Bitcoin Is Venice: Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism

This all reflects more deeply that “capitalism” is a philosophy of human interaction and cooperation as relates to creating common pool resources of economic potential energy.

It does not bow to authority nor look to convince with aesthetics. It appeals to reason, or Logos, and it grants knowledge in the form of what James C. Scott calls mētis, in his magisterial Seeing Like a State, which we reference repeatedly.

We think it is a vicious interplay of three factors, each as unfortunate as the last, each feeding and fed by the others. First: physics envy. This is well understood and is not an original insight. Second, a more specific, material effect of physics envy in this realm: It pushes academic economists to search for what can be measured and quantified

Price is the maximally compressed signal of economically relevant information.

The dominant regime of political economy in the West since 1971, and particularly acute since 2009, has been built on a set of related economic fallacies: There are no adverse consequences to manipulating the price and supply of money; economic well-being can be measured by increases in flows of revenue rather than the growth rate of profit over ca

fiat money even really is: It is a fungible pan-bank liability.

Imposing negative interest rates is strip-mining the capital stock.

Prices are information, trade is speech, and the capital stock is a literary corpus. Which is to say, Bitcoin is the internet, extended to the communication of value, furiously wrestling value back from the feudal client/server architecture of fractional reserve and central banking. The Bitcoin Protocol / Lightning Network Protocol (LNP/BP) is the

This suggests a far more sophisticated understanding of “the risk/reward trade-off” and “the equity premium” than is generally accepted in the realm of modern portfolio theory, and, by extension, the EMH: Bonds are likely to get a lower return than stocks not because they are less “risky” (which in that context is even more questionably interpreted

Mastery and competence are dramatically devalued at the expense of what Sennett calls “cooperation,” presumably unintentionally echoing Whyte’s far more blatant derision in using this word, but which we are happy to characterize more bluntly as manipulation.