Lyn Alden

The ECB is Trapped, Here’s Why [Lyn Alden]

“Base money is a liability of the central bank, and it’s used as a reserve asset by commercial banks. Broad money is the liability of commercial banks, and it’s used as a savings asset by the public. Treasuries are liabilities of the federal government, and they’re used as collateral by the central bank and commercial…

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What is Money, Anyway? [Lyn Alden]

“If a money (the most salable good) is easy to create more of, then any rational economic actor would just go out and create more money for herself, diluting the whole supply of it. If an asset has a monetary premium on top of its pure utility value, then it’s strongly incentivizing market participants to…

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Digital Alchemy, A Post-Mortem of the Crypto Crash [Lyn Alden]

“Several exchanges in the industry fuel bubbles for a quick buck as well. If something starts to get momentum, including meme coins like DOGE or SHIB that don’t realistically have a substantial future, they promote those coins to their users, which can suck retail investors into buying the bubble top. Plus, a lot of YouTube…

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Proof of Stake & Stablecoins – Part 1: A Centralization Dilemma [Lyn Alden]

“If Bitcoin were built on a proof-of-stake model, where the more coins you have the more votes you have on how the network functions, the large exchanges and custodians could have used the millions of coins they held on behalf of clients to vote in their own favor. This is similar to how Vanguard and…

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Proof of Stake & Stablecoins – Part 2 [Lyn Alden]

“Crypto exchanges with numerous coins have an incentive to get you excited about new coins, because they make money from trading volumes. Even if it’s just meme-coins like Doge or Shiba Inu with briefly-lived spikes, they want to get you in on the action, especially near the top of the spike when enthusiasm is high….

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What is Money Anyway? Part 2

“To put it into perspective, this international monetary system based around centrally-managed fiat currency is only 16 years older than me. My father was 36 when the US went off the gold standard. When I grew up, after a period of financial hardship, I began collecting gold and silver coins as a kid; my father gave me silver coins as savings each year.

The Swiss dropped their gold standard when I was twelve years old, which was six years after Amazon was founded, and three years before Tesla was founded. The fiat/petrodollar standard is only four times older than bitcoin, and only two times older than the first internet browser. That’s pretty recent when you think about it like that.” – Lyn Alden

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What is Money Anyway? Part 1

“If a money (the most salable good) is easy to create more of, then any rational economic actor would just go out and create more money for herself, diluting the whole supply of it. If an asset has a monetary premium on top of its pure utility value, then it’s strongly incentivizing market participants to try to make more of it, and so only the forms of money that are the most resistant to debasement can withstand this challenge.” – Lyn Alden

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Analyzing Bitcoin’s Network Effect

“A network effect is an attribute of a company or other system such that as more people use the network, the network becomes exponentially more valuable for each user. It’s one of the strongest economic moats that a system can have against competitors.” – Lyn Alden

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PART 2: The Inflation/Deflation Debate

“deflation is the natural order of a productive economy. If we were using a hard money standard like gold, for example, we would expect products to get cheaper over time relative to the value of our golden money, thanks to technological and productivity improvements over time, which make them cheaper relative to the number of labor hours required to produce them.” – Lyn Alden

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QE, MMT, Inflation & Deflation – Part 1

“Quantitative easing (QE) occurs when central banks, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, create new money to buy government bonds or other securities. Some people fear that it will cause high inflation or even hyper-inflation and that it is essentially money-printing, while others suggest that it has no impact on inflation because the money that is newly-created or “printed” gets locked away… Based on history and math, the inflationary side of the argument is eventually correct, but with a lot of nuance along the way.” – Lyn Alden

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