I was at an economics research conference this week, and I had my first opportunity to engage in sustained discussion about Bitcoin with other academic economists outside my department. The topic just never came up previously, as it's not something that I normally bring up.

Unsurprisingly, both economists that I talked to were vehemently anti-bitcoin, at least at first. For them, there was a certain aesthetic reaction against Bitcoin due to its association with NGU crypto-bros and now the Trump administration. This is unfortunate, because after I calmly explained to them why I support Bitcoin because of its features and properties despite the negative associations, they seemed to warm up to it, at least a little.

Below, I document the flow of conversation, roughly organized by specific arguments that Bitcoiners make, their responses, and my responses to their responses.

When they asked me what's good about Bitcoin, and the first thing I said was "verifiably fixed supply"---that was a mistake. Economists have it drilled into them well and good that the gold standard is a barbarous relic, and that not being able to adjust the money supply makes recessions worse.

I replied that although this may be true, there are also dangers to having an inflatable money supply. For example, I asked them whether they'd rather have Zimbabwean dollars or Bitcoin, and they conceded me that point.

They countered that another problem with fixed supply is that it causes nominal deflation. I asked why nominal deflation is necessarily a bad thing, and here they gave an interesting answer. The standard thing you hear is: "Who would buy anything if they expect prices to go down later?" But these guys are smarter than that. Instead, they argued that in an inflationary environment, you can pay unproductive workers less in real terms simply by not raising their wages. But in a deflationary world you'd have to literally cut their wages every year, which will cause social unrest. This point about nominal wage rigidities is interesting, and I conceded that I didn't have a good answer to that. But I did insist that just because we can't predict every eventuality, it doesn't mean Bitcoin isn't an interesting technology worth investing in. They seemed to agree with that.

This conversation revolved around two points: Bitcoin's volatility and what Bitcoin can do that the traditional financial system can't.

Of course, the topic of volatility came up. "Bitcoin can't be a medium of exchange because it's too volatile." This was fairly easy to respond to. I simply said, "Yes, it's volatile right now, but that's not an inherent property of Bitcoin, it's due to how people trade it." I told them that Bitcoin trades like a tech stock now, but that it really shouldn't because it has none of the properties of a tech stock---the only reason it trades like a tech stock is because most investors still don't understand Bitcoin. They seemed receptive to this argument and agreed with me when I said that Bitcoin's properties make it more like digital gold, only more portable.

On the subject of portability, two of my favorite things to show off about Bitcoin are the following:

My colleagues were surprisingly unimpressed by this (other people usually are). "I can already do that with Visa" and "Settlement times are already down to T+1", were the response. In the end, I was forced to admit that even though Bitcoin is a more convenient MoE than gold, it isn't yet as convenient as fiat in developed countries. For some reason, I forgot to bring up micropayments and how it enables unique services like SN.

Since I couldn't argue that Bitcoin is more convenient than fiat, I pivoted to arguing that it's more robust against censorship and bank failures. While they agreed that this could be useful for certain people, they didn't seem particularly concerned about censorship resistance for themselves.

Moreover, one of them argued that history proves that centralization of a currency is superior to decentralization. He argued that we had a period of decentralized banking in the US and that it was a chaotic time. I wanted to say something along the lines of, "That's not really comparable because we aren't talking about decentralization of multiple trust-me-bro currencies, we're talking about decentralization of the ledger book and of transaction verification," but it didn't quite come out that way. In the end, we both agreed that neither of us knew enough details about the free banking period to make any strong claims.

I think it was a productive conversation overall, and I think I taught them a few things about Bitcoin they didn't know before, as well as got them to see some more positive aspects of Bitcoin. Probably the most important thing was showing them that not all Bitcoiners are NGU crypto bros or Trump fanatics. However, they fairly questioned how many Bitcoiners are like me, and whether my views are a fringe minority in the Bitcoin space. They didn't mention it, but I thought about Bitcoin 2025 and wondered the same thing.

I also have a few regrets. I wish I had started the discussion with my normal opening line, "Bitcoin is a ledger book of monetary transactions that no one controls, anyone can write to, and yet somehow everyone trusts." I think that would have led to a more systematic presentation of the facts, because in the end I don't think I communicated clearly what Bitcoin actually is, which I'm pretty sure they still don't understand. Unless you can understand what the blockchain is and how proof of work fits into it, I don't think all the other features of Bitcoin are going to crystallize for you.

Lessons learned, I suppose. I hope I'll be better prepared to discuss Bitcoin with my colleagues in the future.