Figure out YOUR finances and take my Financial Stress Test by following this link: http://legacy.kenmcelroy.com/stresstest — Why would central banks want a digital dollar? Is the US Dollar really under fire between Bitcoin and inflation? Join Ken McElroy and Finance YouTube personality, Mark Moss, in a discussion about the future of the US dollar, the possibility of a digital currency, and the future of Bitcoin in a global market.
Ken McElroy:
Hey everybody, Ken here and I’m here with my good friend Mark Moss. Hey Mark.
Mark Moss:
Hey Ken. Good to be back with you. So
Ken McElroy:
You guys have not seen Mark’s channel jump on over there, Mark Moss up on YouTube. He’s got a lot of really good stuff on crypto and digital banking and all the different kinds of Bitcoin and, uh, the dollar going digital. He studies Janet Yellen and everything that we’re doing on the, you know, on the real dollar. So go over there and check it out. It’s a massive, massive piece that you guys need to really stay in tune, especially if you’re looking at reallocating, some of your investments. So, so mark, welcome back. Welcome back to the channel.
Mark Moss:
Yeah, thanks so much. I appreciate you giving me such a good, good marks on my channel. My, my videos on my channel have really got to up a facelift on their videos. So anybody watching both our channels might notice we’re using the same kind of monitor. So I appreciate that. My audience definitely appreciates that. It’s been pretty cool.
Ken McElroy:
Oh, that’s for sure. I was watching a bunch of them before we jumped on here. You know, just to see the stuff that you you’ve done the last few weeks, man. I’ll tell you what they get better and better and better every week. So nice work. Yeah. Thank you. So before we jump into it, I created a financial stress test for you guys. You can go take a look at that, just go on to KenMcElroy.com/StressTest. And go check it out. So mark, a lot of the people are really confused, you know, like we’re seeing the stuff come out in the headlines, you know, with the fed and they’re talking about the digital dollar and you know, obviously we’ve got Bitcoin and then you’ve got all these other, you know, non other cryptocurrencies popping up that are, you know, it’s all kind of getting confusing and all these kinds of startups are jumping into the game. You know, can you kind of walk through how these are all different than how it all relates to this? You know, what, what is this online banking and how, how much different it is?
Mark Moss:
Yeah. I’d love to, I think, um, we’ll start off from a high level, but really, you know, you have Bitcoin and then you have what everything else is considered alt coins. So alternative alternatives to Bitcoin and, um, Bitcoin is like gold. And then, you know, yeah, you got a bunch of other metals like aluminum and steel and whatever, but nobody really cares about that. You hear about gold. Bitcoin is just different than anything else because of its decentralized nature. So the real revolution here can, is the fact that since the beginning time, since the beginning of time, that the biggest problem we’ve ever had is that my neighbor was going to come kill me and take my goats. And then I band together with a couple of neighbors, but then this other group is going to come kill it, take us our goats and our chickens, right?
Mark Moss:
So then we make a village and then the other village comes and takes our goats, chickens and our gold. So we make a kingdom and we get bigger and bigger. And the, the entire, the only purpose of the United States government for the constitution is to protect the people from what, from other countries coming to steal our goods. So Bitcoin fixes that Bitcoin allows me to store my wealth cryptographically in a way that costs no money and takes no security. That is a pivotal shift in all of humanity. And it’s hard to really imagine how far that goes out and achieves this level of security because of its decentralized nature, which allows everyone to run their own computer node. There’s no other cryptocurrency out of the 8,000 cryptocurrencies that, that offer that have the security of Bitcoin. And there will never be another one. There can’t ever be another one. I don’t know if we need to dive into all that, but that’s really what separates Bitcoin from everything else. And that’s really the revolution. It’s not about a different way to pay for my Starbucks coffee. We don’t need to wait to do that. Right. Um, so it’s about being able to store my wealth in a way that censorship resistant. Um, and then, and then that’s in direct contrast to, you know, central bank, digital currencies, if that’s what you want to jump into. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
Ken McElroy:
So that’s what they’re talking about, you know, cause obviously as you guys know, the fed likes to control the money supply and you know, as we all know, like we’re dumping trillions of dollars into it right now and people need the money. But uh, you know, everybody’s concerned about deflation, they’re concerned about, um, hyperinflation, they’re concerned about inflation. All those kinds of things are all happening at the same time and they should be, yeah, they should be at some, but now we’re talking about this digital dollar, you know, and it’s, it’s starting to pop up and maybe you can just chat a little bit about that.
