What is a Medium of Exchange? A monetary good is often described as a Store of Value, a Medium of Exchange and a Unit of Account. But what do these mean and in what order are they important for a monetary good to succeed, short term and long term? …

All human interaction can be defined as trade. Yes, all human interaction. Every time a human being interacts with another, an exchange takes place. In every conversation we have, we exchange information with each other. Even the most trivial information is of some value to the other person. If…

“We… are Bitcoin!” I recently saw the Venom movie starring Tom Hardy and it spawned an idea in my head. Bitcoin can be viewed as an alien symbiote. Let’s explore the idea! In the movie, Tom Hardy plays a reporter named Eddie Brock. Eddie stumbles into a suspicious looking research…

The first law of thermodynamics, also known as Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. The second law states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases and the third law states that the entropy of a system approaches…

2018 may look like a really bad year for Bitcoin to the layman’s eye. The price has plunged from a high of around 19000 USD last December to around 5000 USD here in November this year. What’s going on? First of all, it is important to remember that there’s nothing…

One of the most common arguments against Bitcoin is that it is not backed by anything. That it’s price is just speculation. But what does it mean for an asset or a currency to be backed by something in the first place? To find this out, we first need to…

The Lindy effect describes the future life expectancy of a technology or an idea. It states that an idea’s expected remaining lifespan is proportional to its current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. The idea of Bitcoin, which is not only an…

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s no such thing as a zero sum game. The 2nd law of thermodynamics tells us this. You know, the one about entropy and how everything will be really, really lame in a couple of trillion years. There’s no action without an…

Some concepts in nature are harder for us humans to understand than others. How complex things can emerge out of simple ones is one of those concepts. An termite colony, for instance, has a complex cooling system in its lower levels. No single termite knows how it works. Completely unaware…