“One aspect that is still massively under-utilized is the programmability of Bitcoin. While simple things like scheduled payments and automated payment splits do exist, we are undoubtedly still trapped in conventional thinking when it comes to the flow of sats. I’d like to share a simple idea that was shared with me a couple of…

“One immediate lesson many drew from this event was a reconsideration of the risk of fiat liabilities in an environment where trust is lacking (including the trust not to violate territorial integrity and Westphalian sovereignty). This event reinforced the nature of fiat money as a system of centrally maintained ledger entries denominating a unit of…

“The 20th century was the first where technology enabled forms of violent state competition, as well as peaceful globalization, across the full scale of the Earth. Moreover, the same technology made possible the organization of massive state systems to project power and maintain integrated, centralized control over large, diverse populations and cultures.” – Matthew Pines…

“Lightning is the way to make bitcoin the universal mainstream currency it was designed to be. This is how we’re going to bring open financial services to everyone. And we’re scaling Lightning by inviting people to participate and share in the gains.” – Roy Sheinfeld As a loose follow up to a recent article on…

“Over the long run, I view the outcome, one way or the other, more as a matter of technology than politics. From the top-down side, there is the development of Big Data and automated data surveillance capabilities. From the bottom-up side, there is the development of encryption tools and open monetary/information networks. Whichever direction proves more powerful will play a major role in how all sorts of things operate…

“For proponents of privacy and open networks to win becomes a matter of making the technology easy to use, too costly to stamp out, and well-understood by the public.” – Lyn Alden Today Lyn Alden brings us another great piece that breaks down the old structure of our monetary and information systems, the consequences that have arisen from them, and ultimately what…

“This context highlights the importance of the 1920–1921 depression. Here the government and Fed did the exact opposite of what the experts now recommend. We have just about the closest thing to a controlled experiment in macroeconomics that one could desire. To repeat, it’s not that the government boosted the budget at a slower rate,…

“But for me, when I think about what Bitcoin’s properties are as a store-of-value asset and then compare those properties to the existing store-of-value assets out there… Bitcoin is by far the best.  For that matter, if Bitcoin continues to outperform because of its unparalleled properties (and the world begins to come to terms with…

“People are very quick to project technology adoption curves onto Bitcoin. But the problem is that Bitcoin is not just a technology. It’s not just a smartphone, or a computer, or a social network, or a new stock or security, or a new payment method, or a search engine, or a messaging platform, or any other new…