in 2015, civil war living historians and reenactors re-created a may, 1865 parade of the grand army of the republic down pennsylvania avenue, from the u.s. capitol to freedom plaza near the white house. participants included groups representing the u.s. color groups and descendants of the soldiers who were not permitted to march in the original parade 150 years ago. watch american history tv, tonight, beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern, and every weekend on c-span3. >> a think tank is called coin center. joining us is a research director, the website is coin center.org. we'll talk about your organization, but let's begin by talking about cryptocurrency, bit bitcoins. what are they? >> bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency, the first one ever launched in 2009.

there's a bunch of them now. in general, they can be thought of as digital cash. so when you want to move money around, you usually have two options. you can use cash and be in person, hand someone a $100 bill or take it from somebody. hopefully legally. or you can use a bank to send money electronically from person to person over the internet or telephone. bitcoin is cash-like, in that you can hold it, have it directly. you don't have to have a bank to trust. i can send it to someone to singapore. they'll show me a code and i will send it to that code, and the bitcoin moves peer to peer like cash. >> we were talking this morning about email, how 20 years ago or 25 years ago, that was a novel idea. now, of course, it's a standard way of life. can you envision in the next five, ten years bitcoin will be standard in the way we make any transaction? >> i think we're already getting there. so email is the perfect

comparison, because you earl right, back in the '90s few people used email. it just seemed like a weird, new thing. why not just send a letter. but it was this great open standard, and it was made by a bunch of, you know, smart folks who have sort of strange ideas in silicone valley and the rest of the world and developed for the benefit of people. host youn email server or use a company like google. suddenly, those tools got easier and faster and better and we fixed the spam problem. everyone does everything with email or text messages or more modern versions of internet communications tools. very few people send letters now. with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it may not be bitcoin, it may be a stable corn -- stable coin. with bitcoin, we will see more people doing transactions they would have previously done in person or using a third-party

like a bank, done peer-to-peer over the internet like email. but, we will see. host: we saw bitcoin prices surge in terms of the stock. it is now taking a slump. can you explain? guest: this is something that anybody who is thinking about buying them should take into account. the fact of the matter is because bitcoin is the protocol, there is no company or corporation backing the currency. there is a fixed number of bitcoin that exists on the peer to peer network ledger. it is called the block chain. it is a description of all of the transactions that have ever happened. if your skeptical if someone has sent you bitcoin, you can look at that and make it -- it makes it easier and see the transaction happened. you can see the total number of bitcoin that exists. there is only so many bitcoin. there were only ever be 21 million bitcoins.

it is a scarce commodity just like gold is a scarce commodity. demand shifts because suddenly a bunch of people want to buy it or a bunch of people don't want to buy it, they want to sell it. then you will see an adjustment in the price. we can't move the supply. if demand shifts rapidly, price will shift rapidly. it will go all the way up, the high recently, around $40,000 or $50,000 a bitcoin. or it can go back down. it has gone down, recently. you should not treat this as a safe investment, you should treat it as a speculative investment. there are other cryptocurrencies. some of them have a fixed supply and the price goes up and down. there are also new technologies that maintain parity with the u.s. dollar. if you want to use the peer to peer network and you don't want to worry about price changes, you can use stable coin.

host: as you point out at coin center.org, the case for electronic cash and some of the numbers you put in this piece and on your website include the following. with bitcoin being among the largest currencies, there are more than 10,000. the first bitcoin dates back to 2009. in the u.s., 46 million use a form of cryptocurrency. that is about 17% of the population. that number is surprising. that seems like a higher number than one might support -- one might expect. guest: it surprised me as well. i think that research is from newsweek. there are people who are skeptical about traditional economic systems. they may have seen one or two resections -- recessions. if you entered the job market in 2008 and are facing the economic fallout from covid, you think maybe we can find a better way. a lot of folks, young and old,

our thinking maybe there is a different way of organizing the economy and we don't have to trust the big banks to do it. maybe it can be a peer to peer online system and that could be bitcoin or a lot of these new cryptocurrencies. host: how does that differ from apple cash or when you go to a store or a merchant and you use your credit card? guest: so, it is better and worse. there are differences. it is better, because when you use apple pay, for example, you have to have apple on your side. they have to agree to process the transaction. a lot of people don't know this but apple pay, in their terms and services, says you are not allowed to use apple pay if you are selling firearms or if you are selling anything related to sex or pornography, or if you are saying anything on your shop for your disparaging apple products. you're simply not allowed to use apple pay. merchants would be denied if

