Can Bitcoin Replace Government-Issued Money?

An Oxford-style debate at the SOHO Forum

On August 19, 2019 the SOHO Forum hosted a lively Oxford-style debate between George Selgin and Saifedean Ammous. Selgin is the Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he is the editor-in-chief of the Center’s blog, Alt-M, Professor Emeritus of economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. Ammous is an associate professor of economics at Adnan Kassar School of Business and a foreign member of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. He is also the author of The Bitcoin Standard: Sound Money in a Digital Age published by Wiley Brothers in 2018.

Oxford-style debates focus on a sharply worded resolution. They follow a formal structure that begins with audience members casting a pre-debate vote on the motion that is either for, against or undecided. Each panelist presents a seven-minute opening statement, after which the moderator takes questions from the audience with inter-panel challenges. Finally, each panelist delivers a two-minute closing argument, and the audience delivers their second (and final) vote for comparison against the first set of votes. The winner is determined by who has swayed more audience members between the two votes.