Merry Christmas to our American friends. Happy Christmas to the rest of the Anglosphere. Felicem natalem Christi to our Latin-speaking audience, and góðr jól to those who are reviving Old Norse as a great language! Let’s address two themes about the gold price trend that are increasingly in popularity the past few months—as the price […]
We have published many articles, arguing that bitcoin is unsound. Yet for all those arguments, there is a bright side to bitcoin. It is exciting to see that there is an audience of millions of people—mainstream people, not wild-eyed End-The-Fed gold bug preppers who keep their gold hoards with their stockpiles of ammo—who are looking […]
A meme we have seen in the bitcoin community seems to be gaining traction. Bitcoin is deflationary. That is prices of things, measured in bitcoin, are falling. For example, in spring 2011, gasoline was Ƀ1.00. This week, that same gallon had fallen to Ƀ0.0001875. Gas has gone down by 99.98 percent! We don’t think that […]
In the articles below, Keith Weiner covers many of the reasons why bitcoin is unsound and not money and rather the very model of a (post)modern monetary marvel. Bitcoin: What is it Good For? revisits the volatility aspect of bitcoin and addresses the reasons it serves neither the savers, nor the borrowers in our economy. […]
We have covered many reasons why bitcoin is unsound and not money. It’s a ledger of unbacked liabilities. It is designed to have finite quantity but therefore indeterminate and hence volatile value. This makes it unusable for borrowing or lending and hence savings, but a great a vehicle for conversion of one person’s wealth into […]
Carl Menger, father of the Austrian School of Economics, showed the world that money is not the product of the state. He did not mean that government is intrinsically incapable of decreeing something to be money while other groups, organized for different purposes, could do it. He described how money emerges as the commodity which […]
Previously, we have discussed the issue of a currency’s backing. From comments and emails, we realize this topic could use a bit more illumination. And there are some related concepts that should be addressed at the same time. Let’s start with an analogy, the engineering concepts of accuracy and precision. These related words are oft-confused, […]
Bitcoin is often promoted as the antidote to the madness of fiat irredeemable currencies. It is also promoted as the replacement. Bitcoin is promoted not only as money, but the future money, and our monetary future. In fact, it is not. Why not? To answer, let us start with a look at the incentives offered […]
A month ago, we wrote about the bitcoin fork. We described the fork: Picture a bank, the old-fashioned kind. Call it Acme (sorry, we watched too much Coyote and Road Runner growing up). A group of disgruntled employees leave. They take a copy of the book of accounts. They set up a new bank across […]
We have noticed a proliferation of pundits, newsletter hawkers, and even mainstream market analysts focusing on one aspect of the bitcoin market. Big money, institutional money, public markets money, is soon to flood into bitcoin. Or so they say. We will not offer our guess as to whether this is true. Instead, we want to […]
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