Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…In the libertarian utopia that you will build, what will you use for money? Will it look more like Bitcoin or more like PayPal? I’m not exactly sure that I’m going to succeed in building a libertarian utopia. I actually do think that there’s a little bit too much of a fixation on this monetarist level, and not enough on the underlying real economy. I think that, for example, we have a lot of these debates about Fed policy. Are they printing too much money? Are they not printing enough? What should the Fed be doing? Somehow, do you decentralize that? I think money and the nature of money is somehow much less important than all the microregulations that make up the economy. If you give me a choice of getting rid of the vast bulk of government regulations and keeping the Fed, I’d much rather do that than keeping all the other zoning laws and crazy rules we have and going with PayPal, Bitcoin, gold, any sort of alternate currency one could come up with. I’d much prefer to focus on the level of atoms, the real economy, than on the virtual level of bits, which I think of money as being linked to. My intuition, for what it’s worth, is that you’d want money to somehow be linked back to the real, in a fundamental way. This was the merit of the gold standard, that it would at least maintain this discipline that money was not something that grew on trees and could be printed ad infinitum, and so I’d want it to be linked to something real. Maybe you link it to the equity market, or something that’s somewhat more real than just fiat money. I think the much more critical thing are all the microregulations. I work for the Indonesian government as an advisor. I have two questions for you. The first is, do you think Indonesia is underrated or overrated, and number two, what would you recommend for my government to fight off terrorism? Because you talk a lot about monopoly in your book. Is it possible for my government to monopolize information security, yet at the same time, respect the individual privacy of our citizens?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.