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? It all depends on the depth of one’s analysis.

Let’s rewind to the dawn of civilized society. Money hasn’t really been invented yet and good old barter is the only means of trading there is. I will give you my three goats if you give me your cow. If the receiver…

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 information didn’t have any value to us, we wouldn’t talk to each other. Either what the other person says is valuable to us or we find it valuable to give information to them. Oftentimes both. At the core of all human interaction that isn’t violent, both parties perceive that they…

“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 facility and gets “infected” by an alien life form. The alien and the reporter are then forced to live in the same body and a schizophrenic relationship between their separate wills unfolds. The alien needs Eddies body to survive on earth and Eddies body would die if the alien left…

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 a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. Now what the heck does this have to do with Bitcoin? Let’s explore!

In the Bitcoin network, participants known as miners compete for new Bitcoins in a lottery with fixed very fixed rules. The more hashing power (computing power) a miner…

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 new about the price of Bitcoin behaving in this way. Bitcoin’s path to mass adoption is through hype cycles that occur, on average, every two years or so. If we zoom in on the price chart we can see a pattern repeating itself over and over again. The price increases…

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 defy what it means for something to have value. After all, if something is to be backed by something else, that something else better be something of value. Like gold. Why does gold have value? Is it valuable because you can make jewelry out of it or is jewelry made…

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 idea but also a technology and a social experiment, is ten years old now and therefore we can expect it to stay around for at least another ten. So what can we expect of Bitcoin in 2028? First, let’s examine some of the facts.

At the time of writing, there…

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 equally big reaction somewhere. This is also true for Bitcoin mining.

Every once in awhile, some ignorant click bait hungry journalist writes an article about Bitcoin’s energy usage and how it’s connected to global warming or how widespread Bitcoin adoption would kill us all someday because of its “wasteful” production…