Nineteenth century economist Carl Menger[M1892] first described how money evolves naturally and inevitably from a sufficient volume of commodity barter. In modern economic terms the story is similar to Menger's. Barter requires a coincidence of interests. Alice grows some pecans and wants some apples; Bob grows apples and want some pecans. They just happen to have their orchards near each other, and Alice just happens to trust Bob enough to wait between pecan harvest time and apple harvest time. Assuming all these conditions are met, barter works pretty well. But if Alice was growing oranges, even if Bob wanted oranges as well as pecans, they'd be out of luck – oranges and apples don 't both grow well in the same climate. If Alice and Bob didn't trust each other, and couldn't find a third party to be a middleman[L94] or enforce a contract, they'd also be out of luck.

And why did humans, often living on the brink of starvation, spend so much time making and enjoying those necklaces when they could have been doing more hunting and gathering?

The appraisal or value measurement problem is very broad. For humans it comes into play in any system of exchange – reciprocation of favors, barter, money, credit, employment, or purchase in a market. It is important in extortion, taxation, tribute, and the setting of judicial penalties. It is even important in reciprocal altruism in animals. Consider monkeys exchanging favors – say pieces of fruit for back scratches. Mutual grooming can remove ticks and fleas that an individual can't see or reach. But just how much grooming versus how many pieces of fruit constitutes a reciprocation that both sides will consider to be "fair", or in other words not a defection? Is twenty minutes of backscratching worth one piece of fruit or two? And how big a piece?

Critical to Smith's theory is that these strategic games, while played out between phenotypes proximately, are in fact games between genes at the ultimate level – the level of competition to be propagated. The genes – not necessarily the individuals – influence behavior as if they were boundedly rational (coding for strategies as optimal as possible, within the limits of what phenotypes can express given the biological raw materials and previous evolutionary history) and "selfish" (to use Richard Dawkins' metaphor).

Only when Bitcoin has become a deeply established store of value will it become suitable as a medium of exchange.

As we have seen with the origins of money

A global, non-inflationary reserve currency will force nation-states to alter their primary funding mechanism from inflation to direct taxation, which is far less politically palatable. States will shrink in size commensurate to the political pain of transitioning to taxation as their exclusive means of funding.

by the policies of central banks like the Federal Reserve.

that the best and most experienced computer scientists and cryptographers are committed to developing for the original Bitcoin and not any of the growing legion of imitators that have been created from it.

Second layer networks, such as the Lightning network, provide the modern equivalent of the promissory notes that were used to transfer titles for gold in the 19th century. Promissory notes were used by banks because transferring the underlying bullion was far more costly than transferring the note that represented title to the gold. Unlike promissory notes, however, the Lightning network will allow the transfer of bitcoins at low cost while requiring little or no trust of third parties such as banks. The development of the Lightning network is a profoundly important technical innovation in Bitcoin’s history and its value will become apparent as it is developed and adopted in the coming years.

In the coming years, as fiat monies continue to follow their historical trend toward eventual worthlessness,

More precisely, a monetary good will only be suitable as a medium of exchange when the sum of the opportunity cost and the transactional cost of using it in exchange drops below the cost of completing a trade without it.

However, as private sector interest increases and the capitalization of Bitcoin approaches 1 trillion dollars it will become liquid enough for most states to enter the market. The entrance of the first state to officially add bitcoins to their reserves will likely trigger a stampede for others to do so. The states that are the earliest in adopting Bitcoin would see the largest benefit to their balance sheets if Bitcoin ultimately became a global reserve currency.

Money acts as the foundation for all trade and savings, so the adoption of a superior form of money has tremendous multiplicative benefits to wealth creation for all members of a society.

proselytizing the superior attributes of a monetary good is more effective than for regular goods, whose value is ultimately anchored to cash flow or use-demand. The religious fervor of participants in the Bitcoin market can be observed in various online forums where owners actively promote the benefits of Bitcoin and the wealth that can be made by investing in it.

Bitcoin excels across the majority of attributes listed above, allowing it to outcompete modern and ancient monetary goods at the margin and providing a strong incentive for its increasing adoption. In particular, the potent combination of censorship resistance and absolute scarcity has been a powerful motivator for wealthy investors to allocate a portion of their wealth to the nascent asset class.

not immune to increases in supply.

network fees can, however, make transmission of tiny amounts uneconomic

Without improvements to the privacy and anonymity of Bitcoin’s network protocol,

However, government regulations and capital controls mean that large transfers of value usually take days or may not be possible at all. Cash can be used to avoid capital controls, but then the risk of storage and cost of transportation become significant.

However, there are encouraging signs that, despite prominent instances of nation-states attempting to regulate Bitcoin and years of attacks by hackers, the network has continued to function, displaying a remarkable degree of “anti-fragility”.

If history is a guide, it would be folly to consider fiat currencies durable in the long term — the US dollar and British Pound are relative anomalies in this regard.

