In the articles below, Keith Weiner covers many of the reasons why bitcoin is unsound and not money and rather the very model of a (post)modern monetary marvel.
It was just two days ago, that we wrote about last week’s slide in the silver price from around $24, to around $22.50. Well, yesterday and today the price ascended back to around $24.
The question is whether silver is now...
A meme we have seen in the bitcoin community seems to be gaining traction. Bitcoin is deflationary. That is prices of things, measured in bitcoin, are falling. For example, in spring 2011, gasoline was Ƀ1.00. This week, that same gallon...
We have covered many reasons why bitcoin is unsound and not money. It’s a ledger of unbacked liabilities. It is designed to have finite quantity but therefore indeterminate and hence volatile value. This makes it unusable for borrowing or lending...
Carl Menger, father of the Austrian School of Economics, showed the world that money is not the product of the state. He did not mean that government is intrinsically incapable of decreeing something to be money while other groups, organized...
Previously, we have discussed the issue of a currency’s backing. From comments and emails, we realize this topic could use a bit more illumination. And there are some related concepts that should be addressed at the same time.
Let’s start with...
Bitcoin is often promoted as the antidote to the madness of fiat irredeemable currencies. It is also promoted as the replacement. Bitcoin is promoted not only as money, but the future money, and our monetary future.
In fact, it is not.
Why...
A month ago, we wrote about the bitcoin fork. We described the fork:
Picture a bank, the old-fashioned kind. Call it Acme (sorry, we watched too much Coyote and Road Runner growing up). A group of disgruntled employees leave. They take...
We have noticed a proliferation of pundits, newsletter hawkers, and even mainstream market analysts focusing on one aspect of the bitcoin market. Big money, institutional money, public markets money, is soon to flood into bitcoin. Or so they say.
We will...
Most false or irrational ideas about money are not new. For example, take the idea that government can just fix the price of one monetary asset against another. Some people think that we can have a gold standard by such...
Last week, we said:
It is commonly accepted to say the dollar is “printed”, but we can see from this line of thinking it is really borrowed. There is a real borrower on the other side of the transaction, and that...
