On 11/11/22, professor rat
Still not the first clue about anarchism - oh well https://twitter.com/RebelEconProf/status/1591078989724286976
Josh Hendrickson @RebelEconProf A quick thread on bitcoin, crypto, and all that… The creation of Bitcoin was not random. It was the product of deliberative efforts that people had been working on for decades. As more and more things were recorded electronically, these people recognized the need for privacy… One aspect of this was thinking about how to create an electronic form of money. These cypherpunks had a wide variety of backgrounds, but they studied money and monetary history. They learned from people like George Selgin and Larry White about commodity money and free banking… Previous attempts to create a private (both in the sense of privacy and provision by the private sector) electronic money failed. The main problem was always that there were single points of failure. Bitcoin solved this. It made it possible to have a decentralized money… It also solved what I’ll call the Klein problem in economics, the idea that for a private money to circulate one must trust the issuer won’t wake up one day, print a bunch of money, & use it to accumulate a bunch of wealth before everyone else realizes the money is now worthless It did this by having a deterministic supply that cannot be changed without the consensus of the users of the network. And those users have no incentive to deviate from that initial rule. Thus, one doesn’t have to trust an “issuer” I heard about bitcoin in April 2011. I’ve had an academic interest in it ever since. To me, it was exciting because it provided a natural experiment to test various conclusions from monetary theory that were understood in a world in which something like bitcoin had never existed Over the last decade, I have met many people interested in bitcoin. Economists, computer scientists, and software developers. This has been a rewarding experience. All of these people have gone down the rabbit hole of everything you need to know to understand bitcoin. But I’ve also watched this cryptocurrency industry emerge around bitcoin that is full of the worst people. Everyone from scammers to Ponzi schemers to VCs who just want to make a quick buck off of people who don’t understand this stuff. For years, I’ve been careful about what I say about this stuff. But now, enough is enough. I’m going to write about this stuff more and I’m going to call out the scammers. If a fraction of the rumors I’m hearing about FTX are true, then SBF belongs in prison and there needs to be an investigation of all the people who enabled him. Bitcoin and the entire process that led up to it was motivated by the desire to make the world a better place and internet commerce more private. It was a true technological innovation. The market will decide what that innovation is worth. But the people who try to piggyback off of this innovation with their bullshit protocols, tokens, and exchanges to profit off of people who don’t know any better need to be called out. Stay tuned.