It is fair to say that the central operational feature of Bitcoin is verification, and only because of that can Bitcoin remove the need for trust completely.

For a school of thought steeped in high time preference, it is understandable that Keynes could not understand that increased savings' impact on consumption in any present moment is more than outweighed by the increases in spending caused by the increased savings of the past. A society which constantly defers consumption will actually end up being

Keynes was a failed investor and statistician who never studied economics but was so well‐connected with the ruling class in Britain that the embarrassing drivel he wrote in his most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Money, and Interest, was immediately elevated into the status of founding truths of macroeconomics. His theory begins wi

In a free market economic system, prices are knowledge, and the signals that communicate information. Each individual decision maker is only able to carry out her decisions by examining the prices of the goods involved, which carry in them the distillation of all market conditions and realities into one actionable variable for that individual. In t

An important, but often overlooked, aspect of the Bretton Woods system was that most of the member countries had moved large amounts of their gold reserves to the United States and received dollars in exchange, at a rate of $35 per ounce. The rationale was that the U.S. dollar would be the global currency for trade and central banks would trade thr

For an individual to be willing to defer her receipt of a good by a year, she would have to be offered a larger quantity of the good. The increase necessary to tempt an individual to delay her receipt of the good is what determines her time preference. All rational individuals have a nonzero time preference, but the time preference varies from one

This world came crashing down in the catastrophic year 1914, which was not only the year of the outbreak of World War I, but the year that the world's major economies went off of the gold standard and replaced it with unsound government money. Only Switzerland and Sweden, who remained neutral during World War I, were to remain on a gold standard in

Kremer illustrates this by showing that as the population of the earth has increased, the rate of population growth has increased rather than declined. Had humans been a burden consuming resources, then the larger the population, the lower the quantity of resources available to each individual and the lower the rate of economic growth and thus popu

Only briefly, Friedman and Schwartz mention that the price level had not risen too quickly during the 1920s, and thus conclude that the period was not inflationary and so the causes of the depression could not have been inflationary. But the 1920s witnessed very fast economic growth, which would lead to a drop in prices. There was also heavy moneta