Mark Moss:
I would love to. So I mean, the problem that we have is inflation, right? So the federal reserve prints, I mean they just popped out 1.9 trillion and already today they’re talking about another three to 4 trillion. Like where does that money come from? And what people probably most people don’t realize is that every time they print another dollar, the dollar in your bank is worth less. And so, um, it’s, they’re stealing the value from your dollars. And so you don’t have any control over that. And even worse than that, when they print those dollars, they’re stealing your value. They give them to their buddies, the people closest to the money supply, get the benefit it’s called the Cantillion effect. And so it’s a completely unfair system. Um, they’re stealing your labor, they’re stealing your, your energy kind of enslaving you with that. And so going to a digital dollar, a central bank, digital currency is the same system, but even worse.
Mark Moss:
So it still gives them all the same benefits of creating as much money as they want enriching their buddies in themselves while stealing your value. But on top of that, it’s a digital money. So it’s, it’s a couple of things that are kind of scary. Again, it’s a one it’s programmable. So when they gave out the stimulus last year, the goal was to stimulate the economy. They’re hoping people would go spend that money in the economy. Most people, they saved it. Right. Which is exactly what they didn’t want to happen. So, and then some people put it into Robinhood and started trading. Yeah, that’s right. And so they can program the money so they can say, Hey, um, you get the money til Friday. If you don’t spend the money by Friday, it comes back to us. And by the way, you can only spend it here, here, here, but you can’t spend it here, here, here, so they can program it.
Mark Moss:
But it gets even scarier than that. Um, it’s also could be used behaviorally. So for example, Ken, you’re saving way too much money. You’re negative 5% interest on your money. Mark. You’re not saving enough money. We’re going to give you positive 5% interest rate, oh, you’re this race, you’re this sex, you’re this identity, whatever you get this treatment, you get this treatment. And so through the money they can control behavior. And that’s really where they want to go, which is pretty scary. So they want to be able to inflate it away. And it’s almost like if you’ve seen these futuristic dystopian movies, we don’t even have money anymore. Really what we have is the government gives us credits. Yeah. And they can see exactly what’s happening right now. They can use those credits, how they see fit or take them away from us. The difference is when I put my money into Bitcoin, I control it.
Mark Moss:
I have custody. And so nobody can steal it, sees it. And if I want to send it to you, nobody could stop it, block it or prevent it. And I think it’s going to, um, I think it’s going to be a good thing for Bitcoin because it’s, there’s a lot of skeptics on whatever digital money, even though today, I think 80% of transactions are done digitally. There’s a lot of skeptics on this digital money. And so I think it’s gonna make it mainstream. And then people are going to go, wait a minute. Why is my us dollar digital dollar, keep losing purchasing power. But this Bitcoin over here, it keeps gaining, purchasing power. And uh, I think it’s going to be a big marketing, uh, piece for Bitcoin. It
Ken McElroy:
Is for sure. And I think that one of the things I’d love to touch on that we talked about before is there’s a tremendous amount of people like millions and millions of people that are unbanked. And, and so let’s talk about that because this is a great opportunity for people not to have to deal in cash as, as, uh, you know, and have to worry about all that they can actually, they can actually do it through these apps and through, you know, through digitally. Right. Can you talk a little bit about that? Cause these bank accounts, uh, you know, it’s harder and harder and harder to open them these days.
