Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell Joining us today is George A. Selgen, director of the Cato Institute Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Welcome back to Free Thoughts, George. George A. Selgen Thanks, Trevor. Trevor Burrus So today we're going to be discussing, at least in part, the gold standard, which is something that is actually associated with libertarians quite a bit. Gold bugs, a lot of kind of discussion of things like this. Before we get into some of those kind of issues about libertarians and the gold standard, what is the gold standard when people just say, we need a gold standard? What do they mean? George A. Selgen Well, I can't tell you what other people mean because that depends, but at its most basic, a gold standard is a monetary system where the basic money unit is a definite quantity of gold. So it could be an ounce or two or three or any other weight of gold of a certain purity. And, of course, a gold standard system would have actual coins representing that basic quantity or multiples or fractions thereof, and that's the most basic gold standard. But, of course, we have to think about paper money and how that fits in. And there, traditionally, paper money fits into a gold standard by consisting only of good claims or IOUs to gold where the IOUs are promises to pay definite quantities of gold, which are, again, based on whatever those standard units are and their coin representatives. So that's at its most basic. And this is a big distinction between coins, which used to, a lot of people don't even realize, were about, they actually had the gold or silver or bronze in them and they were actually valuable, correct, as opposed to bills. Yes, of course. They were valuable because gold is a valuable commodity and its value might be enhanced by the fact that it's also the monetary middle, but its value doesn't depend on that fact. It exists independently. But it's always important to recognize that as soon as you have paper money in a gold standard, you've got more than one condition for the gold standard being an effect. You have the condition for what coins consist of or the most basic ones. And then, of course, you have the requirements for paper money itself. I wanted to add one more dimension to this because not too complicated too much, but the nature of the paper gold standard, to call it that, has changed a lot in history. And the most fundamental change has to do with the extent to which governments are involved in administering paper money. As I said in the very old, earliest stages, paper money that was consistent with the gold standard consisted of real IOUs to gold that were enforceable IOUs because they were based on enforceable private contracts. Basically, if a bank issued paper notes, for example, and it dishonored them by not giving people the gold that they promised to pay, then that bank was in default and that was that. But as central banks or government-sponsored banks more generally, and governments themselves became involved in issuing paper money, when that happened, the nature of these paper representatives to gold changed even before they obviously, it obviously changed by the governments reneging on their commitments. It changed in a more subtle way before that because sovereign immunity attached to governments and to the central banks that they sponsored, or eventually it attached to the latter. And as that happened, it was no longer the case that a central bank that disordered its promises to pay gold would necessarily suffer any consequences. It became more like the government itself in that regard. And as soon as that happened, the nature of the gold standard itself changed because it ceased to be all that reliable, at least so far as its paper representatives were concerned. And that was, of course, the slippery slope to fiat money, which is what you end up with when these central banks take advantage of their sovereign immunity to say, well, we're just not going to pay you anymore. Why gold? I mean, when we talk about a gold standard, either in the past or the arguments that we should return to one today, are we talking literally about gold, should we be talking about gold? Does it really matter if it's gold or any other commodity? That depends, of course, on who you ask. It's true that there's the gold standard is of commodity standards, the one that's most well-known and most popular, particularly among libertarians, as Trevor was saying. But a lot of this is just historical accident. It should be observed that although the gold standard has ancient roots, so does the silver standard. Silver is the most clear, obvious competitor to gold and among commodity monies. Both of those metals have obviously obvious advantages over other commodities in not being so perishable and so on. But in U.S. history, for example, the gold standard as such was not officially adopted until 1900. Up to that time, we were officially, if not in practice, on a bimetallic standard where the dollar, the basic monetary unit of the United States, was defined both as a definite quantity of gold and as a definite quantity of silver. That's what bimetalism means. Now, in practice, what happened under that arrangement, both in the United States and in other countries, in many other countries that had it, was that depending on which of the two precious metals was more valuable in the open market place and how their relative values there compared to their implied official values, given the two units that define the same dollar, the two amounts of metal that define the same dollar, you would have a tendency for one or the other metal to be driven out of circulation to disappear from circulation and for only the remaining metal to be their true standard in effect at that time. And so for quite a while in U.S. history, we were actually on a de facto, if not a de jure silver standard. Then partly as a result of gold discoveries, mainly as a result of gold discoveries that made it the relatively undervalued, legally undervalued, sorry, overvalued metal. Gold became the de facto standard, though still not the only official standard money. And as I said, it was only in 1900 that gold was officially enshrined as the soul's standard metal. And finally, we should remember that there were important long periods, including from the Civil War until 1879, when we were neither on a gold nor a silver standard, but on a temporary paper standard, the greenbacks in this case. What sort of problem for those who talk about the gold standard incessantly, there's a lot of people there and I were talking about this before we record that there's just people who talk about the gold standard a lot and they're kind of quirky about how they talk about it. They can take any conversation and direct it back to the gold standard as the solution to everything on the planet. But for those people, I want to talk a little bit more about those people. I call them find another bar stool. Exactly. Well, I'm sure you get berated particularly, but what sort of problem is it supposed to solve? It seems like you just talked about problems that were created by the gold standard, especially when you found new caches of gold, that seems to be a problem. Well, let's be careful now. What I said was that underbimetalism, discoveries of precious metals of one or the other kind could disrupt the standard and cause you to switch from effectively being on one standard to being on another. But I would call that a problem of bimetalism, not of having a metallic standard per se. As for the benefits of having a gold standard to a considerable extent, they are the same as those of having a silver standard or any other stable single commodity standard. So some are better than others in this respect, and that big advantage consists of the fact that commodities, all of them are naturally scarce, most obviously those that are not reproducible like gold. So a standard based on such a commodity obviously doesn't allow limitless money creation or inflation, puts a constraint on it, but in fact the advantage is better than that to take the case of the gold standard and bimetalism for that matter. We can see from the historical record that it had a tendency, a very good tendency to preserve long run price level stability. For example, if you go back to the very earliest price level data that we have for the United States and allowing those numbers, those figures are not all that reliable, still they suggest that back at the early days of the Republic, we're talking about the 1790s, the price level was approximately what it was still in 1913. Now changed, it bounced around a lot between those two dates, again according to the statistics we had, but the long run tendency for it to come back to wherever it started was very clear in the data. So you're saying essentially no, but with fluctuation but essentially no inflation between 1790 and 1930s? That's right and that's not a coincidence, it's a feature of a commodity standard like a gold standard and it's not hard to explain. Essentially here's what happens, suppose remember that in a gold standard the price of a unit of gold is the one thing that doesn't change, so if you define a dollar as so many ounces of gold, obviously the price of that many ounces of gold stays $1. So what does it mean to talk about inflation in a case like that? It means that other prices are rising relative