The Asymmetry of Bitcoin Scams Is All Very Sad
“When losses come from risk-taking for which you stood to benefit, it’s not sad if you happened to lose. That was a possible outcome, and whether you properly understood it or not is beside the point. With Skin in the Game, there’s nothing sad about making losses.” ~ Joakim Book
READ MORE
What Do Wildcat Banks Tell Us About Stablecoins?
“The experience in Michigan when it was a frontier state in the same year that the telegraph was invented is not particularly pertinent for discerning the likely success of private currency with the communications technology available today. ‘Wildcat’ is a phrase that has no relevance for stablecoins.” ~ Gerald P Dwyer
READ MORE
Are Digital Assets Coming of Age?
“During the intervening five years, much has happened to support the case for digital assets. More legitimacy will be needed to satisfy the institutional investment community, but it is reasonable to conclude that digital assets have finally come of age.” ~ Colin Lloyd
READ MORE
The Decentralization Fetish
“We must not merely assume that decentralization is always good and more-decentralized solutions are always better. Instead, we should recognize that it depends on the unique benefits of decentralization and the costs of realizing those benefits relative to more-centralized alternatives.” ~ William J. Luther
READ MORE
Decentralized Cryptocurrency Systems and Hayek’s Unplanned Economy
“Pure free market money is emerging upon the world to compete from a position of zero against a Goliath establishment. If it wins, the debate is settled. With luck, but thankfully without the permission of any planner, we all get to witness Hayek’s ideal of decentralization bear out across financial markets in all of the years ahead.” ~ Erik Voorhees
READ MORE
Hyperbitcoinization: By Choice or by Force?
“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that bitcoin’s culture is changing. Getting to 100% bitcoin adoption remains a core plank of the bitcoin community. But now all routes to that goal seem open, including the use of government force.” ~ J.P. Koning
READ MORE
El Salvador Is Not the Birthplace of Bitcoin’s Future
“Imposing the use of Bitcoin by force through a software oligopoly–through a scheme which may ultimately pose a threat to the entire El Salvadoran economy–is almost as far from Satoshi’s Bitcoin objectives as the fiat dollar is.” ~ Peter C. Earle
READ MORE
You Cannot Eat Bitcoin
“You cannot eat bitcoin, or dollars, or bank balances, which means that whatever vehicle you use to move value across time has an exchange rate risk. Many bitcoiners’ mistake is to think that their preferred asset avoids this; Taleb’s mistake is to think that others can have a different view of government than him.” ~ Joakim Book
READ MORE
Fighting Ransomware Doesn’t Require Banning Cryptocurrency
“With OFAC as coxswain, an embargo might achieve everything that a ban on cryptocurrency promises to achieve without depriving gamblers, outsiders, and hobbyists of a product they utilize. It would also be more effective than the status quo, which is not capable of stopping criminals who operate with impunity from noncompliant jurisdictions.” ~ J.P. Koning
READ MORE
What the Heck Is Bitcoin All About?
“Peter C. Earle, senior fellow at AIER joins Aleksandra Przegalinska for a conversation on the unknowns of bitcoin, crypto currency and blockchain technologies in the modern era.” ~ AIER
READ MOREThe Rise of Bitcoin
“The blockchain technology at bitcoin’s core provides a new and fundamentally different way to process payments. It relies on neither decentralized nor centralized clearing. Instead, it processes transactions over a distributed network. And, by solving the double spending problem without recourse to a trusted third party, it has the potential to offer a degree of financial privacy comparable to decentralized payment mechanisms like cash.” ~ William J. Luther
READ MORE
Bitcoin and a Lesson in Electricity Markets
“We should indeed be skeptical of financial fads, of everything in the Everything Bubble. And we should argue over bitcoin’s many monetary attributes – mostly because we therefore highlight how other monetary regimes work. But the environmental accusations of Bitcoin’s mining operations is like hitting your head against brick walls – not a very useful thing to do. Like the great JP Koning concluded this week, ‘It’s not the energy needs of these products that is the problem.'” ~ Joakim Book
READ MORE