Bitcoin

Goods that are censorship-resistant are ideal to those living under regimes that are trying to enforce capital controls or to outlaw various forms of peaceful trade.

taps into the innate human desire to collect that which is rare.

Thus gold is better than diamonds, which are irregular in shape and quality.

While many goods have been used as stores of value or “proto-money”, certain attributes emerged that were particularly demanded and allowed goods with these attributes to out-compete others.

The incredible inefficiencies inherent to barter trade drastically limited the scale and geographical scope at which trade could occur. A major disadvantage with barter based trade is the double coincidence of wants problem.

Bitcoins fall into an entirely different category of goods, known as monetary goods, whose value is set game-theoretically. I.e., each market participant values the good based on their appraisal of whether and how much other participants will value it.

trusted intermediary, such as a bank or government

The turn to “privatized Keynesianism,” which requires working people to smooth fluctuations in aggregate demand through private borrowing, has given debt a bad name.

We must move beyond the idea that economic justice can be achieved through redistribution, and instead move toward a conception of the economy that gives working people productive power.

The political economy manifest in the Treaty of Detroit was racially exclusive, built on the backs of unwaged women, and premised on resource extraction from postcolonial settings; it offered little to those who imagined a life outside of waged work. Instead, it sought to prune the edges of industrial capitalism, securing retirement, vacation time, and a system of relief for those temporarily out of work on a temporary basis. For many, the call for a guaranteed basic income today is an extension of this logic.

It is striking that Coates makes no mention of the charter school movement,

The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead; our duty is to the living, and to generations yet to come, and their interests are best served by liberty and prosperity, not by moral theater.

antique Prussian model of education that contributes so much to black poverty

If their incomes grew in the subsequent century at the same rate as those of white natives, then a century later they’d still be as far behind as they were when they arrived. Income gaps have been closed and closed quickly by some immigrant groups — notably European Jews, Vietnamese immigrants, and Indian immigrants — because their incomes across the first few generations grew much, much more quickly than the native rate.

then initial conditions will be very important for a very long period of time

no matter what policies are enacted

Black households saw stronger income growth than did white households during the Reagan boom, and from 1990 to 2000, Census figures report aggregate growth in the black median household almost twice that of white households, 23 percent in constant dollars for blacks vs. 12 percent for whites. Had those trends continued, the racial difference in median income would have been wiped out in about 40 years.

policies that encourage economic growth and robust employment, which is the only meaningful long-term anti-poverty program

Even controlling for income, blacks are financially risk-averse compared with whites, which probably has something to do with the history that Mr. Coates cites; but this risk aversion has the long-term effect of leaving them worse off as they forgo higher returns on their savings, which is one reason, though not the only one, that black households are likely to have less wealth than white households with identical incomes. In the matter of savings and investment, it is very likely that skeptical attitudes and relatively poor outcomes feed on each other.

By my lights, however, we’ve done quite a bit of symbolic acknowledging. For over 40 years we’ve dedicated the month of February to remembering black history; Martin Luther King Jr. has had a national holiday in his name for almost as long; more or less every prominent liberal arts college in the country has an African-American studies department and many have black student housing

repaid the debt of slavery; my point is that no policy ever could

One indication of the size of this racial advantage is that, for decades, white business owners have been fraudulently claiming minority status, sometimes risking jail time, in order to increase their odds of capturing these lucrative government contracts. (A white man from Seattle is currently suing both the state of Washington and the federal government for rejecting his claim to own an MBE given his four percent African ancestry.)

The article passed without fanfare, probably because such racial preferences—or “diversity and inclusion” programs—pervade so many sectors of the U.S. labor market that any particular story doesn’t seem newsworthy at all.

Consider, as if for the first time, the fact that the U.S. college admissions system is heavily skewed in favor of black applicants and has been for decades. In 2009, the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade found that Asians and whites had to score 450 and 310 SAT points higher than blacks, respectively, to have the same odds of being admitted into elite universities. (The entire test, at the time of the study, was out of 1600 points.)

Although American intellectuals speak of slavery as if it were a uniquely American phenomenon, it is actually an institution that was practiced in one form or another by nearly every major society since the dawn of civilization.

the code execution jumps out of the code and down the Error Rail, which propagates the Nothing to the end of a function. We do the same for Errors.

In additon, you don’t actually change types in Dark. Instead, you make a copy of the type, and make your changes on that new copy. This allows you to prototype with the new type and test your change easily, making cheap iterations (and new types) as you try out new ideas. Once you are confident in your new type, you replace the uses of the old type (with semi-automated tooling).

idea

Dark doesn’t have exceptions.

In most languages,

change

It also allows algorithms to be written in a more readable fashion.

local networks (such as your home WiFi)

because the creative expression is something so personal.

The “Mindset” Mindset

information about how they’ve done without a judgment attached — is preferable to any sort of praise.

it’s a judgment; it’s more about controlling than encouraging.

really not very capable and therefore unlikely to succeed at future tasks.