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

If we had to pick a moment in time in which we entered the final stages of degenerate fiat “capitalism,” we would likely pick March 2020, when it seemed very much as if the everything bubble had popped.

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

The health of a single business, and the health of the aggregation of all businesses, should not be measured by “growth” in revenue, or in profits, or even in capital, but in the ratio of profits to capital. The rate of return.

knowledge and competence are only ever local. There are meaningful categories of universals in mathematics and physics, but not in any remotely social affairs. Humans create universals across disciplines so as to comprehend and communicate, but, as the linguistic philosopher Alfred Korzybski is well known for saying, the map is not the territory. M

While not a samurai, Jigoro trained in martial arts and became well known for his meticulous recording of the jujutsu techniques he deemed most effective. He described his work as “keeping what I felt should be kept, and discarding what I felt should be discarded.”

Programmable securities, money streaming, and a global buyer of energy of last resort are tremendously exciting. Their growing promise is evidence that Bitcoin is, “not just a digital rock,” to cite an expression frequently utilized by Elizabeth Stark.

From Chapter Four, the social utility of money is realized not in moving on from barter, but in moving on to capital, and from Chapter Five, that capital is very much a resource that needs to be cultivated, nurtured, grown, replenished, and not strip mined!

The price is never right, but prices are as right as can be hoped for at that moment.

For these reasons, prices may pass statistical tests for randomness, but they are not themselves random (although it is plausible that their randomness is random, and that randomness is random, and so on) but rather are unpredictable on the basis of market data alone. They are, however, predictable to the extent that the predictor accurately assess

This is not at all mysterious if we realize that engaging with markets requires individuals to compress the economic signal nascent in the n-dimensions of their information, heuristics, judgments, and stakes, and project it onto the single dimension of price, and that markets do not project the aggregates; they aggregate the projections.