Last year, I wrote about my first time doing an entire orange pilling lecture in my economics class (#899199).

Today, I just did it again. I didn't do it last semester because I was on a teaching sabbatical, but now I'm back in the classroom full time.

The class starts with this 10 minute video on the history of monetary technology. It's a very nicely put together video and I recommend it as a good introductory to video who aren't very familiar with monetary theory.

I then proceeded to answer questions students had about the video, or Bitcoin in particular. If there's a lull in the questions, I'd proceed to talk more about Bitcoin. During the class, I was able to cover the following topics:

• What is a blockchain? Basically just a ledger of transactions.
• What is a block? Basically just a page in the ledger.
• What was Satoshi Nakamoto's innovation? A way to decide which ledger everyone should trust.
  • This was probably one of the harder points for students to grasp, and I did notice many start to zone out here. The concept of different people having different copies of ledgers is a bit foreign to them, they are so used to thinking of things in terms of centralized systems.
• What is the dollar "backed by" and what gives it its value? What is Bitcoin "backed by" and what gives it its value? Both are not really backed by anything; both derive value from peoples' expectations about what can be purchased with it in the future.
• What are some problems with the current dollar system? Undisciplined money printing leads to asset price inflation and the Cantillon effect.
• Is Bitcoin mainly used by criminals? It can be, but there's no evidence that it's preferred by criminals over dollars. It's also more traceable and thus I wouldn't use Bitcoin if I was a criminal.
• Why is Bitcoin less stable than the dollar? The stability of purchasing power has more to do with the inertia of many goods already being priced in dollars, and adjusting those prices being a slow and frictional process. If the more goods were natively priced in Bitcoin, its purchasing power would also be more stable.
• I also showed them mempool.space and showed them what the ledger looks like, and how you can see some transactions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, being transmitted, possibly internationally, for a fee of less than $5---something completely impossible in the traditional banking system.

One difference between this year and last year is, unfortunately, that interest seemed to be much higher last year. I noticed most of the class zoning out this year, and only a few interested students participating. Last year the interest seemed more widespread. Maybe because it was done earlier in the semester (Feb instead of April), and students at this 2/3-point in the semester are feeling a lot more burned out. But it could also be because Bitcoin is doing worse price-wise, and thus people are just not as interested.

I did preface everything by saying that I'm not primarily interested in Bitcoin as an investment vehicle. I'm not telling anyone to choose Bitcoin over the S&P500. I am saying that I think Bitcoin represents a genuinely new monetary technology, and that it could lead to a freer and fairer monetary system.