Guest i was trying to come up with a label for the peculiar variety of libertarianism that says if you get sick and cannot pay for it, that issue are a tough lockett is unjust for government to tax somebody else to pay for your health care isnt there was a revealing moment in the oracle oral argument argued on behalf of the mandate that it is fair to require people to buy Health Insurance because if they get sick and they cannot afford to pay for it were obligated to give them health care and Justice Scalia said then dont obligate yourself. That is extraordinary thing to say and it shows the moral culdesac the conservatives got themselves into because it was driven by politics once the bill was passed the only hope to shut it down was the constitutional challenge to the on the constitutional theories that were out there was extreme libertarian theories that were morally repellent for those people who dont believe this stuff i dont think scalia really believes it is okay to withhold health care from the port but they found themselves to say that tough lot things and i needed a label. Host house significant is the case we are currently waiting to appear as opposed to the case that has already been decided . Guest i think does a decision in favor of the change challenge would do far more damage because with sebelius case the obamacare system was just being set up and a lot was not in place, not a Large Population of people already receiving benefits but if this is decided in favor of the challenge bin and nervous money to hospitals will suddenly be cut off a huge numbers that are getting subsidies who would not do it anymore all large number that gets subsidies who suddenly cannot afford Health Insurance anymore. It would be a bureaucratic nightmare for the Health Care Industry to deal with a radical shift in theory millions of people to zero large sums of money the federal government says we are not entitled in the first place. There are two reasons why i expect the challenge to feel that the legal argument is terrible. Just terrible. And much more with a humanitarian catastrophe within a few weeks or months there will be people standing aside the Supreme Court holding up signs to say john roberts killed and another. And journalist will investigate to see that is true. Host if people read your book what will they learn and what is the conclusion . One thing they will learn is the basics of congressional power. One of the reasons it was so hard to understand is a basic understanding of where Congress Gets its power under the constitution and the real limits on that power and why obama it chose this route to require everyone to buy Health Insurance and then to tell me where the challenge comes from. Then where it came from and by the Supreme Court decided as it did and what the Supreme Court wrote. Said it will give you the ability to understand the work of the Supreme Court in this case. Host professor of law at Northwestern University booktv is on vacation talking with professors who were also authors booktv now continues. Washington journal continues. Host joining us from new york city is Nathaniel Popper, reporter for the New York Times, out with his first book called digital gold bitcoin and the inside stories of the misfits and millionaires trying to reinvent money. Thank you for joining us. You write for the New York Times, and cover business issues. What made you want to write about bitcoin . Guest frankly, i resisted it for a a while. It seemed like some sort of pet rock type of thing that i could ignore. I was covering finance at the time when i began writing about this. My first story and 2013 was about the winklevoss twins, famous from the facebook story. At this point, really nobody with a name or reputation had attached themselves to bitcoin. They came forward and i wrote a story about their Massive Holdings of bitcoin at that point. It was Something Like 10 million. The response to the story was so incredible that it kind of made me sit up and think about what this cap into. This idea of new money tapped i nto. This was what got me thinking about it. It was another year before i was ready to write a book about it. Host lead us through it. The subtitle is that the inside story of the misfits and millionaires trying to reinvent money. How does bitcoin work and how does it reinvent our current currency . Guest i think the basics of bitcoin still eludes a lot of people including people in technology and finance. That is in part because bitcoin is a lot of Different Things. It is software that makes Different Things possible. Because it is a lot of Different Things, it is sometimes hard to understand you hear all these Different Things about it. In a two sublist terms, this came out of a movement of people essentially trying to event digital cash. With cash, you can transact directly with someone. You hand over cash in the oldfashioned world and you do not need anyone else there to do the transaction. And no one even needs to know other than that to know other than the two of you that the transaction happened. When money moved into the digital world, you essentially always needed some thirdparty there to move the money, update everyones records on both sides. There was a group of technologists who saw this. Most were privacy activists. They realized that there wasnt this loss of privacy when money moved into the digital realm. They began working to try to create something that was like cash but for the digital realm. That was the simplest idea that inspired this. What makes that possible with the coin with bitcoin is new software and networks that allows money to be moved around, much like email allows messages to be moved around. If you have someones