Bitcoin Is Venice: Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism

Declining to hold a cash balance is a form of leverage by omission, as is declining to purchase insurance it would really be prudent to hold.

Imagining scenarios or stories and not actually acting on them is a significant attribute of the human narrative capacity. The term for this behavior is “decoupling” or “the separation of mental action from physical action.”

Our argument in this chapter will go through the following propositions, which serve as headings for their own sections of discussion: Value is subjective; uncertainty is not risk; economic complexity resists equilibria; markets aggregate prices, not information; and, markets tend to leverage efficiency.

Capitalism — an economic system respecting and encouraging the nurturing, replenishment, and growth of capital

The geography of most modern urbanization can ultimately be traced back to navigable waterways and deep harbors, followed by hundreds or even thousands of years of network effects pertaining to industry (i.e., progressive integration of labor and capital) and the iteratively compounding Pareto distributions that naturally follow.

The creation of good art is necessarily mindful of interpersonal compromise and personal sacrifice because it is a quest for social truth. It speaks to the human condition, not the artist’s condition.

Patreon is now basically a payday lender.

Money balances are private property but the institution of money is a common pool resource, in arguably exactly the same way that a stock of fish might be a common pool resource, even though fish fished by fishermen have clearly become private property.

Violence has only ever been prevented by one of three means: inherent human goodness, perceived benefit from cooperation, or credible or enacted threats of violence greater and more terrifying still.