Mark Moss:
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s such a great point and you know, um, if you’re in the United States or Europe and you’re listening to this, it’s hard for you to kind of understand why, why you would need this because you know, the dollars were reserved currency of the world and it’s, you know, pretty stable. But the reality is if you live in other countries like Venezuela or Argentina or Lebanon, where your money is going up in smoke overnight, you need to get out of that currency and you need a way that the government can inflate it away. So there’s different needs in different parts of the world. Um, th th I think the UN reports that there’s about 2 billion adults in the world that have no access to the financial system. They’re not allowed to join the financial system. And if they can’t join the financial system, how can they ever get ahead?
Mark Moss:
So a lot of third world countries, obviously they’re very, very poor, but they can’t get ahead because they can’t even get access to banking. So Bitcoin fixes this, it’s permissionless. Anybody can download a wallet and instantly have access to the financial system. Uh, but it’s also, again, there’s something else going on here that I’m just going to touch on really quick, that I’m super excited about. So Bitcoin, um, has changed things. So like, how do you send 25 cents over the internet? You can’t, you can’t, you can’t do it. You can’t send more than five bucks is like the minimum, right? You can’t do it. How do you send half a penny? You don’t, you can’t. And what the, like, uh, I was talking to my kids about this last night. They’re like, oh, we used to have all these movies. We had all these DVDs.
Mark Moss:
Why don’t we have those anymore? Well, we stream our movies now just like we stream our music. Well, Bitcoin now gives us the ability to stream money where I can literally be watching your video. And like, as I’m watching it, like one Satoshi, a second one sat a second is being streamed to you. We can stream money. And now anybody, anywhere in the world can have this. And the internet has created this, uh, this, uh, work there’s this need for work where it’s called micro tasks and it’s called like many people call mechanical Turks. And so for example, to train AI, I would need to sit here and recognize patterns and circle a stop sign, and I can get like a half a penny for every stop sign I circle. And this is great for people in third world countries, but how do they participate? How do you pay them a half a penny Bitcoin fixes that? So now we can send them a phone. They could start to work in Indonesia or Bali. They could have their phone ch and it could be getting Bitcoin stream to them in real time for that, uh, when they have no access to the financial system normally. So it’s going to radically shift, uh, the entire world and really bring a lot of people out of poverty. Yeah,
Ken McElroy:
It’s actually awesome. I mean, there’s going to be entrepreneurs popping up everywhere. It’s going to be great.
Mark Moss:
Yeah. It’s going to be great. It’s uh, it’s what, I’m what I’m calling. Uh, I believe it’s like Renaissance 2.0. So, um, we went into the dark ages and then we went to the Renaissance age. Um, and I believe we’re going into the next run. I was on, um, with information flourishing and having a money that can be open borderless and permissionless going across the world. Um, so I think it’s, I think there’s as, as dark and scary as the world seems right now, and, and it is, um, there’s massive opportunity and hope on the other side of it.
Ken McElroy:
There is. I’ll tell you what, though, these central banks are going to fight like heck to keep control and it’s already starting to pop
Mark Moss:
Up, right? They are, but history shows us that they lose always over and over, uh, because one, their policies fail. They’re there, their policies won’t last. So they’ll fail, they’ll fail on themselves. And history also shows us that, that people, uh, people and freedom will always win. Right. Right.
Ken McElroy:
I, and I know, you know, uh, we’re going to be speaking together in June. Uh, and Mike Maloney’s there and I used to run around with Mike and he told me something, once he said, there’s never been a currency in the history of the world that’s ever survived over 2000 different currencies kind of blew my mind when you, you know, obviously that’s big picture. Right. And so what we are is we’re just kind of witnessing this, uh, uh, and we’re witnessing the collapse of, of potentially one and the rise of another right. Well, what’s interesting,
Mark Moss:
You know, is that, you know, obviously you’re in the finance niche. And so you kind of deal with like economics and things like that. And, uh, Ludwig Von Mises from the Austrian school of economics, he said back, you know, a hundred years ago, he said that there’s no such thing as a constant in economics because supply of oil is changing squad goals, changing the supply of dollars is changing. It’s a real, estate’s going up now. There’s no supply and economics. So how do you measure that? And how would you build a house? Can if you had to hire an architect and builders, but there was no such thing as a foot or an inch or a pat, like you couldn’t write, you have to have like these constants. And so he said, there’s no, no such thing as constant economics. And he was, he was, he was right until now.