bitcoin address, you can send them money anywhere in the world and it does not have to go through a third person. That is the simplest way to imagine it. There are a lot of layers beneath that. That notion of digital cash and email for money is the way i like to start. Host this was a currency, ideas started in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. In your book, your you write that the result of this complicated process was something deceptively simple but not possible before. Financial notes that treat and move money without a central authority. No bank, credit cards, regulators. Now we are in 2015, a number of years since the creation of the bitcoin movement. Federal regulators taken an interest . Guest they have. It took a few years for the software to really get going. Isaiah got going, it was not living up to its grandest ambitions. That passage incited you cited, it did not provide an alternative to Central Banks there was surviving. It was becoming clear sooner regulators, central bankers, prosecutors, that this was something new. It was a way to move things around without oversight from any central party. Whenever you have something moving around without oversight, regulators get worried. In the financial system, banks are the front line in Law Enforcement, because they can overseeing the movement of money. Regulators began looking at this hard in 2013. There were two Senate Hearings in one week, if i am not mistaken, one right after the other, in which people from the di and good service and doj all got from the fbi, secret service, and. Most of the Law Enforcement folks at the hearing essentially said there are dangerous with the new technology is interesting and it can be used for more than just lawbreaking. So lets watch this, and we are watching it carefully. That one even probably gave as much of a boost to bitcoin as any sort of event during its lifetime. Since then, you have people from a whole bunch of different regulatory agencies trying to figure out how to deal with it and also trying to dig your out what is it. Should we treat it like stocks, treat it like a currency, a commodity . Should we treat it like a Financial Institution . I think a lot of that is still going on. One of the things that points to is that this is something new. It does not a into the old categories we have for the financial realm. Host Nathaniel Popper is our guest, author of the book digital gold. We invite you to the conversation. 202 7488000 four eastern and central time zones. 202 7488001 for the mountain and pacific time zones. If you are a user of bitcoin and have used in the past, call 202 7488002. A story in the New York Times about one of the campaigns using bitcoin. This was a couple weeks ago. In accepting bitcoin, rand paul raises money and questions. They write, president ial fundraising, never known for its transparency, may have come more secretive. In announcing his candidacy for president , rand paul waited into new waters where he said he would accept Campaign Contributions in bitcoin a largely untraceable Virtual Currency, in amounts up to 100. Interested donors were given three options for making a contribution a credit card, paypal, or bitcoins. While some state and federal candidates and california, colorado, and elsewhere, rand paul is the first president ial candidate to do so. In the age of wanting transparency and president ial elections, is it a good thing the Paul Campaign is allowing bitcoin contributions . Guest i do not know if im qualified whether to say that is a good rain. The way it is doing done in election politics now, it is limited to relatively small sums. In that sense it is like someone giving a 20 bill or a 50 bill to a candidate. It is not like someone giving 10,000 of unmarked bills to a candidate. The most notable element of that story is that rand paul decided to do that on day one of his candidacy. It shows the degree to which the Bitcoin Technology and this movement that grew up around bitcoin has been driven by a law of this sort of libertarian sentiment that is also driving rand pauls candidacy. It drives home just how much bitcoin was a result of the anxiety and unhappiness that came out of the financial crisis that has also given rise to the popularity of libertarian candidates. This suspicion of central authorities. That is so deeply embedded in bitcoin. The suspicion of the Federal Reserve and Central Banks and also of big wall street banks that are were blamed for the financial crisis. Bitcoin was viewed as a system that would allow us to circumvent that and have a financial that existed without those central authorities that was raised and run by the people used it. When rand paul made that announcement on the day his candidacy was announced, it was a sign of how intertwined bitcoin had become with the rise of libertarianism, tea party all of this stuff after the financial crisis. Host we have calls for Nathaniel Popper on Digital Currency. Columbia maryland, jim. Caller thank you. God bless cspan. You have been talking in general terms with government. Bringing it to an individual level, as an entrepreneur i went through the loan process and banking and it was a mess and a bureaucratic nightmare. Why is it that we, as people and a society, feel this need to regulate bitcoin just because we have always regulated these things . Why can we not just move on and look at different ways of doing it . This is a new form of currency why are we so determined to regulate it like it needs to be controlled . It does not make sense to me. The process we have now is so convoluted and makes no sense. This seems like a much easier different way of doing things. Is there a reason it cannot be done like that . Guest