forms of gold that ultimately are rooted in gold, and accompanied by a black chain that is an immutable database that means you can permanently record all the

transactions transactions and make them visible to everybody. >> host: in your book "the scandal of money" you write that the internet today desperately needs a new payment method that conforms to the shape and reach of global networking and commerce. mr. gilder, how many people are using bitcoin or other what you call crypto money? >> guest: well, it's a massive development right now. there's -- the crypto currencies and their icos, which are initial coin offerings, are now raising more money than all the venture capitalis put together, than all the ipos put together. there have been some 50icos that are responding to the collapse of ipos, all regulated and osi identified by the sec

and all the rules apply fog the public company that resulted in a 50% shrinkage of the number of pocks. now the crypto world generated the answer. the first juan was brendan ike, one of the founder odd netscape and mousies la mozilla and the major language used across web pages in the internet. he has a new browser called gray, which works with bitcoin and micropayments and -- he writes $38 million in coin offerings. another company called baycor raised $150 million a few weeks. scores of internet initial coin

offerings or crowd funding offerings that were made possible by the jobs act, made it easier to do these crowd fundings but they've really addressed this big crisis of ipos. no ipos for months on end, and now scores of these large, multimillion scores of million dollar issuances of tokens and currencies that don't sell equity because that would be regulated by the sec. instead, they sell other components of value in a company. brendan ike's idea is an attention token; so that in order to use your data, google or facebook or -- would have to

pay you or to get you to accept one of their ads on your screen. they'll have to pay you in micropayments and the brave browser does that. and there are -- there's a new company called block stack. it's about three or four years old, that rebuilding an entire new internet based on this distributed structure of crypto currency. it's the biggest development in finance in the last 25-30 years. >> host: well, we have been talking with george gilder about his book "the scandal of money: why wall street recovers but the economy never does." this is your 20th book? >> guest: ey. about my 20th book. >> host: you have one coming out shortly which is about what? >> guest: life after google. >> host: what does that mean. >> well, google -- the internet was started as a distributive system.

anybody could play. but it has since developed into a set of empires of giant information companies like google, facebook, amazon, all these giant leviathan companies are fragmenting the internet into silos, and the problem with this is, if the internet isn't a global network anymore, it's run by google, apple, amazon, facebook, whatever, why not the chinese communists? they can have an -- if goggle can have an yesterday, couple nerds from michigan can start an internet, why not the chinese? why not the iranian mullahs? why not the you europeans.

this top-down, cloud computing base internet that google and are creating this is breakdown of the business model of all these companies. europeans are cracking down, the chinese are cracking down. and so these companies no longer have an open future. so the injured has to change. >> host: george gilder. here at freedomfest. thank you for your time. >> guest: thank you so much. i appreciate it. ...