D.L. White

Most conversations about Bitcoin are identity fights—pro, anti, or exhausted. They tend to oscillate between reflexive dismissal and euphoric embrace. I’ve written a lot about Bitcoin in other venues. Here I’m more interested in the institutional reality of money and monetary systems. Bitcoin forces a few questions into the open: From my view, Bitcoin is… Read more: Bitcoin as a right of exclusion

A recurring theme in my work—across financial compliance, bankruptcy, and criminal justice—is that governance depends on legibility: the ability to classify, measure, and act. Legibility sounds benign. It can be. But it isn’t neutral. To make something administrable, you first have to make it countable. You have to sort messy reality into categories that can… Read more: Legibility Is Not Neutral

Most arguments about money start with definitions: medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account. Useful labels—but they often arrive after the interesting part. What I care about is monetary system formation: how a society moves from scattered practices of credit, dues, settlement, and accounting into something that becomes stable enough to feel like… Read more: Monetary System Formation

If you’ve landed here, you’re probably interested in some combination of money, institutions, governance, and the ways complex systems—once built—seem to acquire their own momentum. This site is meant to be a simple home base for my writing. I’m keeping it intentionally spare: a place to publish work that sits between academic register and public… Read more: Complex systems and writings thereof…