Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

Instead of creating a fixed “exchange rate” between computations and the resulting currency accumulation, the Bitcoin protocol essentially adjusts the exchange rate by making the math puzzles more difficult.

So, perhaps to your disappointment, we’re not going to end this book with an actionable list of particular technologies in which to invest your time and resources.

Many of those who participated in the Bitcoin bubble can attest that a bubble completely warps one’s sense of chronological time, a feeling captured by a viral meme that likens experiencing the bubble to the experience of the two protagonists of the 2014 movie Interstellar when they arrive on a planet where a few hours correspond to a few years in

among the Silicon Valley set by Peter Thiel, our wants tend to be borrowed from other people.

Novel ideas, which don’t fit within a well-established canon, are significantly less likely to be produced, published, and widely read. This self-reinforcing dynamic fuels the logic of preferential attachment that controls scientific research, as each newly published paper disproportionately adds citations to papers that are already well cited.

In his 2007 book Pop, Daniel Gross runs through a list of historical bubbles, including telegraphs, railroads, dot-coms, and housing, that had undeniable upsides.

So there’s a vicious cycle wherein aging populations make housing more expensive, which slows family formation

He even ordered employees to take lie detector tests. (One worker’s came back clean, while everyone else refused to take it.) For the

Yet passive investing destroys the price discovery process. No risks are taken and no investments are made based on a determinate vision of the future, because all that matters is the size of a stock or derivative and whether it will get included or excluded from an index. As a result, financial markets have become homogenized, dominated by a few p