to the price of gold. Well what does that mean? It means that the costs of implements and materials and labor for producing gold, those costs are going up but the price of gold isn't going up, which means the profitability of mining gold is going down and that means that inflation tends to be self-limiting because the more it progresses the less profitable it is to mine or search for gold and so gold output eventually slows down. Mines can even be closed because they cease to be profitable and that puts a break on the money supply and eventually the price level will stop growing and will even come back down. On the other hand if you have a period of deflation that makes gold mining and prospecting more worthwhile and the tendency is for such efforts to result in a greater output of gold that reverses the downward movement in prices and this is exactly what happened historically. You had discoveries of gold like the discovery in California which is a famous one that are not really accidental when you look at the big picture. What happens in most cases is prices have been falling, people start prospecting harder for gold and eventually they find it. Sometimes they find a lot of it but instead of causing inflation the main effect of these discoveries more often than not, not always, is to reverse what had been a deflationary trend and so help prices come back where they were before. This long run stability of the price level is in fact a built in feature of many commodity standards and that long run stability will hold as long as the basic cost of production of gold, it has to be rising at the margin but on the long run the cost of producing gold just has to not fall any faster than that of most other goods. Does picking the commodity matter in the sense that so gold has other uses, so we use it in electronics and it can be very good in certain things and so does it, do we run the risk of if we have a gold standard of directing what might be a valuable resource to a less efficient use because people want to use it for as money and it's less valuable than to use it in these ways that could be better in the future or more wealth creating? Well, if you want to have the advantage I just described of a commodity standard it's difficult to have except by having a commodity and the commodity is by definition, something that's got a value other than its value as money. So any commodity standard is going to involve opportunity costs from employing the commodity as money rather than in other ways. Those costs can be kept at a minimum however by taking careful advantage of substitutes including paper substitutes of the sort I referred to before and if you have a well conceived and regulated system of paper substitutes and also bank deposit substitutes that don't have to be actual paper that system can allow you to have a commodity standard, a gold standard for example where the actual amount of gold employed to maintain the standard is very low just to give you an extreme case in the Scottish banking system that you fellows know I'm very fond of because it was a very free banking system. The banks got by at one point with the reserve ratios that is precious metal reserves of some thing like 1 to 2% of their total assets. Most of the money that was actually used in Scotland consisted of the redeemable notes of a set of Scottish banks and also deposits held at those same banks and for most of Scotland's history in the late 18th and early 19th century the system besides being cheap was also remarkably stable. Adam Smith writes eloquently about its properties in both respects in book 2 chapter 2 of the Wealth of Nations and what he points out is precisely Aaron the point that by saving on actual gold it allowed first that gold to be put to other uses and second people's savings to be harnessed for productive, more productive uses by being backed by productive bank loans. So in this situation just to make sure I understand the pound notes or whatever they were issuing were worth a very little amount of gold. No, no. They weren't worth a little gold. But they were redeemable for a very little amount of gold. They were backed. Now not even that. They were backed so let's take that 1% number. So you might have a Scottish five pound Royal Bank of Scotland note. What I'm saying is that if you went to the Royal Bank of Scotland its total gold reserves might be 1% to 2% of the value of its total outstanding liabilities including all its notes. But that didn't mean that the note that the note that you were holding was worth anything less than five pounds or that the bank would give you anything less than five pounds worth of gold if you sought to redeem that note. In fact of course the bank notes did circulate at their full face value just about all the time and the banks did redeem them and those things go hand in hand. If a bank didn't redeem the notes would no longer command their face value. So in other words the banks found ways to manage their affairs such that they were able to get by with slim reserves. But of course to get there they had to show their capacity to honor their promises regularly and it took a long time for them to establish their reliability. But they did so to the point where your average Scotsman the last thing he wanted was to have to hold a gold guinea. I thought it was a nuisance and would rush to his bank and get quick good Scottish bank note to take its place and that's how it was. They couldn't survive that means that if there was a run to go get your gold they would run out. Well they might have to do some quick thinking around. Runs were almost unknown almost completely unknown. Runs happen in decadent banking systems like ours today and in the past they are a symptom of a banking system that has not developed in a healthy fashion. And that's that consistent sort of the next question which both is going back to the quirky gold standard person which is something Aaron I as I mentioned we don't know a lot about monetary policy compared to other things that we know about. But it's always very interesting to me. But one reason I can be honestly say if someone comes up to me and the first thing they start talking about is the gold standard and this actually happened literally last night at a Cato reception a guy came up and said are you a fan of sound money and I pretty much assumed that the guy is going to be really quirky if a kind of conspiracy theorist in other ways and sure enough he immediately got into the Rothschilds and Luannotti and all these things and any and also you know any podcast listeners cannot see me cringing. Yeah and if you're talking about his hands over his face if you're having a conversation about I don't know police brutality they'll be like well we can't do anything unless we restore sound money and they could so here's the question. Why do you think these people are so focused on gold what is it what is it about gold and just sound money in general that makes a lot of things going on here and I feel that there's a risk of course of of lumping all people who are fond of the gold standard together with the nuts cases and I certainly don't want to do that. Some of my best friends are fond of the gold standard including some very good economists I know however it must be said that a big part of this specific appeal of gold as opposed to other precious other commodity standard certainly has to do with the fact that it was the last commodity standard in place here in the United States and there's a sense that that's the most obvious choice to go back to if we could ever have a commodity standard again there's also a lingering feeling I think among some that after all people got swindled when they suspended gold payments back in the thirties and ultimately abrogated all of the government's commitments based on gold bonds and other things and and it's confiscated private gold holdings to boot that that all of this was quite a nasty thing and that we need we need in some way to make up for it the problem with that of course is that every year that goes by it becomes a less compelling point of view it's already been you know some nine on almost 90 years 80 you know 80 plus years since this happened and and you know it gets to the point where it's almost akin to suggesting that we really ought to give all the property back to the American Native Americans which you know there's certainly an argument from justice that that that they deserve it and it would be a little disruptive and let's face it that the Native Americans who live today or that the connections that they can show to any existing property are perhaps not all that obvious in the case of gold though it's even more clear that justice wouldn't be served by trying to restore the old gold standard because among other things it would require a massive deflation to get there and that itself would be an awfully painful procedure you could try to restore a new gold standard of course where the dollar represents so much each dollar represents a much smaller part of gold but what would that have to do with restoring justice or making up for anything that happened in the past the argument for doing anything like that for any renewal of the gold standard in my opinion has to be based on its advantages starting today and not on any claim that it would redress past injustices so as soon as you put it that way then you also I think are compelled to