Last week, I delivered a speech on the origin of paper money. Here's the complete written copy.

What I'm showing you is money. More precisely, paper money. The paper, which this money is printed on, has no intrinsic value by itself. The 20 dollars value is declared and enforced by the government. Here in my hand is another form of money. This silver maple leaf coin has a declared value of only 5 dollars. But its market value right now is 37 dollars.

Money, as the medium of exchange, has two main functions. One, it is a unit of account for value. Two, it is a store of value. Precious metals, like gold and silver, have been used as money for thousands of years exactly because they fit these two functions very well. How does paper money perform? Not so well. As a unit of value, paper money devalues too much and too fast due to government over printing. Can you imagine the length of a metric meter getting shorter and shorter? If this should not happen to a unit of length, why do we allow it to happen to a unit of value? As a store of value, paper money is worth nothing by itself. Its value is declared by the government. But unlike gold and silver, governments come and go. When a government is in deep trouble, so too will be its paper money.

If paper money is so fraud, why are we using it today? To answer this question, let's go back in history. Let's revisit ancient China where paper money was first invented.

Kim Jong Il died yesterday. What's going to happen? Chaos or opportunity or both? Who knows, this could be the start of World War 3!

Yesterday I tried to create a Korea conflict scenario for my newly released Deep Battle game. But I was stuck on the map. Usually I use Google earth and Google map to help with my map design. But North Korea? It was blank in both Google earth and map. Not much details on cities, roads or anything. I give up for now, maybe some other time in the future when there's more information available to public.

Now I'm thinking about my gold and silver investments. They may get a boost tomorrow from this uncertainty.

I read an interesting article today at King World News. In this article, Jim Rickards claims that China is the sucker at the global gold poker table. I kind of agree with him. While middle east nations are busy selling oil for gold. China are selling their goods for worthless paper. They are stuck with 3 trillion dollars of paper. Nowhere else to go, not enough gold, don’t know what to do and they are completely vulnerable to the United States.

Years ago I was shocked to hear that our universe is ever expanding. Now I am shocked again to hear that neutrinos can travel faster than light.

Before Einstein, physicists were shocked to find out through experiments that nothing travels faster than light. Because of this, Einstein deduced his relativity theory on the premise that nothing travels faster than light.

New theory is needed if this premise is proved not to be true. Wow, I hope what I hear today is true.

This is a truly enlightening book. It is written in a very convincing, logical, common sense way. 100% pure gold standard may very well be the cure for all the economic ills in this world.

2012 is approaching, people say this could be a big transforming/transcendental year for humanity. I wonder what could it be. Could a monetary revolution to gold/silver standard be part of it?

What Has Government Done to Our Money? and The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar