George Selgin, director of the Center of Monetary Alternatives at the Cato Institute joins the show to discuss Bitcoin, Free Banking, and stablecoins. In this episode: 

• Why George refers to Bitcoin as a synthetic commodity money
• Why George was excited by the possibility for synthetic commodity money
• What conditions would have to hold for Bitcoin to be considered money
• Why money is a spectrum rather than binary
• Are stablecoins prone to bank runs?
• Is Tether's melange of underlying collateral sufficient?
• How should stablecoins be regulated?
• Why are regulators looking into stablecoins today?
• Comparing stablecoins to Money Market Mutual Funds
• Why money market funds broke the buck in 08
• Are stablecoins as systemic as money market funds?
• George's objections to Gorton and Zhang's paper on free banking and stablecoins
• George's definition of free banking
• Was the 1830s-60s period in the U.S. a period of genuine free banking?
• The actual causes of bank failures in the pre-Civil War period
• Why 'unit banking' was so fragile
• What lessons can be taken from Canada's experience with free banking in that era
• Why the history of Free Banking is a red herring in the stablecoin debate
• George's recommendations for a primer on free banking
• George's reflections on Hal Finney's reference to his work
• Why bank failures are often the consequence of regulation

Content mentioned in this episode: 

• Selgin, Synthetic Commodity Money 
• The Alt-M Blog
• Selgin, Money Free and Unfree
• White, Free Banking in Britain
• Selgin, The Theory of Free Banking
• Dowd, The Experience of Free Banking
• Gorton and Zhang, Taming Wildcat Stablecoins

Sponsor notes: 

• This episode is brought to you by Withum, a top 25 accounting firm with a cutting-edge Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology practice. To learn more, visit  withum.com/crypto.