30 - Network State Conference 2026 - Christopher Smith on Why a New Country Needs a New Currency

Hello everyone. So I heard you want to start a new country? Well, you're probably going to need a new currency. So the motto of Network State is win and help win. This is the essence of free market capitalism the ideal of humans voluntarily collaborating to solve our collective problems. It's the foundation of civilization. I like to say money is love and love is a circle. The idea of money has been dramatically over complicated. It's actually very simple. You do things for other people and your number goes up. Other people do things for you and your number goes down. That's making and spending money. Of course, that's just an ideal. It doesn't always work like that. Sometimes people do things and they don't get credit for it. And sometimes people take credit and they didn't do anything. That's called stealing. There's a special kind of stealing called counterfeiting where you just create fake money and then spend it. It's stealing because you're getting other people to do things for you and you didn't do anything for them. You broke the circle. It's very sad. So let's zoom out cuz there's another question here. Where does the money come from? It may seem like our favorite currency, the US dollar, has always been here and will always be here forever and ever. Amen. But actually historically it's not quite true. You can see, dating back to the the 1200s, different currencies have become dominant and fallen away to be replaced by others. You've got the florin, the real, and of course, the dollar. But, today's empires are tomorrow's ashes. The dollar probably won't be here forever. What's going to replace it? You know, it's always going to be easy easier to print money to solve problems or paper them over. Instead of saying no, making hard decisions, especially with an election coming up. That's why we get inflation. As you can see here, the value of government paper over time reliably declines relative to harder assets like gold. It's not something specific to the dollar. It applies to all of the fiat currencies. But, what if our civilizations didn't just last a few hundred years? What if we could make something that lasted for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years? What would that look like? Well, the idea of Bitcoin was inflation is bad, actually. And so, it addressed this by making a scarce currency. Only 21 million coins will ever be created. It's censorship resistant, so it's difficult to weaponize it against your political enemies. And it's decentralized, meaning Bitcoin doesn't care what race or religion, nationality, or even species you are. If you have an internet connection, you can use it. Quantus takes this a step further. We took the beautiful ideas of grandpa Bitcoin and made it quantum secure, private, and highly usable. If you'd like to get involved with freedom money, please download our wallet, our mobile wallet today, and come talk to me or someone wearing a Quantus t-shirt, and we'll give you some for free. Also, you can buy it on near.com today. No KYC. Thank you. Okay.