Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It

It seems that their audience is not those who are closest to being able to answer their critiques (i.e., people working in the industry), but instead others who are jockeying for position within what might be termed the “Critique Economy”, a largely discursive and academic mini-industry that seems to have consumed too much of the left’s energy of l

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There are essentially two definitions of the commons. It can be used to signify a resource that is freely available like water, air or land, at least before private property enforcement was used to prevent local populations from accessing land or water. Alternatively, as the work of Elinor Ostrom showed, it can also be seen as an institution. Ostro

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If you’re on the left, when you hear the word “finance”, you’ll likely think of a hyper-individualised pursuit of personal wealth, or the power that large financial institutions have had over society, especially in the fallout of the 2008 recession. If you’re on the right, you may think of the more “entrepreneurial” aspects we associate with financ

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While central banks are overseen by directors chosen by those elected to government, and central banks can increase the money supply through open market operations (where central banks provide liquidity directly to private banks in their currency like during the 2008 recession and more recently with COVID-19), the vast majority of money is created

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There is a major contradiction and tension in cryptocurrency narratives. One is that cryptocurrency is a better form of money to spend and the other is that it is attractive to hold on to in the hopes of making a profit. What is clear about what makes money “money”, is that it cannot be simultaneously an investment and something you spend for your

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Unlike the mathematics driven logic of code, law intentionally contains ambiguity in order to allow for applicability to various situations, whereas it is incredibly difficult for code to foresee all of the possible situations in which a law can be applied. This ambiguity allows for participants in a contract to outsource low probability scenarios

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Another important consideration is that since all money that is loaned out by central banks to private banks is done so at interest, as are the loans those private banks then make to their clients, there is always more debt owed by the economy than actual money in existence, making money a scarce resource. So how can these debts be paid off? This c

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If using money and prices is an instrument for signalling preferences in an economy, it is an extremely blunt one that loses all of the finer details and qualities of what we as humans actually care about should we be given the opportunity to stop and think about it. What our dependence on money shows is that we have a monoculture of value expressi

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The truth is that the story of the “tragedy of the commons”, commonly used to justify the need for capitalist markets and push for neoliberal economic policy, was one made up by the conservative American ecologist Garrett James Hardin.8 Hardin later retracted his original thesis in response to evidence of historical and existing commons, stating th

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While these shows of force can be intimidating, it deflects from the reality that sanctions don’t really work.4 Sanctions are imposed by governments to punish dictatorships or “bad guys” in other countries. The idea in the liberal or conservative mindset on geopolitics is that by intentionally harming the general population in those countries, by d

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