D.L. White

@pmarca wrote something about Bitcoin in 2014 that I think has aged remarkably well. Not the micropayments, not the merchant-adoption curve, and not the expectation that rising usage would naturally turn Bitcoin into a global payment network. The part that still looks exactly right is much more fundamental: Bitcoin created, for the first time, a… Read more: Marc Andreessen & Saylor’s Digital Capital

The standard story about money runs roughly like this: people already want to trade, barter is inconvenient, some commodity becomes widely accepted because it makes exchange easier, and eventually we get money. Markets come first. Money improves them. I think that gets the direction of causation badly wrong. Money is a whip. Start with ordinary… Read more: “Sound” Money & Bitcoin

The CLARITY Act is intended to settle a problem that has dogged U.S. crypto regulation for years: what exactly are these things, and which regulator gets to oversee them? Its answer is to divide digital assets into legal categories, principally securities and “digital commodities,” and assign jurisdiction accordingly. As a practical matter, some version of… Read more: CLARITY puts Bitcoin in the Wrong Box

Most people interact with money through its most immediate, personal interfaces: swiping a card, seeing a balance rise/fall in an app, handing over bills, watching crypto tickers, feeling the weight of coins, or stressing over paycheck deposits. These feel like direct, tangible “money” actions—spending it, saving it, earning it—so the brain defaults to treating this… Read more: Money

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: Which parts of “money” are… Read more: Bitcoin as a right of exclusion