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

Declining to hold a cash balance is a form of leverage by omission, as is declining to purchase insurance it would really be prudent to hold.

A cute conceptual corollary to risk is not uncertainty is, unpredictability is not randomness. There can be unpredictable events that are not random, and randomness that is not unpredictable.

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

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.

That all urban development has been locked into path dependency on an economic concern now millennia out-of-date is surely a cause of unimaginable waste and inefficiency.

More precisely, we are creating capital. Capital is not just complex tools, nor is it the money used to motivate their creation, but could be thought of as the extent to which the two are fluid. We believe Hernando de Soto has by far the best appreciation of the true subtlety of the concept, from his brilliant, The Mystery of Capital: Capital is no

How do you make sense of an “average” of a system that will be different every time you run it? Well, you could fix the period of time the system runs for and take the limit of where individual variables get to, as attained by running the system over and over and over to infinity. Or, you could fix the number of systems (preferably at “one” for min

Another decent definition of money is the most liquid form of capital.

Clearly the numbers in finance are causally dependent on one another and take place in a world in which time has a direction.