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

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

It is somewhat concerning to us that people seemed, and still seem, to be lining up to both defend and attack “capitalism,” when the object of discussion could hardly be further from any worthwhile meaning of the word but is rather better described as: To boost aimless consumption, primarily with uncollateralized debt, by destroying the price signa

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.

Culture is a web of metaphors, which we use to filter the raw information of the world into a distillation of the communal relevance of individual yet shared experience. “Metaphors make connections which are not contained in the fabric of reality but created by our own associative powers,” Scruton argued.

As bitcoin mining is unusually sensitive — reactive, even — to the cost of the energy it consumes, this means it is overwhelmingly likely that Bitcoin will be the cleanest consumer of energy in the world before too long, entirely as a side effect of its brilliant design and not at all because it is conscious of its environmental impact.

“In equilibrium systems, everything adds up nicely and linearly. It is trivial to generalize to many agents; this simply corresponds to connecting more glasses of water. The effect on the water level from adding several drops of water is proportional to the number of drops. One does not have to think about the individual drops. In physics, we refer

We do not mean that physical coins or notes depreciate, which would ironically have the opposite effect. We mean that the utility of the institution depletes with inflation.

If, as in a social network, we knew with whom we were dealing in economic exchange, we could perhaps base this communication in the simpler medium of trust than in money. But since we mostly do not, the specific social scalability conferred by money allows for what Szabo calls “trust minimization,” or, “reducing the vulnerability of participants to

Second, those who hold return-seeking capital assets but who do not lever up are comparatively disadvantaged if their competitors do.