they were selling any of those things. apple reserves the right to systematically shut down apple pay whenever they want and cut any customer off from that system and you will no longer be able to transact. i don't mean to pick on apple. they are a great company and make really good phones. this is true of any electronic payment method. credit cards and banks work that way. you are at the whim of a major corporation and their choice as to whether or not you are allowed to continue making payments. for most people, that is fine. we can imagine lots of issues with totalitarian governments and lots of issues with discrimination. i would not want to rely only on a corporation for payments. that is where cryptocurrencies come in. with bitcoin or with these stable coins, you don't have to trust anyone to process your payments because there is this peer to peer network of people all over the world who work together and we don't have to trust any one of them to process the payments. if one of them decides i don't want to process the payment,

that slack will get picked up by the next person or the next person. there are thousands of people who run these networks collaboratively on the internet. it is a censorship resistant and free and open payment tool that can be good for protecting your privacy and your economic autonomy because you cannot be cut off from this system at the whim of a totalitarian state or an oppressive corporation. host: how does venmo fit into all of this? guest: as long as venmo likes you, you will be able to make all of the payments you want using venmo. if you are paying for a protest in belarus, you will be cut off from venmo over the financial system. venmo did not do this specifically, but people trying to raise money for a pro-democracy protest in belarus found they could not use credit cards. this organization, which is a

nonprofit, started raising money for the protests using bitcoin. that was a viable tool. it is a more difficult tool to use because you have to think about the exchange rate. and fluctuating prices and you will have to use a phone that may have more complicated software than what you would be used to with swiping your credit card. but maybe it is worth it. it is definitely worth it for pro-democracy advocates in belarus. host: what will happen to currency and coins? guest: you know, i think there are folks in the bitcoin community who probably make too many noises about how bitcoin is going to dominate all economic systems and nobody will use dollars anymore and nobody will use banks anymore. i think that is foolhardy. the fact of the matter is there is going to be times when a bitcoin transaction is what you want. definitely if you are in an oppressive state like nigeria or belarus, you may find it more useful to use bitcoin. in the u.s., we have a stable banking system.

we have the rule of law and a well-functioning government, although some of your callers might disagree and sometimes i disagree. but generally speaking, we have a good situation here from a financial infrastructure standpoint. so, generally speaking, you will probably still use credit cards and venmo and things like that. but maybe you will want to buy some bitcoin because it will be eight way to balance your investment portfolio against the threat of -- via way to balance your investment portfolio against the threat of inflation. as part of a balanced portfolio that includes other safer investments, you may have a bitcoin to hedge against inflation. host: peter van valkenburgh, tell us about your organization and how you're funded. guest: we have been around for six years and we are an independent nonprofit. like i said, bitcoin is not an

industry. don't get me wrong. there are big corporations like coin base and tracking that run profitable -- kracken, that run profitable businesses by helping people buy and sell bitcoin when they want. going itself is not a corporation or a group of companies. it is a group of strangers on the internet who are collaborating to build a new and freer economic system. because it is this shared public resource, like the internet itself, there are no voids for bitcoin and washington, d.c. there is no ceo who can get on a jet and testify before congress. we saw this six years ago when we were starting coin center. we said we want to be an independent voice that has good information about the technology for folks in government who have questions. people in government have a lot of questions about things like pick one. we operate on a donation based system. if people see the work we are doing, educating folks in the executive branch about how

bitcoin works, they are free to support us for the coming year. we do a fundraiser every winter. we have had generations -- we have had generous donations from people who like this technology and want to see people like myself ripping it to folks in government. we have been doing it for six years. it is the best job i could ask for as a young law graduate six years ago. host: ned is joining us from idah >> ned is joining us from ketcham from idaho? you own crypto currency in. >> caller: i do not. i'm not sold on it. there's also a problem with the amount of power being consumed by bitcoin. it is more than the entire country of argentina is consumed by bitcoin.

a little bit of a problem, especially when we're trying to do this whole, you know, save the world thing. you guys have got to slow down when you're creating new technologies. you know, we know the -- coming up here soon, the deep fake videos. >> ned, thanks. if you do own cryptocurrency, give us a call. but to his point, and then jody says in a tweet -- >> so to ned and to jody, what would you say? >> so let's talk about the energy use question first, because that is a really good question. so the first thing i want to say is, you know, we need to know

why bitcoin uses this amount of energy. to get into this, we need to have a little bit of details how bitcoin works. i promise i will keep it straightforward and avoid technical speak. if we've got all these people collaborating over the internet to keep this system working, to keep the block chain, which is that record of all transactions, we have this question, if we're not trusting a company like paypal or bank of america to keep that record, how do we incentivize people to keep that record and how do we make sure that people keeping that record are invested in the systems themselves so they're not going to create fraud on that block chain, make fake transfers to themselves? so we do it in a consensus mechanism is the technical term. a way of getting everyone to agree based on certain rules of computation, of computing. the bitcoin consensus mechanism is what we call a proof of work, meaning if you want to participate in this shared effort of maintaining the ledger of transactions for bitcoin, if