i think there are regulators who are trying to take a new approach with bitcoin. Over the last year, the effort to regulate bitcoin has been led by the top financial regulator in new york. He came up with something called the bitlicense, which was his effort to create a new regime for this technology. To the question of does this thing needs to be regulated, one of the elements that comes through so strongly in the story of bitcoin and is such a theme in my book is that this new technology that allowed money to move around drove home how much, once money comes involved, peoples worst instincts are drawn forth. Bitcoins history has been marked by enormous instances of hacking and theft and fraud. And often served as a reminder of why regulations, into existence in the first place. You have this universe where people control their own money but often times, those people are less sophisticated. Bitcoin makes it possible for you to control your own money with what is known as a private key, a password. If a hacker gains control of your computer and get that private key, the essentially have your money. That has happened many times. Probably more people have lost money using bitcoin then made money using bitcoin. A lot of money has been made, but a lot of people have lost money. You have understood unsophisticated People Holding their own money. Or when people stop trusting themselves, they have given their bitcoins to what our essentially bitcoin banks to hold their money for them. Not too surprisingly those acorn banks, the biggest of which known as mount gawk, have often proven to be not up to the task of protecting that. This has brought forth arguments of if you have Something Like this mount gawk, a company in tokyo that held half 1 billion of peoples bitcoin money, you need someone looking at it to make sure it has reasonable security, make sure it is not a way station for hamas or hezbollah to move their money rum toured in wars area to the United States or vice versa. There is a reason you want someone watching the Financial Institutions. That can go too far in the other direction and you get this convoluted process we have now that you talked about. Payments are another indication of that. It can take three days to make a simple Money Transfer to a friend. There are certainly middle grounds, but the story of thefts and wrongdoing and fraud through the bitcoin story have in a reminder of why regulations about. Host oregon, neema is on the line. Caller i am hearing how volatile it is. It looks like it was going off a hundred ohm, which scares me more than anything. What about a country, disliking us so bad, that they would hang on to a line of bitcoin and then flood the market. Lets say you have 1000 in the bank. If a nation that hates us does that, we could end up with only five dollars and that it. My concern is chinas coming out with their own money. And our friends, germany france, south korea, thailand, they are joining in with the china banks. Can you explain something about that as well . Guest i think you are talking about, essentially, these currency wars that, particularly chinas effort to supplant the dollar as the reserve currency i think what bitcoin is now is a long way from being able to provide an alternative in that sense. When you look today one of the coin when it was launched, the initial description in 2008 when it was released, people talked about the fact that this could one day be a sort of new global reserve currency. That has come up through acorn story. At this point, all the bitcoins in existence are worth Something Like 2 billion or 3 billion. That is less than the stock of urban outfitters. Host what is an individual bitcoin worth today . Guest Something Like 235. There is Something Like 14 million of them in the world. That gives you the total value of the bitcoins. When you have seen in one of the stories i tell in my book is the story of argentina, where bitcoin has caught on, in part because of the problems with their own currency. They had numerous instances of hyperinflation, and they had a deeply troubled financial system. People there have used the coin as an alternative to their financial system. It is not half the country but it is ordinary people realizing that this new Technology May provide an alternative. For now, to the degree that bitcoin is used in that way, it is more likely to happen in smaller places like argentina. Places with troubled financial systems. The u. S. , for all its problems, has a credit card and ranking system that works pretty well for most people on a daytoday basis. You hear a lot of people in this movement talking about bitcoin saying that the u. S. Is not the first place that needs this technology. It is needed in places where people do not have it bank account or have a credit card. Host you talked about argentina, ecuador is the Money Initiative outlaws bitcoins and makes it mandatory for banks to follow that dictate. A couple tweets, the reason there has been speculation is because the dollar has been debate. Also, if cash is only legal tender, how can it coin be legal , is the core not another pyramid scheme . That reflects the title of the peace that meant obrien in the Washington Post a week ago or so. Part of what he said in his comments on wondering what bitcoin is, he says it is not clear what bitcoin is or what it will be, but it is clear it is not a currency. People do not set prices in bitcoin and do not buy things with it either. That is the only function of money, he writes. It comes close to performing as a store of value, but it does not even do that well. A lot on that play. Plate. Guest that gets right and a lot of deep questions that have swirled around bitcoin. B pro