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Showing posts from April, 2018

Arithmetic for Austrians

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This piece grew from a number of conversations with people of Austrian economic persuasion, mostly Bitcoiners and goldbugs (which these days seem mysteriously to have converged). I thought of calling this "Monetarism for goldbugs", but decided to preserve the mathematical slant of the previous pieces in this series. But it's monetary arithmetic, of course. And as Austrians tend to obsess about "sound money", it is specifically sound monetary arithmetic . (Note: Someone has pointed out on Twitter that the arithmetic in this piece is considerably more advanced than the equations themselves suggest. If you are bit rusty on the mathematics of change, I suggest reading the first piece in this series, Calculus for Journalists ).  Inflation is complicated As "sound money" seems to mean "no inflation", let's start by defining what we mean by inflation. In mainstream economics, "inflation" usually means a general increase in

The Bitcoin Standard - a critical review

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For over a century now, the world has lacked a genuinely international means of payment. This is partly due to decisions made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollar was adopted as the principal international settlement currency, rather than John Maynard Keynes's suggestion of an independent global currency that he called "bancor". Although the Bretton Woods gold-backed structure ended in 1971, the US dollar became ever more dominant. In 2008, the dollar's global reach enabled an American financial crisis to spread to the entire world, causing a deep recession and long-lasting malaise. Ever since, there has been a deep longing for a more stable international financial system, one which didn't depend on debt, wasn't dominated by the US and was immune to political whims. Some have called for a new Bretton Woods , or even for the return of the classical gold standard . Bitcoin emerged from the financial crisis as a fledgling internatio