you want to build this free and open transaction tool of the future, you need to prove to us that you have spent some amount of energy in costly computations. so you're solving a difficult math problem that can only be solved by making a lot of guesses using powerful computers to make more guesses. if you provide proof of that computational work, you are welcomed into the group. you don't need permission or have to buy software, you just prove that you have spent the computing power to participate. this is how we keep people who are not serious out of the system. god knows lots of people on the internet is not serious. if anyone is allowed to keep the ledger, we would have real problems. the caller says bitcoin uses the amount of energy as argentina. that seems close, but there's a lot of money at stake. so how much resources would we

will willing to dedicate for individual people all over the world? the global financial system, all of the big banks, all of the computer systems and all of the laws that back up those things, that uses a whole bunch more energy. and i think we could be more efficient if we gradually transitioned to more cryptographic systems. it's something worth spending energy on, like it's worth spending energy on food production and computers on your mac book pro with aluminum body. aluminum smelting uses a lot more energy than bitcoin. and the last thing i want to say, this is a serious problem if minors, the people on the bitcoin network spending the energy, are using dirty energy sources like coal. so one thing you'll find out if you look into this question really deepy is that, yes, there are a fair number of miners located in china, and china pays

people to dig coal out of the ground and burn it for super cheap electricity. it wouldn't be that cheap if the chinese government wasn't actually paying people to dig coal and burn it for electricity. but because it's so cheap, bitcoin miners go there because it's cheaper energy. but that's a problem because china is paying people to burn coal, but not bitcoin miners and others use it. our audience, ourr van valkenburgh. >> a quick follow up, our guest is peter van valkenberger. this is from a viewer saying what if that block chain or whatever the platform is that's host thing bitcoin, what if it gets hacked? >> that's right. and so your second question earlier was about hacking too.

i forgot to answer it. so sorry about that. let's talk about hacking. so we all know that financial institutions get hacked all the time. there was probably the biggest bank robbery ever to happen was a bank transfer from an indian commercial bank or to an indian commercial bank from the new york federal reserve bank, i think. and this was a transfer that was authorized over the swift network for millions and millions of dollars, and it was actually a fraudulent transaction. the indian bank that was initiating the transfer had been hacked. so the biggest bank robbery happened because of a cybersecurity vulnerability and the swift network and is settlements between big banks. and people know about hacking like the equifax hack where your names and social security numbers got leaked because a corporation failed to secure

your personal data. the great thing about bitcoin, there's no bank to hack. there's just this shared ledger across computers all over the world. you might say that seems more vulnerable to hacking because it's shared ledger. but the only way to change it is to change your little part. i can only move the bitcoins that i have the credentials to move. i can't move other people's bitcoins. so there's no way to hack the system as a whole. you would have to hack every single participant. and there are tens of thousands on this network. instead of having a fragile system where you only have to have one corporation, to screw up their financial records and hurt them financially, you have to hack every person individually. >> this is a tweet from one of our regular listeners and

viewers saying -- >> this is from coin market cap on their website. davis owns crypto current si. >> caller: good morning. bitcoin is about empowering yourself and becoming your own bank and being able to facilitate those transactions without a third party. it has far more value than just being, you know, an ownership and a platform. it's control and voting power

and the ability to find your assets and only real estate. >> thank you, davis. we'll get a response. peteer? >> i mean, i have to agree. i always said be cautious, don't invest more than you're willing to lose. but the technology is exciting. that's because as the caller said, it really allows people to have direct control over the things that they own digitally. in the past, if you owned anything digitally, you didn't have any rights to anything. when you do your online banking and stock trading, you're trusting a company to do it on your behalf and to represent your interests faithfully. that relationship is not available to everyone. so it's a little discriminatory. and it's fragile. the person you're trusting could get hacked.

