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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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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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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My argument in this book is that representational thinking is also rampant in the crypto industry as a way to market crypto to a large audience quickly, as well in the minds of the critics of crypto. Discussions and debates between hypemen and gatekeepers of crypto tend to happen over a map which is covered in tracings derived from representational

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Chaum’s research is said to be a direct inspiration for “cypherpunks”. The term was coined by Jude Milhon (or St Jude, as she was sometimes referred to),6 a civil rights activist and cyber-feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, to mean computer users who were dedicated to online privacy through encryption. In 1992, a small group of cryptographers and ear

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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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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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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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Friedrich Hayek, the libertarian Austrian School economist who inspired many of the men who had a hand in the creation of Bitcoin,1 argued that money and prices were efficient signalling systems to facilitate the free market by aggregating vast amounts of information in a way that planned economies could never do. While prices certainly do coordina

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