to say that we might also have to consider we should consider all other alternatives for reforming the present system instead of treating gold as being in any way sacrosanct by guns or by guns if gold is a good choice today and if there's a good way to implement it now well by gosh let's fight for it but if there are other better alternatives we can think of today the fact that gold was once our monetary our standard monetary metal is itself no reason to to argue for restoring it to that role are there any countries today that are still on a gold standard no well is that did that happen I mean I again I'm picturing quirky gold standard guy in my brain but did they kind of all slowly move off of it because they were constrained and wanted to inflate their currencies or they could or would it be impossible for a gold standard country to exist in a world where everyone else has doesn't have a gold standard well I think to a considerable extent the last statement is true but but what actually happened was that most of the countries that were on the gold standard went off in the course of the the Great Depression now it should be said that in fact those countries most of them originally went off the gold standard during World War One and then between World War One the Great Depression to the extent that they got back on a gold standard they did so often in a kind of jury rigged sort of way so that this this gold standard that was reestablished these gold standards reestablished after World War One where Rube Goldberg contraptions compared to the stand gold standards in effect before World War One and they were very fragile in any event the depression caused it all them all to break apart one after the other and in fact although the United States left the gold standard itself in 1933 it did so only partially it never allowed its citizens to again convert paper money into gold however it did resume gold payments for foreign central banks and it continued to do so in its capacity as the supplier of reserve currency under the so called Bretton Woods system so the U.S. in in remained to a limited degree on the gold standard until it was finally taken off completely in the early years of the Nixon administration so is so in fact we remained we were the last gold standard country though we were so only in a to an extent that was much more limited than had been the case before the Great Depression now a lot of people would describe the going off of the gold standard as I mentioned that that it was it was governments I mean conspiring with the Bretton Woods attacks on Bretton Woods but governments conspiring to break the boundaries the break the confines that gold put on their ability to inflate the currency in order to do more spending and more pernicious thing is this accurate would you say to some extent well there's no need for the word conspiracy well just kidding I guess as the fact is that that in the case of Bretton Woods what happened was the U.S. had found itself its dollars being treated as the official reserve currency of other countries so the gold standard for all those other countries survived only in the sense that their currencies were convertible into dollars which were ultimately convertible into gold not but not by us citizens but by foreign central banks and foreign authorities so what happened though was what what you might expect to happen in a situation like that being being in the position of supplying the world's reserve currency means that a central bank can issue more of its liabilities can expand and doesn't face any immediate necessary request for redemption because this IO user themselves being treated as reserves gold may be the ultimate reserves but reserve but but for a while at least other central banks would be happy to sit on the official reserves and not on not turn them into ultimate reserves of gold well though as prices rose in the 60s because the Fed was issuing more money in part owing to fiscal pressures from the Vietnam War first in the great society afterwards or along with it the the the French in particular started to cash in their gold chips and this is what broke down Bretton Woods because our IOUs the Fed's IOUs the promises had expanded but its gold reserves were limited and ultimately to prevent to avoid running out of gold they suspended payments much as they'd done the 30s but this time for foreign governments as well and that was that so now the real the real problem here isn't conspiracy it really boils down to the different status of a central bank compared to a private bank as I mentioned before a private bank simply couldn't say well we're not going to pay you anymore or even we're going to devalue even today you go to your bank of deposit forget about deposit insurance that's not the point but suppose you go to your bank and you say I'd like to to cash I have a thousand dollar deposit balance and I'd like to have my money back now what that means today is that that bank owes you a thousand dollars worth of Federal Reserve currency but suppose it said you oh I'm sorry we've had a devaluation so your one thousand dollars of deposit credits are now only worth five hundred dollars in Federal Reserve now so well no they can't do that that's called default that's failure they close this there's no two ways around it and this is how it's always been for ordinary commercial banks they simply don't have the right to decide to pay less because their liabilities are true genuine liabilities promises to pay their their solemn promises the courts insisted they be honored okay or there are consequences but a central bank it took time for people to realize this because there was a long period when central banks were not really sovereign entities they were private and they acted like private firms but eventually they as they got more and more let's say cozy with governments they acquired the character sovereign immunities of governments themselves and at that point they could say as the Fed said in in 1970 sorry we're not going to pay and nothing happens the bank doesn't get wind down wound down it doesn't get closed the shareholders take no losses there's no inquiries there's no liquidation there's no receivership none of that happens and of course what that means is the temptation for central banks to accommodate governments when the governments lean on them is great because the repercussions for the central bankers are are minimal and this makes a huge difference and that's what happened in the case of Fed in the in the 70s and many other central banks before and since that although they start out with a commitment to a fixed exchange rate whether metallic or otherwise could be some foreign currency fixed exchange right there's not much holding that thing together because there's not many penalties born and by a central bank that dishonors these commitments and this by the way to segue this one reason why I'm restoring a gold standard today would be very very difficult so that brings up the question two of the relationship between the Fed and a gold standard and maybe we sort of need to explain exactly what the Fed does but they're often talked about together and you say well we have we used to have the gold standard now we have the Fed but we had a the Fed and a gold standard at some point and that's possible maybe not desirable but it's at least possible absolutely a central banks can coexist with metallic standards but they don't tend to do so for very long for the reason I just explained the fact that there are no serious repercussions for central banks at least once they obtain the the status of sovereign entities were treated by the courts as such at that point the jig is pretty much up it's just a matter of time before the promise ceases to be worth anything so which is the which is the first problem if you were if you were to central banking is the first problem if you if you had to which one do you need to what domino do you need to fall first to start getting matter to fix our monetary system okay so let's just step back a bit uh the the that you can have a gold standard without a central bank and you can have a competitive banking system like this goddess system where the banks are all commercial banks they issue the paper money but there that's a commercial promise just like your modern bank deposit and that will hold together that will be that will tend to endure them will be bank failures uh and so on but there won't be or there will be there will be of course some banks will fail but but uh there's no tendency for the whole system to give up on the gold standard at the same time uh there may be crises of course but the nature of the underlying contracts is such that it's actually rather difficult to not have the thing stay together because you'd have to rewrite contracts and unless you're talking about sovereign entity entities that's not so easy to do as soon as you monopolize currency issuing privileges in a in a privileged institution uh whether you call it a central bank or not you're already on the slippery slope where the the longevity the survivability of the metallic standard that it's all supposed to be based on is now in doubt because as soon as sovereign immunity attaches to the promises then there's a grave risk that they'll be dishonored and eventually they will be and that'll be that um so going back uh to the question you know how do you uh fix things