money

A Scientific Definition of Money

The importance of trade and what we ambiguously call “money” demonstrates a simple fact: humans are natural cooperators. Evolutionarily, this is no surprise. Agents gain more if they manage to coordinate on mutual contribution than if they act alone. Any subset of a population that succeeds in coordinating on such cooperation will tend to outcompete […]

Money and the Whore of Babylon

I first came across this idea in Bernard Lietaer’s The Future of Money. In it Lietaer — one of the architects of the euro — describes how, in ancient Mesopotamia, the temple distributed clay tokens that entitled the bearer to a certain amount of barley. Some writers — beginning with Herodotus — have linked these […]

The matrix of “money”

Imagine a simple scenario. Producer A meets Person B, who offers an item called “money” in exchange for A’s bread. At first glance, everything seems fair and straightforward. The item works as a medium of exchange, facilitating the trade between A and B. For simplicity, let’s define money this way, as most economists do: an […]

The proof-of-work fallacy

If your friend shows you a medal and says that it proves he’s run a marathon, you might not totally believe him. Yeah, your friend is fit and the medal looks legit; however, this piece of metal does not actually prove that he’s run the 26.2 miles. This scepticism may seem like semantic hair-splitting, but […]

Bitcoin and academia

Paul Krugman once said to Bernard Lietaer, a monetary theorist and one of the architects of the euro, that he should ‘never touch the money system’ because he would kill himself academically. This statement is akin to ‘never question God’ in the academic environment of the middle ages. Indeed, Bitcoin is relevant to academia because […]