#757: The Treasury Is Failing You with Vince Lanci

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Vince, take two. Here we are three days after the first attempt at recording this, but you had some power issues.

**Vince Lanci** (0:43)
Yes. Thank you, Marty. Take two. Take two indeed.
Yeah, so we had a couple blackouts in the area. One was from the storm and one was from before the storm.

**Marty Bent** (0:58)
I was texting you early June, blackouts, not a good sign before summer even kicks off. That's right.

**Vince Lanci** (1:05)
I think they're going to put a data center in the Starbucks next door to me.

**Marty Bent** (1:08)
Legitimately or is that a?

**Vince Lanci** (1:10)
No, that's bullshit, but that will be funny. Why not? Starbucks become a data center.

**Marty Bent** (1:15)
Everybody's become a data center. It's the blockchain to your name and see your stock price rise.
Yeah. We're not here to talk about all that. We're here to talk about your new book, which is called As Good as Gold, The Return to Real Money. And you're really beginning to get going during the first take of this episode on Friday. We just started with the concept of collateral versus currency. You believe the system runs on collateral, not currency, and how you have these different properties of money, and you're explaining how gold was the store value, medium exchange, and unit of account for a long time, but they began to slowly but surely and methodically detach each property from gold specifically, specifically medium exchange and unit of account.

**Vince Lanci** (2:06)
That's right.
The collateral approach, yeah. Why the collateral approach behind the book? Most books talk about money, they talk about currencies, they talk about central banks or interest rates. What I wanted to do was focus on the thing underneath all those collateral. The thing that's underneath all those is trust. But absent the trust, you've got to go with collateral. So the insight that drove the book is that every monetary system in history ultimately depends on what society trusts enough to pledge against debt. And this is definitely in the Bitcoin camp. For centuries that asset was gold, right? So in the modern era, it became US. Treasury Securities. And the book explains how that transition occurred and why it mattered. And then the transition occurred, starting with Bretton Woods, which is what we were talking about.
Yeah, you see, the question, I think you asked me a question, you said, what gave me the idea to write it? I think that's what you asked me. And the answer is about four years ago, I was writing some of the questions from the lines of questions for the Frank Giustra, Michael Seller debate on Bitcoin. I was involved in writing some of the lines of questions for that. And during that, I gave myself a very deep education on the three definitions of money, which any Bitcoin person knows what they are, you know, meaning of exchange, store value, and unit of account.
And during that, I did a little history search, and it was current events with the Bitcoin debate going on back then. But I did a little history search, and the history search said, well, before Bretton Woods, gold was all three, money was all three, store value, meaning of exchange, and unit of account.
And then when Bretton Woods started, they went off the gold standard, even though we all allegedly still had our gold, and the dollar became the meaning of exchange. So the gold is still the store value, right? They peeled off medium of exchange, and they peeled off unit of account. And then in 71, when Nixon blew up Bretton Woods, we went off for gold altogether. So if you look at the three definitions of money, and you hear the debate about the dollar is going to be dethroned, I don't think it is going to be dethroned, and I don't give a shit. I mean, I don't care about whatever theory you have about the milkshake boys or whatever other dairy confection that we're using to describe the dollar. But to be fair to that concept, they're not going to stop using dollars. They're going to start using stable coin dollars or digital dollars, you know?