Mark Moss:
Yeah. Bitcoin’s hard cap to 21 million coins. It’s the first time in history that we have a fixed constant in economics to measure value and wealth against. I mean, this is, uh, this is, uh, it’s, it’s like you and I having a conversation in 1996 or 1997, and we’re talking about the internet and it’s real. It’s really cool. It’s like, you can send a mail, but now it’s like electronic mail. And we could like chat in these chat rooms, but we had no idea that, um, our car would be hooked to something called a cloud, using something called artificial intelligence, using something called social media to navigate us around traffic. We didn’t know that. And so that’s kind of where we’re sitting today. We’re starting to see this foundation, but man, to imagine where it’s going in the future is pretty, pretty difficult. Yeah.
Ken McElroy:
It’s so true. So, so guys, we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. We’re talking with mark about digital dollar. So mark boss stay with us. We’ll be right back.
Ken McElroy:
Okay. So mark, so our good friend, George Gammon says a stimulus could be given to you in a digital wallet, you know, and, and I know that just kind of people are having a tough time wrapping their head around that you, you know, do you see that happening? And, and could that be a problem?
Mark Moss:
Well, I certainly see it happening. Um, and as far as people having a tough time with it, I think it depends on where you’re at on the age spectrum, because today we have Venmo and PayPal and I mean, it’s no different than using Venmo. If you know how to use Venmo or PayPal, like you could use, you know, cryptocurrency or whatever. So it depends on kind of where you’re at on that scale, but it’s definitely something that’s gonna happen. As a matter of fact, we know it’s going to happen because when they pass the stimulus bill last year, they wrote it into the bill. You know, they’re always sneaking stuff through in there. And so they already passed that in there. Um, they’ve already it where all the banks have to provide digital wallets to their customers and they want to do that because what they want is the fed to be able to get money out directly to the people like right now, when they want, because they want to be able to really program the, the economy and, and, and move that.
Mark Moss:
So, um, they’re definitely gonna be doing it. Um, sooner than later, we know that China has already launched their own central bank, digital currency. Um, they’ve been building the test bigger and bigger and bigger. Their plan is to have it full scale, fully launched and operational by next year when they host the Olympics. So they’re definitely ahead of the curve. There’s several other countries that are already doing it as well. The United States, federal government, and they’re behind the curve on this of like, like a lot of things. Unfortunately, um, Jerome Powell, the fed chair said that they’re not in the, in, in a hurry to get it right. I’m sorry to get it first. They just want to get it right. And so, you know, they’re trying to take their time. Th the dollar is the reserve currency. I get that. Uh, but yeah, Georgia’s, Georgia’s right. I mean, they’re, they’re going to push it out. It’s already been written in the law and it’s coming.
Ken McElroy:
Yeah. So what’s your biggest fear then when the U S establishes this digital dollar?
Mark Moss:
Well, can I, I don’t, I don’t know if I have a biggest fear about that. I would say that, um, it’s kind of the same old, same old, right? They, they already control the dollar. It just gives them more control. Um, I would expect to see more manipulation. Um, I would expect to probably see more inflation because of it, because they’re really gonna be able to get the money directly out to the people at the problem that they have right now is the fed creates reserves for the banks. And the banks are supposed to create that money into existence by providing loans. The problem is most banks aren’t providing loans. So even though the fed is creating trillions of dollars, it’s not getting to the people. And that’s why we’re not seeing that inflation. But what they want to do is push the digital dollars directly to the people bypassing the banks. So I would say, I guess, I guess my fear would be that we’d see way more inflation, but I’m, I’m kind of planning on that. So I don’t know if I’m super afraid of that. If you’re not planning for it, you should be afraid of it. Um, but I think, I think we’re going to see a lot more control, a lot more manipulation, a lot more inflation because of it. Um, yeah, I guess that’s kind of what I would project.
