Recent content on Easy There Entropy
The history of capitalism, in so far as it’s something that emerged out of developments in Italian bookkeeping, is broadly a history of the bill of exchange. This versatile instrument dominated the financial landscape of the West for some 800 years, from the First Crusade on the eve of the 12th century until the First World War at the start of the 20th. Surely, if we are to understand the…
Dan Barabander wrote a great little article on what he calls “Hourglass Markets,” markets bottlenecked by bilateral interemediaries that bridge different trust layers, and the opportunity for crypto to disrupt them. The article starts with the problem of “stacking and funneling trust” in the banking system, or what Perry Mehrling would call the Hierarchy of Money.
Dan…
I’ve written an introduction to zk-SNARKs designed to be accessible to anyone with just some high school math. You could have even invented them!
See the pdf.
The history of money is often glossed over in books about modernity or narratives about money. Assumptions and myths abound. But the reality of money’s history corresponds to no simple myth. Money has ebbed and flowed over millenia, with societies moving in and out of monetized relations as they are blown about by the winds of change. Slavery, war, mining, all play an essential role in this…
This post is part of a series on the Properties of Money. See the introduction
In the introduction we outlined that the key function of money is to make payments - to denominate and discharge debts - and that its three properties can be defined as follows:
the Unit of Account is for denominating debts the Medium of Exchange is for discharging debts, here and now the Store of Value is for…
This is the introductory post in a series on the properties of money and the tensions between them.
It is perhaps inevitable that every philosopher of money will venture at some point into the muck of money’s notorious “properties”, trying to make space for some light. Unfortunately, many such ventures seem to result in obnoxious arguments as to why one or the other of the…
This month, September 2022, marks a critical transition point in the history of the Cosmos project. Let this post serve as a guide, both a history and a preview of what’s to come.
September 2022 effectively marks the end of the first major phase of Cosmos development and the dawn of a new one. I will call this first phase Initiation. We could say it began with the Cosmos Whitepaper in…
So I finally got around to reading Brett Scott’s fantastic post, The Hole in Bitcoin’s Heart. I typed up a bit of a lengthy reply, which turned out to be too long to put in a comment there, so I’ll post it here instead. There are some rough ideas I haven’t had a chance to flesh out better, but this felt like a good opportunity to get some thoughts down.
The velocity of money denotes a kind of circulating quality of money, an ability to flow. But it appears as a poorly understood, or largely ignored, phenomenon:
What does the "velocity" of money purport to capture, that mere spending does not?
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) October 26, 2021 Velocity has a well-know definition: the ratio between the total spending in an economy and…
Last year I read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation back to back. Both published in 1944, these great works of political economics were attempts by their authors to grapple with the collapse of western civilization into the fascist totalitarianism of the Second World War. For Hayek, a classical liberal, totalitarian tragedy follows inevitably…
Table of Contents:
Introduction - Tesla vs. Bitcoin Green Tech - The Problem with Tesla Orange Money - The Promise of Bitcoin The Root of All Evil - Monetary Institutions and Political Economy In Proof We Trust - Proof of Work and International Trust Mind the Miners - Mining Is Not As Bad As You Think Big Bad Blockchains - What about Proof of Stake? Introduction Earlier this year, Tesla…
This is not investment advice. Do your own research. The analyses here are based on vague subjective notions of social responsibility that are likely to be nonsense anyways. They do not account at all for the potential profitability of the companies mentioned or any kind or ROI. Disclosure of my own positions is incomplete at best.
For years I’ve felt that the vast majority of publicly…
The great tragedy of mainstream, neoclassical economics is that, in trying to transform the Classical political-economy of the 19th century into a more mathematical science of economics, it butchered its political and moral foundation.
It all started with a good idea - from Menger, Jevons, and Walras - of the subjective nature of value and the marginal utility of goods. The “marginal…
Local Money Systems As you may know, I’m quite enchanted with the idea of local money systems - money designed to facilitate local economic organization and trade. There’s a nice overview in Bernard Lietar’s Creating Wealth. I think they’re the best application of blockchain tech and the best hope for a sustainable civilization.
I expect that progress in blockchain tech…
Disclaimer: This critique is based almost entirely on a reading of Stephanie Kelton’s popularization of MMT, The Deficit Myth. I have yet to really dive into the MMT academic literature.
Update: I’ve read plenty more MMT and MMT-adjacent literature by now, and believe the thrust of my points here still stand :). MMT is refocusing economics on an important set of ideas: monetary…
I wrote an op-ed in Coindesk, called Crypto Needs to Engage With the World.
It’s basically an unrolled version of my crypto thesis tweet thread.
The Story of Civilization The story of human civilization begins around 10k years ago in the dawn of agricultural societies, in a new relationship between humans and land. Agriculture transformed the nature of land from external environment into direct extension of the human body and society; from something to contend with into something to protect.
The story is often told, quite wonderfully,…
One whole year ago today, the Cosmos community made history with the successful decentralized launch of the Gaia blockchain, also known as the Cosmos Hub. After being “two months away” from launch for about 16 months, I couldn’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing our incredible community of validators launch Gaia into the world. I checked block explorers many times each…
This is an ode to the Guelph Center for Urban Organic Farming, an organic farm located on the University of Guelph campus, where I fell in love with gardening and discovered that permaculture can feed the world.
The Guelph Center for Urban Organic Farming is a sanctuary. A botanical paradise. A fantasy realm in our own backyard. It is a stunning beacon of productivity; a shining ray of…
Modern distributed software development marks the pinacle of text-based collaboration. A global web of internet connected humans, of varying geopolitical and educational background, working for different companies or none at all, composing tapestries of textual repositories that give rise to our entire digital society.
The essential feature of software development today is distributed version…
Life Socioeconomic systems may be conceived in the same vein as organisms: driven, replicated, non-equilibrium systems in a landscape of steady-states. Lifetimes and sustainability in such systems are parameterized by the capacity to represent and predict driving signals, and to use the energy contained in such signals to replicate successfully.
Driving signals are the cycles of availability…
On January 3rd, 2009, the great mother Goddess of cryptoeconomics, Satoshi Nakamoto, birthed her baby Bitcoin into the world. 10 years later, Bitcoin is booming, awakening cavalries of latent innovative energy and catalyzing radical new approaches to socioeconomic systems.
Bitcoin and its ilk are pushing the boundaries of critical fields of study, from fault tolerant distributed computing, to…
I love writing, and I want to commit to doing more of it. Once upon a time I had a good cadence going on Blogspot, and when that dropped off, I eventually picked up again on Wordpress. But it’s been a while. Now I plan to write in Vim and publish on Github while letting Hugo do the hard work of beautifying, unless you can convince me of something better.
Hi! I’m Ethan Buchman. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, but spent many years in lovely Guelph.
I co-founded the Cosmos and Tendermint projects, run Informal Systems, and am now focused on building Cycles. I have a background in biophysics and computer science, and more recently have been studying the history of monetary and financial institutions.
What is Cosmos? Cosmos is a political…
I often speak on podcasts and at conferences. Some of my favorites, which tend to focus more on larger vision and political economy, include:
2024-08: Science of Blockchain Conference - Cycles Protocol: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Clearing System 2024-07: Modular Summit - Defund the Dealers: the Past, Present, and Future of Liquidity 2022-05: Bankless - Why Bankless Is Wrong 2020-11: CSCON[0] -…
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