that's a very difficult question uh and now there are really two different questions what should we do to fix our present monetary system and what would we have to do to get a metallic monetary just standard back in place they're not as i said hinted at before the answer to those questions are not necessarily the same uh indeed i personally don't think going back to a metallic standard is uh uh worth even worth trying i have to be very careful because i i don't want to uh overstate the case i certainly don't want to dismiss contrary arguments by reasonable gold gold standard fans and there are plenty of them but here's what i see is the problem in order to affect a change to the gold standard first of all it isn't enough to do as some people have suggested to merely make it legal for people to own gold and open bank accounts based on gold uh some of those to some extent these things are legal first of all but even if there were no barriers to the use again of gold as a as a monetary medium to no barriers to private coinage to having banks that have gold deposits and so on the problem with the spontaneous development of a new gold standard is the same problem faced by any potential arrival to an established monetary standard it has to it has to compete with a well established standard and it confronts massive network disadvantages or disadvantages of network economics in doing so what that's a fancy way of saying the a monetary standard is as useful as the size of the network of people already using it it's rather like it uh being on a telephone system or computer network in that respect so this is like what say bitcoin is dealing with it's only two people use it but now more and more people use it well yeah and i'll talk about that in a second i was going to allude to bitcoin because it's a good case in point in any event if you've already got a standard today in the us we have the fiat dollar administered by the fed that's accepted pretty much by everyone not only by everybody in in the us economy but by large numbers of people elsewhere that's a tremendously large network and a very hard one to compete with and even though even if it were true that a gold standard once established in place of the fiat standard would be better in some respects it doesn't follow that it's better right away to any individual consumer because its small network size alone makes it inferior right so that's why uh i'm i'm very doubtful that any degree of liberalization of choice of laws to provide for choice and currency would itself suffice to cause a parallel gold standard to take off any and eventually to replace what we've got so that that thing aside can i keep going if you still have time i have a follow-up question okay so um then what's the alternative the only alternative is that there should be an official attempt to reinstate the gold standard right well what does that mean the only sense i can make out of such an official attempt is that they there would be a legislation that would tell the fed to once again make its dollars redeemable into club into gold and then equip it with the necessary gold reserves the treasury could usually do if the gold is in fort nox that it claims is there for example pick the right rate of conversion and so on now though there are two problems or two possible problems there is a rate of conversion such that you could make every unit of money in the economy a hundred percent backed by gold or every federal reserve dollar on the fed's books a hundred percent backed by gold but that would almost certainly entail a very dramatic change in prices and deflation it just look at it this way right if we take the present price of gold and figure out and compare that to what amount of gold we would have to make the federal reserve dollars worth if they were each to be fully covered like one so it's about a thousand dollars an ounce right so a dollar would be one one thousandth of an ounce you have to take the amount of gold that the treasury could provide to the fed and the amount of dollars that a fed liabilities that presently exist and imagine what the price of gold would then be one way or the other you're going to have a very disruptive change if you do that now if you allow for fractional backing of gold then of course you could do it without that disruption but then you'd have this other problem like the scottish did your same oh yeah some fraction but then you'd have another problem because it's the fed and the fed no longer has credibility no one would trust the fed if you told me that as of tomorrow the federal my federal reserve notes in my wallet i could go to the fed and get a certain amount of gold for them i'd go and i'd get the gold because i know there's absolutely no chance that the fed's gonna revalue its notes so that they they end up being worth more than the gold and then i regret what i did but i know for sure that there is a positive value i don't know what it is that the fed's going to do what's what it's done in the past and it's going to devalue or suspend and turn back to fiat money more over i know other people are thinking this so they're going to go and even if the fed wasn't planning anything between us we're going to force it to devalue we're going in other words we're going to stage what's called a speculative attack as what brought down the tibet and the ruble and british pound and milling other the other fixed exchange rates in the past not to even go back to previous gold standard devaluation so so spontaneous order won't do it 100 reserves forget about it official fractional reserve based gold dollar won't last as far as letting alternative systems so we're not we don't talk to government the government doesn't formally switch to a gold standard or any other currency with you know the government of grace adopts the bitcoin or whatever but we you know it kind of emerges and develops in parallel is there a point at which it can't become the the kind of default system that everyone's using because of income taxes like the government has to at some point we have to pay taxes the government so the government decided it's only going to accept dollars it's never going to accept bitcoins it's never going to accept gold or whatever these alternatives are then were kind of locked into using those yeah that you remind me that I meant to say something about bitcoin as an example if bitcoin is fascinating because it's taken it does have a foothold in the world of currency but let's face it it's tiny compared to the dollar network more over right as we speak other blockchain type cryptocurrencies that have noted the advantage of the established network money are competing effectively with bitcoin for payments remittment remittments and and other things that bitcoin does very efficiently uh and doing it successfully by by being dollar based but on so on Aaron's question though like if let's say something happens where bitcoin let's talk about I mean for example venezuela right now was experiencing hyper hyperinflation and it seems that something like bitcoin if they they could be using that in their you know to get around the currency but when they have to pay taxes they might have to use the i didn't want to draw the question or if there's employer tax withholding that my employer has to pay me yeah well the answer is that why it would never be able to take over first of all um it's true that when you have a crack up hyperinflation like venezuelas that of course is the one exception to the rule that the established network money is is is is preferred to others because the depreciation rate is so bad that the demand for that the network is no longer attractive right that happens it's very rare and by the way some gold standard fans seem to be looking forward to a hyperinflation in the united states so that that can happen here that's another solution to getting to gold that I rather uh would avoid would rather avoid and I don't like it not because it might not work but because I just wouldn't want anyone to have to go through it um and I certainly don't think it's something we should wish wish for uh but um but uh that's for the tax argument people I think people have uh uh many people including economists vastly exaggerate the role that uh receivability of a money in taxes plays in driving the general uh uh acceptability of that uh money it's true of course that that governments are big players in their economies and to that extent they are big contributors to the network effects so yes if a government accepts it and if it's official money or an official money in payment of taxes it's going to give a big advantage to that compared to other monies but but uh although governments are big there are other big players and so tax receivability alone is not by any means usually sufficient to guarantee that the money that's so receivable will will outcompete others remember that uh if enough people prefer other monies they can always they can always uh treat the official money as something they buy just for the purpose of paying taxes let me make an analogy suppose occasionally you like to buy some goods from France all right what do you do well when you have to do that you go and you get a money changer to give you some francs and you buy the goods from France the same thing could be done let's say if an economy where the government's got some crappy money and it says you don't you can only use