and if we could use a shared network of free people to move money, then we can use people to keep track of things like real estate sales. that's an interesting idea. one of the most exciting ideas is to use a shared block chain, to keep our identity credentials. so you have cash in your wallet and your license. when you move around on the internet, you might have your digital cash like bitcoin. but you don't have a digital driver's license. a lot of people think that is scary, because they don't want one world government to freeze their accounts or take their identity. so maybe instead of having a government issued digital identity, we can have a like, i hold it, i am the only person who can determine the ultimate fate. who i'm going to identify myself to and not. we can do that using a shared

network like bitcoin. it's a really exciting use case. we won't get too into the weeds. i think there's a lot more to bitcoin and block chain technology than just money. money is a great first use case. maybe the most important use case ever, because the financial system is so important. we can build a lot of better things to improve human flourishing, using things like block chains. >> and florida georgia girl with this tweet -- >> if you're interested in an article dealing with the wild swings of cryptocurrency, it's available at washingtonpost.com. scott is joining us from illinois. good morning, scott. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. while i was on hold, you might

have answered my question to a large degree, but maybe not entirely. but i'll throw it out there any way. something i don't understand about cryptocurrency, especially bitcoin, is that ultimately it gets valued in dollars. we talk about how it's worth $36,000 today. a few weeks ago it was worth $60,000. who knows what it will be worth tomorrow? so what is this facilitating if ultimately it's just stated in dollar value any way? it all boils down to dollar. >> thanks, scott. >> scott, that's a great question. you're right. you see the price of bitcoin quoted in dollars. that's just convention. a bitcoin is worth one bitcoin. you know, you could figure out that value by how much a bitcoin will buy you, and there are some places where you can spend bitcoin to buy things. but at the end of the day, we don't want to know how many teslas your bitcoin can buy.

elon might or might not sell you one for a bitcoin. we want to know what we're comfortable with. right now, at this point in history, maybe not in 30 or 40 or 50 years. but at this point, we understand dollars, especially here in the u.s. it's the unit of account that we like that we're comfortable with. so if we want to know how much our bitcoin is worth, we're probably going to want to know that price in dollars and lots of people will give you that quote. but that's not the only way that you can quote the price of bitcoin. that's just something we do for convenience. the bitcoin itself has nothing to do with dollars. it is a scarce unit of digital property. as markets evolve, you can price that in euros, you can price that in teslas. and we'll see how it happens. maybe one day we'll be quoting prices of bitcoin instead of dollars because that's somewhat everyone will understand and use. it will be a little weird, and i'm not sure that will happen. >> peter, quickly, where does

the name bitcoin and cryptocurrency come from? >> you know, our community is really bad at naming things. almost everything, including my organization's name, either has coin or bit in the name, right? so the name bitcoin was announced in the research paper. there's this paper that was published anonymously on the internet in 2008, you know, a few months before the network launched. and only a few people who were really like nerdy and interested in digital cash read this pdf, this research paper early on. it described the whole system we were going to build together using shared computer software and a shared network to create the bitcoin network. the author, whoever he, she, or they were, we still don't know to this day, they used a

pseudonym. in this research paper, they named it bitcoin, calling it a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. that was the beginning. i didn't notice this until many years later in 2011-2012. i wish i had bought a lot more at this point. back then it was really cheap. but more and more people found out about this research paper and looked at the actual software folks were sharing and the block chain, which started getting built in 2009 and has just carried on with basically 100% up time ever since. that's a term for how long a server on the internet stays active. sometimes amazon.com is down and you can't buy things on amazon. bitcoin has never been down for almost its entire history. so it's a really reliable computing network for a reliable hardmony. >> what has surprised you the most in researching the trends

in bitcoin? >> our day job is not so much talking about bitcoin in the abstract but specific bitcoin policy. i think a lot of people think that bitcoin is unregulated. the fact is, there's lots of regulation that already apply to activities that people do using bitcoin. so for example, all of these exchanges where you can buy and sell bitcoin, they know your customer controls, they do anti-laundering policies and file reports with the u.s. treasury. this is how we stop people from using bitcoin for things like terrorism. so that's something that is surprising to other people. it's not surprising to us anymore, because we spent six years in washington, d.c. talking to treasury and congress. but there are a lot of rules that are just written as general principles. so of course they apply to bitcoin. >> the we can side is coincenter.org. thank you for that explanation. i hope you'll come back again.

we appreciate it. >> i would be happy to. thank you. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ weeknights we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. about 180,000 african-americans, both free and formerly enslaved, served in the united states color troops during the civil war. and by the end of the conflict, made up 10% of the union army. in 2015, civil war living

historians and reenactors re-created a may 1865 parade of the grand army of the republic down pennsylvania avenue, from the u.s. capitol to freedom plaza near the white house. participants included groups representing the u.s. color troops and descendants of the soldiers, who with not permitted to march in the original parade so years ago. watch american history tv, tonight, beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern. and every weekend on c-span3. >> >> up next, a house panel investigates voter i.d. laws and election administration practices. some of the other topics include voting right laws litigation, and the use of multilang wall --