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

For finance to consistently grow as a proportion of GDP, either it is simply upping its take — which might be reasonable within bounds, but raises questions of adequate competition in the sector and of possible regulatory capture — or it is making more and more MBS-like time bombs. It is spinning off flows of toxic financial exposure, of whose valu

The first direct use of the phrase “social capital” has been attributed to Lyda Judson Hanifan in his 1916 essay, “The Rural School Community Center”: In the use of the phrase social capital, I make no reference to the usual acceptation of the term capital, except in a figurative sense. I do not refer to real estate, or to personal property or to c

When prices go up because a currency is being debased, that is inflation. It might make a social and political difference if the price increases are in milk and bread, or housing and healthcare, rather than in financial assets, but economically it is irrelevant. It reflects only what the artificial money was first used to buy (also known as the Can

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.

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

These people’s wealth is determined almost exclusively by how high they can push flows — stocks and rates of return be damned. Everybody else is left with low or negative real returns and depleted stocks of capital and wealth. This is why GDP growth can be positive, while almost everybody feels poorer. Almost everybody is poorer. Objectively so. Th

Adding a bitcoin mining rig to a renewables project provides a permanent buyer of otherwise wasted electricity, lowering the volatility of cash flows of renewables projects, which in turn lowers their cost of capital, ensures more get financed and on better terms, and drives down the deflation curve even faster given Wright’s Law indicates a strong

But eventually we are left with nothing sacred, nothing we can take seriously. It all becomes a self-referential circle jerk of irony descending slowly into total relativism without an anchor; nothing to which to be relative; without a meaning; without a social truth in sight.

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