this to pay your taxes and everybody else prepares to use bitcoin well most of their purchasing and stuff they're doing with bitcoin but every once in a while they go and buy some you know uh has been as well and uh stuff just just to pay taxes with and that's its only use and they just do these spot exchanges right it's not going to do much for the value of the stuff it's just gonna you know they're going to be in and out of it and that's that so people should not uh or exaggerate the extent to which governments merely by using the power of determining who can what can be used to pay taxes that they can prop up their monies to any considerable extent that way it's a it's in my opinion that's a fallacy though it's one that's that economists too many of them cling to so we've discussed the problem and the gold standard and the problems with putting it back into place and then we have this concern of as you brought up of inflation and currency collapse and a lot of a lot of people who talk a lot about monetary policy especially the ones who corner you in bars and stuff like this uh talk about you know you know you better get your money into gold because in two years the dollar is gonna gonna absolutely collapse and they do kind of seem to wish it's gonna happen sometimes there's a thin line between uh saying that that's inevitable and wishing it would happen but how how scared are you of this i mean we you know is this something that you think is a possibility if we keep going the way that we're going in terms of the way we print money and the way that we have a fed is this something that you're like yes i mean do you have gold buried in your backyard george come on that's what i want to know and i want to know where it is if i do uh actually i i don't because i don't have a backyard well i have a backyard back in athens if i have gold there i don't know about it it's possible you know i could be the next sutter mine could pop a bit property could be the next sutter's mill for all i know but no i didn't put any gold there um well look the answer to that question would depend would vary depending on what country the person you're talking asking it lives in here in the united states do i think uh that we're in for hyperinflation anytime soon i don't i don't uh fortunately our institutions are such that um the public's dislike of of inflation does in fact translate into the the fed and the government between them to consider them as a unit are not not prepared to put up with the backlash they would get if they were to allow a lot of it at least not under present circumstances but what so what do you see happening in the in the short and maybe biggest stage a short run in the long run real dad but in the short run with the system we have what is the even if we don't have the you know we're going to say we should have the gold standard what is the biggest danger that in fact i i just just wrote an op-ed about what i consider to be the biggest danger this morning uh and uh it's um it it is it is indeed a danger of excessive fed monetization of government debt and deficits but uh the reason it's a danger and a bigger one than we've had in the past is precisely because this time around it's possible the fed could do these things and not generate the inflation that would would in turn cause a backlash and and its capacity to do that its new capacity is a result of its ability to pay interest on bank reserves which is a power it gained in the course of the last crisis and has been using ever since and so far it has used that power uh as a device that allowed it to buy or add 3.7 trillion dollars to its balance sheet without causing inflation i don't want to give the wrong impression it had a lot of help from the fact that it was after all dealing with a depressed economy and exceptional liquidity demands but in principle paying interest on reserves is also a device for containing uh or rather for containing inflation by by simply encouraging banks to pile up reserves instead of lending them what i'm worried about is that in the future a fed pressured to monetize the government's debt and we are after all looking forward to a trump administration that could cause that debt uh to go way up by trillions of dollars in the decade uh the fed now that it's armed with this new tool might be more inclined to cave in to pressure from the administration to monetize debt knowing that it has this tool by which it could prevent that monetization from resulting in inflation essentially by uh causing the banks to pile up reserves so what what what it does what it does that is basically shunts the public savings from bank lending to productive industry and other purposes to lending to the government so it's grabbing the savings and the same the government grabs the savings in the same way it would if they were outright inflationary finance but ironically enough the fact that this is going on is is actually less obvious to people than it would be if there were inflation because in order for them to recognize what's happening they'd have to be cognizant of the accumulation of bank reserves the decline in bank lending and the multiplier and all that and the role of interest reserves that's a lot for people to digest it took them a long enough time to figure out that inflation was related to deficit financing and to therefore object to it uh it's it certainly would take them a long time to figure out this new method of shunting scarce savings to the government uh in order to gobble up paper over its deficits and i'm really worried about that if you've enjoyed listening to free thoughts this past year i encourage you to go check out libertarianism.org's facebook page where you can vote on your favorite episodes of 2016 free thoughts is produced by evan banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


Okay, we're gonna go ahead and get started if you want to take your seats Okay, so my name is Kurt Griffiths I am a architect at Rackspace hosting and I work on the Marconi project, which is the the codename for the message queuing service program that OpenStack has Today we'd like to give you a brief overview of the project We're gonna walk through the API and also talk a little bit about the architecture We've also got a live demo prepared for you so you can see Marconi in action and We'll finish up with Some frequently asked questions and then we'll have some time of course for for y'all to ask us whatever it's on your mind Okay, so In in the late 1800s young Italian by the name of Marconi began to play around with radio electronics in his attic of his family's home and He would go on to along with a few other visionaries revolutionize the way the world communicated Wireless had two key advantages over the alternatives First it allowed the center of the message and the receiver to be loosely coupled second it Afforded a wide variety of communications patterns. It was very flexible and you could apply it to a lot of different problems So with the Marconi project we hope to bring these same kinds of advantages to Cloud applications communicating through the internet We envision Marconi applying to a variety of application domains anything from e-commerce to software as a service to Social applications So let me let me just take you through some of the operations that you can do with the API So this is these are things that a cloud application developer would Would use in order to do some of those things that we just mentioned But before I get into some of the details It's helpful to understand that the Marconi API is based on two fundamental concepts first you have a message feed You can kind of think of this like a RSS or an atom feed where you can post messages up there. You can list them There's known No As you list messages other people can see them as well. So you're not hiding them from anyone There's also the notion of a claim and a claim is where I can grab a batch of messages and Their mind so you would use this for job queuing where you have workers who are processing things and and you only want one worker at a time to Be working on on a single message So those are the basic concepts and we actually have put these both in the same API and That enables hybrid messaging patterns. So you can have for example You might be processing Billing invoices maybe you're converting them to PDF files You can have a auditor process that's just watching the feed of messages fly by and Logging those and so if you ever have a problem or customer calls and says hey, I missed my invoice You can go back and track that so that's just one example of how you can use this hybrid model And out of those concepts we have you know to make this a little more concrete The API has a notion of cues or you can think of these as topics And then of course we have messages and then claims I already mentioned so these are pretty straightforward Now each one of these has different kinds of operations a lot of what you would expect and maybe a few things that you don't so Let me just take a couple minutes and walk through the different operations you can do on each resource The first up we have cues You can of course create a queue you can list cues you can find out that can be useful for auto discovery for example You can certainly delete them One interesting thing you can actually do with a queue is set metadata on it So back to the invoicing example you could set a template