Silk Road1: Theory & Practice

Alt title: “001: On slave labor crypto merch”

Bitcoin is a digital currency, so it’s intangible, and it’s (in theory) middleman-free because it doesn’t rely on a bank or other institution to keep track of people’s money balances. Instead, Bitcoin relies on a network of computers around the world to keep a shared log, or ledger, of every past payment. This “shared public ledger,” as it’s known,... See more

The essence of temporal salability is soundness; the essence of spatial salability is portability. Prior to Bitcoin, the two were in inescapable tension; economic development induces a market demand for money to be increasingly purely informational, as commerce itself becomes more complex than movement of specie can efficiently support. But informa

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