“Uncertainty” characterizes a non-deterministic system for which probabilities cannot be assigned to the space of outcomes.

Henry Kissinger is known for the rather menacing aphorism, “who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control continents; who controls money can control the world.”

The essence of temporal salability is soundness; the essence of spatial salability is portability. Prior to Bitcoin, the two were in inescapable tension; economic development induces a market demand for money to be increasingly purely informational, as commerce itself becomes more complex than movement of specie can efficiently support. But

“An amount of money lent to a government, and the interest amount charged, is assumed to be risk-free because it is in turn assumed that a government can tax, borrow, or print further amounts of money to pay its debt. These three options are indeed available to a modern government, but one must not ignore the fact that the government has no access

Bitcoin does not only benefit the environment specifically because of a handful of contingently economical use cases related to renewable energy; Bitcoin benefits the environment because it encourages long-termism and proper cultivation and preservation of capital.

Patreon is now basically a payday lender.

While Pax Romana was appreciated by many, it remained imposed by fiat and from a central point of failure. All roads lead to Rome, they said. So, what if Rome fell? So would the entire network. Top-down institutions depend on a constant projection of strength. Ironically, this is precisely what makes them brittle. They depend on a high flow,

They are efficient with respect to the information they manipulate and convey: As a one-dimensional price, it is the absolute minimum required for participants to interpret and sensibly respond.

This is sacrifice and compromise personified: One can always create something trivially original on the grounds of trivial individualism. The challenge is to create something meaningful to others and true to oneself that manages to say something new, or at least newly, to infuse just enough individual creative spark as to manipulate the common pool