Into that queue metadata and then your your worker could pull that out and use that to construct the PDF file For example that you would then send to your customer And then you can also get statistics for that queue you can find out how many messages there are total How many are claimed versus free you can find out the the oldest and the newest message So we think this is going to be really useful for auto scale as well as just getting a Better insight into how your cues are behaving and and whether or not they're getting backed up So here's just a quick example of how you create a queue You can see I am able to choose the name of that queue And going back to the earlier example. I'm going to call it invoices And Here I'm going to set that template that I talked about before This is just a very simple example And then of course I can go ahead and get that so my my my worker would need to get that template back Out of the queue metadata so that's here's an example of how you might do that and Of course I can Always list those cues and I if I pass an optional query parameter detailed true I can get the metadata there as well and this can be useful if I'm trying to auto discover what What kind of cues I'm dealing with or you can imagine for a for a horizon or for some kind of control surface This could be useful And then of course you can delete Some message operations again, it's kind of the usual suspects you can post messages You can you can get a single message you can list those messages as much as you would like with an atom or an RSS feed with pagination And of course you can delete messages So I'll just show you briefly what a message looks like you you set a time to live which Controls the lifetime of that message here. I'm setting it for five minutes and then I'm setting a arbitrary payload This is as long as it's valid JSON. You can Submit whatever you like so it's up to the application to interpret that so here, I'm just maybe setting some some information you might find useful in generating invoice and There's just quick example of posting that and getting back the link to the postage message Again, this is an example of how I might list those messages One thing I'll just call out here as you can see the pagination is is there using the kind of a restful design We've tried really hard to make this a clean modern HTTP API All right, so our last one is things you can do with claims Of course you can create a claim when you create a claim it grabs it goes to the head of the queue and finds a certain it if so if I ask For five messages, it'll go find the first five messages that haven't been claimed by anyone yet And then return that to me and then I cannot I can always just read the claim directly I can refresh a claim because claims can actually expire and Yeah, I can also delete claim messages, etc Just really quick how this looks here. I'm creating a claim. I'm saying I I want it to live for one minute I think I can process all the messages there within a minute and That's useful because if my worker crashes then the system will automatically free release that claim and the messages can be reclaimed by another worker and Here I'm passing a limit of two so I'm asking for a maximum of two messages okay, so Once I get those messages, I'll do my processing in the example. I will create that PDF file Maybe I'll email it out and once I'm done. I'll delete that message so that it doesn't end up getting processed by a different worker And you can see there where I'm passing the claim ID so that ensures that Only the worker that created the claim is able to delete that message Okay, so that was a very quick rock-through if you want to dig into the details go to our wiki page We are planning to do some proper user documentation, but right now Everything's just kind of on the wiki. So With that I like to invite Flavio Percoco up from red hat. He's gonna discuss the architecture and Some deployment options that you have with mark on me. So hello run Thank God for the introduction. So yeah, I'll say I work for red hat. I'm sort of an engineer there Mostly learning to the storage side, but I'm also working on my Connie Like a broker developer Anyway, so I will now go through the whole architecture I will give you a really quick introduction to a two-mark on his architecture and how we built a whole this whole thing So this is a very high level overview of what we have right now. We have there. So basically Splitting three different layers that we can play with basically like if they were Lego bricks We have the first layer is a transport layer It allows so we created this because we wanted people to be able to deploy Markoni and be able to use different transport for it So those of you who don't like using HTTP for messaging Can you use some TCP transport and talk to Marconi through TCP or use your MQ as a You know as a way to send messages to Marconi and Marconi then will then process those messages and do something useful with them we then have The API layer where which is where we define the whole API So this is basically this is mostly a logical representation of how Marconi works We will split this in three different packages basically in the next few months But the API and the transport layer are in the same package right now So the API is high is where the API the API layer is where the API is defined is basically a couple of classes and specs that represent the whole The whole mark the whole Marconi API and it allows to you know have Validations pipelines and have a different way to expose that through different transport So transport when when you start a transport when you start Marconi and it loads the transport It will read the whole API spec from the API layer And it will create the the endpoints and will expose those inspoys dynamically And it will also allows to have at some point maybe extension So that people can actually create different endpoints and plugins based on their own needs That may not make sense to have inside the code base Then we have the storage layer that's where the whole persistency of Messages happen we right now right now we have a no SQL back end Which is based on MongoDB and we have a yes and SQL back end which is based on a SQL light We are replacing the SQL light one for a SQL alchemy based one So we have support for my SQL process SQL and SQL light and Whatever SQL alchemy can support and we are also working in the in the next couple of months We'll be working on there in the first aqp back end for Marconi Yeah, so basically the storage layer allows you to you know like playing around with what back end you want to use And what back end you want to have in your infrastructure So one of the philosophy we have in Marconi is that we don't want to be invasive We want you to be able to deploy Marconi with whatever you are already using we don't want you to Get a new storage get a new broker and get to know that broker yet again in a new API or whatever you You already know how to deploy let's say QP right you already know how to have HAA with it and how to distribute in your infrastructure We just want to give you a nice API on top of those technologies that you can basically develop things on and then make them portable at the same time So that's basically what the architecture of Marconi looks like. It's very simple. It's very straightforward There's no magic in there. There are just Interfaces, I know that word is ugly, but there are some interfaces there that you can basically use to you know Create your own transport or create a back end for your own technology or the one that's missing in there Yeah, and I'll now go through some ways of deploying Marconi Just like the API deploying Marconi is very simple as like I said, it's like playing with Lego bricks You can pick whatever you want, right tell Marconi where it is and Marconi would talk to that Storage or we had supposed that transport as you choose The first way to the play Marconi the simplest one is single storage You have a Marconi instance of several Marconi instances that you can scale out Horizontally and then you're talking to the same to this to one single cluster of storage Right you have your MongoDB cluster your mysql cluster or whatever you're using and you point Marconi to that cluster and you scale That cluster as much as you want The second way to deploy Marconi is to have been is to have several different back ends deployed at the same time basically Barconi has these Really cool feature called partition that we introduced that allow you to not just scale your for example your NQP broker like having different clusters of it and tell it like These kind these type of queues will go to the cluster a and the other list of queues will go to the cluster B But it also allows you to Have different back ends at the same time You can also deploy like a radius cluster along with a mysql cluster along with a rabbin and q cluster Based on your needs, right? It's kind of more work to do for DevOps and the whole deployment process But if you if that's something that you can find useful for example One of these case for that is like having all Not Persistent messages going to readies for example that you don't want you don't care if they are lost Let's say ready's fails or whatever you don't care about those messages. So you have these not non persistent messages there that Have really high performance because ready is