The Memory Pool

Where ideas wait to be mined into the blockchain of the collective conscience

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Toward a Node World Order

Michael Goldstein

The Industrial Revolution freed humanity from the Malthusian trap. Bitcoin, having put an end to counterfeiting once and for all, frees us from the fiat trap.

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Gradually, Then Suddenly (#15)

Bitcoin is One for All

Parker Lewis

Whereas the dollar (and other fiat currencies) are one for a few in the short-term and all for none in the long-term, bitcoin is one for all, now and in the future, because it fixes the economic foundation for everyone.

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Gradually, Then Suddenly (#13)

Bitcoin is a Rally Cry

Parker Lewis

No matter how many cycles of quantitative easing the Fed and its global counterparts have in their bag of tricks, bitcoin is inevitably becoming a rallying cry for all those that see the train wreck coming and are unwilling to stand idly by.

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Gradually, Then Suddenly (#3)

Bitcoin is Not Too Volatile

Parker Lewis

Volatility in bitcoin is the natural function of monetary adoption and this volatility ultimately strengthens the resilience of the bitcoin network, driving long-term stability. Variation is information.

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Gradually, Then Suddenly (#7)

Bitcoin, Not Blockchain

Parker Lewis

Every other fiat currency, commodity money or cryptocurrency is competing for the exact same use case as bitcoin whether it is understood or not, and monetary systems tend to a single medium because their utility is liquidity rather than consumption or production.

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Gradually, Then Suddenly (#4)

Bitcoin Does Not Waste Energy

Parker Lewis

Put a price on economic stability and the economic freedom a stable monetary system provides; that is the true justification for the amount of energy bitcoin should and will consume. Everything else is a distraction.

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Gradually, Then Suddenly (#11)

Bitcoin is Not for Criminals

Parker Lewis

We accept the good with the bad, recognizing that due to the very nature of bitcoin, we do not get to decide. There are always trade-offs, and in this case, that bitcoin will unavoidably be used for illicit purposes is the trade-off we gladly accept in exchange for the economic stability that an unmanipulable global currency will provide.

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Bitcoin Equals Freedom

Ross Ulbricht

Bitcoin was consciously, yet spontaneously taken up as money while no one was watching, and our world will never be the same.

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Bitcoin Governance

Pierre Rochard

Compromising on trustlessness could help the Bitcoin price find a local maximum, at the expense of finding a much higher global maximum.

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Economics of Bitcoin as a Settlement Network

Saifedean Ammous

From the settlement layer view, the growing adoption of Bitcoin is increasing its liquidity internationally, allowing it to compete with global reserve currencies for increasingly more valuable transactions, causing transaction fees to rise.

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Against the Minimum Majority Measure

David A. Harding

I personally suspect that Bitcoin’s steadily improving privacy will prevent us from ever measuring decentralization in a truly objective way. Losing easy quantification but gaining stronger privacy seems like a good tradeoff to me.

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Why the Bitcoin Dominance Index is Deceiving

Jimmy Song

Like with most things, Bitcoin Dominance is a very crude metric and one that’s unfortunately very easy to manipulate. The recent enthusiasm for ICOs has made the manipulation even worse and continues to hide the fact that Bitcoin is doing really well.

Crashes and Hyperinflation

Daniel Krawisz

This article is about how money interacts with the rest of the economy after it has matured and about how mismanagement by an issuer can cause it to fail.

Who Controls Ethereum?

Daniel Krawisz

If it became easier for people to trade different forks of the same currency, then investors could get direct experience with different ideas without endangering the network.

Who Controls Bitcoin?

Daniel Krawisz

Bitcoin upgrades must be a clear improvement to Bitcoin as an investment or else they face a sharp uphill battle to adoption.

Bitcoin’s Compound Rewards

Daniel Krawisz

The difference between Bitcoin and a Ponzi scheme is that in a Ponzi scheme, the early adopters benefit by cashing out. With Bitcoin, there is no reason ever to cash out.

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Don’t Panic

Daniel Krawisz

Working in the Bitcoin world is like working for a drug addict with bipolar disorder.

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The Two Ideologies in Bitcoin

Daniel Krawisz

There are two ideologies in the Bitcoin world. They are not political ideologies; they are different visions of Bitcoin’s place in the world and how adoption will happen.

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Meditations on Cypherpunk Nightmares

Michael Goldstein

Protecting ourselves from the dangers of crypto-anarchy requires embracing it even more fully and internalizing and practicing the virtues that have helped great men weather the storms of life since antiquity.

Reciprocal Altruism in the Theory of Money

Daniel Krawisz

That monetary behavior is a form of altruism, and of reciprocal altruism in particular, has been demonstrated by relating the properties of money to the definition of reciprocal altruism and to its required features.

GPG Contracts

Mircea Popescu

All this aside, non-enforced contracts, contracts which the participants uphold out of their own free will rather than at the behest of some third party or by the point of the sword of some blind demigoddess are a thoroughly fascinating turn of events.

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Speculative Attack

Pierre Rochard

Bitcoin will overtake weak currencies like the dollar through speculative attacks and currency crises, not through the careful evaluation of tech journalists and 'mainstream consumers'.

Bitcoin's Rugged Individualism

Daniel Krawisz

There is a fundamental agency problem with Bitcoin: agents can disappear or simulate a heist upon themselves. They cannot rationally be trusted without extreme costs being imposed on them which are more stringent than traditional banks.

Bitcoin's Shroud of Subtlety and Allure

Daniel Krawisz

Potential Bitcoin attackers are in a Prisoner's Dilemma. In the same way that the people cannot easily rebel against the king owing to a lack of coordination on their part, governments cannot rebel against Bitcoin for the same reason. The government puts the people in a Prisoner's Dilemma against one another, and Bitcoin does the same to government agents.

Bitcoin is the Best Unit of Account

Daniel Krawisz

Someone still lost in the dollar world looks at Bitcoin and sees wild and extreme volatility, whereas someone in Bitcoin looking back at the dollar sees the worst and longest economic crash in history.

How to Market Bitcoin

Daniel Krawisz

Does Bitcoin need to be sanitized and separated from its anarchist, black-market roots in order to become acceptable to the general population? Absolutely not!

Hyperbitcoinization

Daniel Krawisz

This article is about the possibility of Bitcoin-induced currency demonetization, or hyperbitcoinization, which is what would happen to any hapless currency that stands in Bitcoin's path of total world domination.

The Proof-of-Work Concept

Daniel Krawisz

Proof-of-work should not be seen as a mysterious or wasteful system, but as something functional, natural, and potentially of value for the design of any communication protocol.

End the Fed: Hoard Bitcoins

Pierre Rochard

Low transaction costs make Bitcoin the most competitive medium of exchange in humanity’s history, and it may be the case that a currency with even lower transaction costs is theoretically impossible.

Working and Saving are Revolutionary Acts

Pierre Rochard

New capital formation is the impetus for two trends that push the equilibrium of all industries towards decentralized markets: increasing technological sophistication and a deepening of the division of labor.