Ken McElroy:
So I know the world’s, the, world’s not very happy with us, you know, we are the world’s reserve currency and, and so, you know, you guys just need to go online and take a look like there are a lot of people, not very happy with us if we’re paying them in dollars and then we’re, you know, deflating the value of the dollar. Uh, obviously that’s not making a lot of people happy. So what do you think is going to happen there, you know, on the, the world reserve currency, you know, cause that’s where we are right now.
Mark Moss:
Yeah. Great question. And, and that, that really needs to be talked about because it’s something actually way bigger. And so you’d mentioned earlier that, uh, the dollar, uh there’s no, Mike Maloney told you no currencies ever survived. And that, of course the dollar is going to, at some point, some might say that the dollar actually did die, right? Because the dollar was kind of created as the reserve currency in 1944 and the Bretton woods agreement. And it was supposed to be backed by gold in 1971, Richard Nixon, basically reneged on our creditors and said, we’re not going to give you any gold anymore. You’re out. Right. And so really that might’ve been the day the dollar died. Um, and it was also the same time that the IMF, so the international monetary fund, which is kind of a central bank above the central banks created, what’s known as an SDR.
Mark Moss:
That’s a special drawing, right. And that is its own Fiat currency on top of the traditional Fiat currency. So, um, you know, we have the federal reserve and the dollar, the Euro has the European central bank in the Euro, right. Japan has the Japan central bank and their, and their, their currency. So have all these central banks with their currencies. The IMF is a layer above that. And so they, I think they’ve only issued this special currency, this SDR currency twice before in history since the late sixties. And, um, I think it’s about 200 billion in total and they just released another five to $600 billion of these SDR currencies. And they’re pushing them out to these, these governments to put them on the reserve so they can print even more Fiat. And so where this is all going, um, probably sooner than later is the dollar will lose its reserve status pretty quickly. I mean, I could see this happening in the next 24 months, um, and being replaced with the SDR as the reserve currency
Ken McElroy:
Of the world. Wow. That’s quite a statement. So, so we’re going to go, and we’re going to jump over to the premium salt, and we’re going to talk about this exact issue in this one last question with mark. Um, you could sign up for premium obviously at www dot Ken McElroy slash premium mark. Hey, thanks man. What a wealth of knowledge and I appreciate it. I can’t wait to chat with you once in June, we’re going to see each other in a couple of months, but also after all those conferences for the, for those of you guys don’t know, Mark’s got an incredible channel run over to mark boss and take a look at the stuff he’s done. He’s continues to just dive into this subject and get as educated as he can. He’s he’s flying all over the place, going to these conferences, trying to listen to all these experts, um, make sure that you guys stay here, go on his channel, take a look at what he’s got to say. Uh, I’m telling you guys it’s, uh, if you, you know, if the things are changing and if you guys are heavy in cash or, um, or, um, you know, buying things, uh, different kinds of cryptos, all that kind of stuff, you need some serious education around it. Uh, and you should be thoroughly, thoroughly, um, uh, you know, have a little bit of experience before you, uh, try to go, just go do it yourself.
Mark Moss:
Right. Definitely. Definitely. I agree. And so, uh, yeah, I appreciate you having me on Canon. I would just say, I would just say kind of in closing is that, you know, some of this stuff might sound a little bit scary. Um, and I would just encourage everyone. Just kind of like what you just said again, is like, just take the time to like, kind of educate yourself. Education is, is, is power, right? And so educate yourself. Um, if, if, if those things sound scary, figure out a way to make them not so scary for yourself. And there’s definitely strategies that people can learn. So I would just encourage just what you said, just, just to encourage people to just kind of build them their own education. Yeah. A hundred
Ken McElroy:
Percent. So get online and start looking. Uh, there’ll be lots of varying opinions. And, uh, I think going to find that Mark’s, uh, right up there with one of, some of the top guys, uh, on this subject, so mark as always, thanks for your time, buddy. I appreciate the value you bring to this channel as well. Uh, I know it’s a question. A lot of people are asking, you know, what should I do next?
Mark Moss:
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much, Ken. Appreciate it.