fast And then if you care about those messages, you can move them to some persistent back end like mysql SQL Whatever you choose, right? So it basically allows you to do many things and then you can always kill Marconi who is on tally you can start many instances and have some H8 proxy on top of it Which is basically what is in this light here We have we have split the admin API from the public API So you can just bind the admin API to some private network to some private interface and then expose the whole public API Then the admin API basically does whatever the public API does plus has some admin endpoints that you can use to monitor your home your Marconi Instance and and and what's happening in your infrastructure And then like I said, you can have an h-protsy on top of those public API and Balance those things and if you need to scale more you can start more Marconi instances and tell them where this Sortage is and they will find it and we'll talk to those So basically you can you have to scale two areas right if you want to make Marconi scale You have to scale the whole Marconi instances And you have to also scale the back ends for it, right? If you already know how to scale those back ends, you just have to start more Marconi instances and you're done And with this which was very very quick I'll introduce you to Alan Matz who's a rack space manager director. What and he's going to demo Marconi to you and and why you have done what they have done in their cloud Yeah, my name is Alan. I I'm the director of engineering for at the rack space is Atlanta office We're the team that has been responsible for taking the Marconi API From OpenStack and actually creating a cloud queues product. So that's what this the Marconi is is known as in In rack space. It's a product called cloud queues So what we've done is basically we have connected Marconi up we made it given it a presence on our our standard Control panel so over here on this side we actually have the queues tab Which what I've actually done is you know rack space has six data centers So just for the purposes of this demo. I've actually created a queue In each of those six data centers. So we have queue in in Dallas, Hong Kong Northern Virginia London Chicago and Sydney. We use three letter Airport codes for to designate our our data centers so So we've done this we've also tied in Into our software development kits at rack space Some client bindings so that we have client bindings for Python Ruby Java and net at this time So I'm gonna basically just do a real simple demo just to kind of run some some messages through this is actually in GA We we announced lives Production released on Monday And so what I've done is I've basically created a queue in every data center and then I also have a server running In every data center.  I'm sorry my SSH connection here. All right, so now we're back So I am going to Run it. This is just a simple little utility. I wrote to make things easy. I want to send 100 messages to London So what's what this is gonna do is basically 100 messages are gonna go into the London queue and then I had these servers set up so that Each one is gonna pull messages from that queue and it's gonna send it to the next queue in the chain So basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna send a hundred messages around the world So we just connected to London and go back to the queues thing here And we should she see some of these messages start to run through So these There's eleven messages in flight in London.  So if I go back here So basically we're going from London to northern Virginia to Chicago To Dallas to Sydney and we should end up in Hong Kong here So looks like we got 69. I'm not gonna wait for those to show up They should get there eventually, but let's just go ahead and take a look at What's in one of these Python, okay, so we have all hundred now Show message so first message in Hong Kong HKG And there we go So that's the content of the first message in the queue and basically it Every time it visited a data center That basically just posted a message that said I was here and I forwarded it to the next queue So that's a quick little demo. I think we're gonna come up and answer some questions I think Kurt's got some frequently asked questions to walk y'all through and then we'll take questions Come on back up All right, so as you saw Marconi is real it's ready for production and we are Continuing to work on it and refine it so we're really excited for the future there and just a big thank you to the folks at Red Hat and We've had some interns helping out as well and all the all the guys at rack space for getting the project to this point So I'll bring this up here Before we get to the Q&A session, I just wanted to cover a few questions that a lot of people ask us and Then we're happy to take some general questions from you. The first one is we do get asked a lot What's are we gonna be able to? Plug in Marconi to our existing Lost it into our existing rabbit MQ Infrastructure and and as Flavio said we are we're trying to work with whatever you already have deployed whatever you have Expertise in already. So we we actually had a design session on this earlier today and We're looking at planning that for our version 2 API. So that'll be coming later next year we are It looks like we want to do this for a back-end We're not sure if a name QP transport would be useful So we'd love to hear your use cases come talk to us and let us know what you would like there and of course If you have folk if you have engineers that would like to contribute to the project We're always happy to help them to Take their their patches Another question we get is you know the obvious one. How does this compare to what Amazon offers? Amazon has their SQS and SNS services We are actually we are targeting similar workloads to what they have One difference though is we are we have a unified API. So the the SQS and SNS are our two completely separate services and APIs and they With Marconi we brought We're we're trying to tackle those in the same API, but in a more flexible manner So we instead of saying you have you have to you do work queuing this way and then if you want to send email messages out when something happens you do it this way we want to give you more of a flexible creative platform and See what you can come up with so Just a couple of the quick differences. We we actually do have guaranteed first in first out for a single producer and once and only once delivery which At least with SQS Amazon does not guarantee And as Flavio mentioned that's probably going to depend on what kind of backends that you deploy But For some of our drivers we will have that available for people who would like that and then of course since it's open source And and you saw that architecture. It's very customizable Just a couple more questions we get People are wondering how mature it is you saw that we're actually running this in production in rack space today and We have a growing community of contributors and users I know Flavio has been really active in the the broader community going to meetups and conferences and talking about Marconi and and we're We're we're getting more and more contributors outside rack space and red hat so really excited about that we actually have also got a intern from the Nome outreach program for women who's going to be doing some work for us on our API so So we're moving along. We're growing. We're excited about the future. We have some things coming up We're gonna polish up our 1.0 API Over the next few months and release of 1.1 so that by the time we're integrated with ice house Everyone has a nice clean API to start out with because we envision that API being around for a number of years we are Looking at additional storage drivers right now as Flavio said we have a MongoDB driver and just a basic sequel light driver for testing but we're looking at all kinds of other options there for example Redis or a QP for different types of workloads and We're also Getting ready to merge in this storage sharding which allows you to do application layer shardings So I can have multiple Mongo clusters or my sequel clusters and I can distribute those cues across there and that will allow us to scale to master proportions Which is really important when you're running a public cloud In just a few other things that notifications part We're gonna we're looking at adding a few more things that'll make SNS type workloads possible connecting up Messages and alerts to like text messages or push alerts for phones or sending out emails and Then we just have a few other things going on We're working with the keystone team to add message signing and some other neat stuff So we invite you to get involved. Let us know what you want and Help us design the future of Marconi. All right Yes Yeah, let's get what let's get Alan and Flavio up here and we can There we go Currently we have MQP as such in the rabbit MQ We call it usually protocol and you call it storage and It does support the calling casting those kinds of topics and all that it supports So are you externalizing it? and One that is one and second if you externalize can I do whatever I want to do Within the open stack as if if I want to create another module. Let's say Independent model like you have yourself created right now For you, you will have your own queue based on a MQP right now. I assume I