E06 - Stephen Macaskill on Economics, Money, and Bitcoin

Stephen Macaskill is the CEO of Dasset, a trading platform for buying bitcoin and other digital assets. Before digital assets Stephen ran a precious metals company helping people maximize their savings and financial literacy.

In this conversation we talk about:

• precious metals and gold's role in recent monetary history including Bitcoin;
• the definition of money and Austrian and Keynesian methodologies within economics;
• bitcoin and its intrinsic versus subjective value;
• spontaneous orders, and
• human cooperation through decentralized autonomous organizations.

Timestamps: 
00:00 intro
01:23 precious metals and gold's role in monetary history
07:04 WTF happened in 1971
13:27 what is money
19:46 Austrian vs Keynesian
27:35 social data vs natural science
32:59 Bitcoin
39:30 intrinsic vs subjective value of Bitcoin
43:32 on enabling global collaboration
45:52 scaling blockchains
49:13 defining digital assets
51:53 potential of DAOs
59:07 insurance
1:01:23 rapid fire
1:04:02 fin

Some notes from the show:

• what happened in 1971? https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
• Turkish rare earths discovery https://www.wired.com/story/turkey-rare-earth-metals/
• French try to redeem gold https://www.huffpost.com/entry/august-15-1971_b_4284327
• Austrian methodology https://mises.org/library/methodology-austrian-school-economists-0
• Keynes & rise of macroeconomics https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp
• tomayo https://www.newworld.co.nz/shop/product/5267101_ea_000nw
• Bitcoin whitepaper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
• spontaneous order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order
• coinmarketcap https://coinmarketcap.com/
• Vitalik's essay on DAOs https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i-1379644274
• Whitehouse redefines recession https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1551349167674499073?s=20&t=i4KWmNn8oWiVhCt7MdvMVg

Contact Stephen:

• Dasset https://dassetx.com/ 
• LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenm/  

Find Jeff:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn 

The BCNZ Pod:

• Website https://podcast.blockchain.org.nz/
• YouTube 
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Media & Sponsorship Enquires:

• team@blockchain.org.nz 

Recorded at blockheight 746718. The BCNZ podcast was founded in 2022 by Jeff Nijsse and Bryan Ventura.