Okay, okay. Yeah, there's a little confusion on that because The the support that we're talking about free MQP is actually using it as kind of a persistence layer Which is a little strange because you usually think of like a database or something for that We are it We are actually providing a general abstraction over other Cueing protocols so We It's kind of up in the air whether we would do an MQP transport because it doesn't cleanly map to the semantics that were that we have to find today But we'd love to talk about that and find out your use cases again about that Does that make sense Oh, I see yes there are some other benefits besides the The API or the protocol you use to talk to Marconi with Marconi you have portability That you maybe won't have if you want to change from a broker to another broker You will not be able to or your application from one point to another point. So Marconi we what gives you is actually Cross cloud Portability you can basically take the same application you used to talk to one of the stack cloud one of the stack infrastructure Environment and you can take the same application and make it talk to another one where Marconi is deployed as well So it's not just about a protocol. We can support a protocol. There's there's a way to do that Right, we have we have transport plugins So you can basically create a transfer for a MQP if you want and you can create a transport for I don't know S3 because you may want to use both of the talk to Marconi And then you'll just make it interpret that stuff and pass that to the API and go down the whole change But it's not just about it. Yeah, there are ways to do that to make it even more portable because if you're if you Already have your application that talks to an MQP broker you Having a name QP transfer will give you that portability from that model to from that application to Marconi, but you know Yeah Yeah, I mean at some point you got a scope it I mean one of the one of the major things you get is a clean modern H2P API that works with Non-persistent connections One of the things you have trouble with with a MQP is going across, you know network boundaries going through firewalls and Also for scaling It's extremely difficult to get say a hundred thousand clients talking to a single a MQP cluster But you could do that with Marconi using the HTTP transport So like I said, I don't know if it makes sense to have a MQP transport because at that point maybe you might as well Just deploy like a Q-butter rabbit MQ But we are still kind of filling that out so that's great feedback. Thank you other questions I have two questions. The first one is that you you told us that You have you you are able to share in between different backends and I understood I understood the use case when for some examples some cues needs to be Persistent and so they're not my question is What what wasn't clear to me is that how do you do the sharding? Is this the role of the Marconi server to shard or if this is something That the user has to explicitly say that's something which is a bit unclear. Oh Okay, what okay, so Yeah, let me clarify that for you the The sharding is is really not something we're we don't want to necessarily surface that to the user But Is there two uses for sharding? I think this will help clear that one is simply to scale horizontally so if I want to have a hundred MongoDB Replication sets for example, and I want to just keep going out I can use the sharding feature to distribute those cues across all of those backend storages So I can just keep adding and adding and adding so that's one thing now The nice there's it's almost a side effect, but it does open the possibility to have like we said Heterogeneous back-end so I could maybe have a pool of Redis clusters a pool of MongoDB and then the user can specify What kind of a cue they want so they don't know that it's going to Redis or my sequel they just say I want super fast But I don't care so much about Fifo or persistence. Okay, we put that on Redis or you know, I want super high durability I'm okay with some of the trade-offs. So we'll put that on the MongoDB cluster So so that was my question. Yeah, he's the he's the kind of back-end exposed to the user. So he could I would say explain which kind of Back-end he wants and then leave the leave the implementation up to Marconi as you said Do I have any way to specify when creating a queue which kind of super fast Back-end I have or that kind of thing. So that that's not in the API today but I can imagine sort of a like a cue flavor concept in the future where when I create a cue I can say I want this flavor. I just wanted to add something to what Kurt said The whole sharding stuff in Marconi is not that Marconi will split your data between two different Back-ends so when you create a queue in a back-end the queue will exist in that back-end just there The message is going to that you won't be splitting several back-ends because that would we wouldn't be able to guarantee FIFO otherwise, right? So the whole idea is if your storage Supports sharding that's something that you will handle in the storage site, right? So if MongoDB Since MongoDB has sharding you want to shard MongoDB you will do that at the MongoDB level for Marconi There are separate clusters that he it can talk to you can talk to and you will simply say like this Cues here go there and the other cues go in the other side Yeah, yeah, so we're so the app so the application layer sharding is happening in a queue level not the message level You can use the the native storage sharding for if you want to do message sharding Got a question over here I was wondering what languages you support you have client bindings that you ship So yeah, right now we're working on a Python library obviously the first one is the most complete one There are their support for queues and then there's support for messages already and we're working on the claim part And those patches should line the next couple of weeks And there's also some hack on a Haskell library But that's that doesn't have much working yet, but there's some work going on there I hope there are there will be more libraries very soon Rackspace has as part of rack spaces SDKs like Ellen mentioned we do support Java and What else is a Java.net? Ruby and Python right now. Yeah, right now. So hopefully so we can contribute some of that I I believe they should work with generic open-stack clouds. They're not necessarily rack space specific so But we hope the community will contribute more there for sure Other questions. How easy is to jump on the project? Do we have to deal with things like Dev Stack or it's easier I Let's see how easy it is is it to jump on the project Well It's probably one of the I mean It's definitely one of the simpler projects in open-stack like you can get up to speed very quickly with the code We have a fairly small team right now. We were very active in the IRC channel You can see that up there and we have a good time there. So I think the Do you want to talk about the experience maybe of of our intern and how she's doing? sure so I Think it first the first thing you have to figure out is where you want to work at and mark on it, right? So it's not that you if you are working on the transport layer You won't be working on the back and later you still have to know the whole thing But we try to you know keep us focused on some things So we don't mess up like conflicting patches and whatever and we can keep this the whole Knowledge of what we are doing a little bit more, you know isolated and and you know But we still talk about everything in the IRC channel anyway So once you do that you can jump obviously on on launchpad and start getting some box There are tons of bugs because we create bugs even for the most Really lame things because we want to you know, remember them and we want to have low hanging fruits for people to jump into a project and That's basically what we do We just go there create things and if we haven't fixed them a good way to jump into a project like go in there and picking One of those bugs and start fixing them Another good way to jump into a project start working on the client side the client side I mean the client library for Python. It's there. It's still missing some pieces like claim But it will definitely give you the whole picture of the whole project and once you know What how the project looks like what the API looks like it will be Straightforward to get into a project and start coding on it. So we're out of time. We got one more question here Do I understand that correct? Is it? Marconi will be used to collect the notification that are generated by the Open stack different component that is that is the idea, isn't it? So the idea is not to replace What opens tag is using right now for messaging? So the idea is not to replace the rabbit and Q instance or the QPS starts open stack is using it It is possible. There is not idea the idea is to have a queue in service for open stack we will have integration with Celerometer and heat and horizon because those projects want to use Marconi for Notification and for QE, but that's not what will be used for by the whole infrastructure that the Like the salamander project and those folks they are interested in surfacing some Notifications to users. So we are we are very focused on on the the cloud users the application developers All right, thanks everybody