A blog by the co-founder of Cosmos/Tendermint exploring monetary theory, local currencies, and payment system design.
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RSS →Polarities of Exchange5mo ago
The history of capitalism, in so far as it’s something that emerged out of developments in Italian bookkeeping, is broadly a history of the bill of exchange. This versatile instrument dominated the financial landscape of the West for some 800 years, from the First Crusade on the Clearing the Hourglass8mo ago
Dan Barabander wrote a great little article on what he calls “Hourglass Markets,” markets bottlenecked by bilateral interemediaries that bridge different trust layers, and the opportunity for crypto to disrupt them. The article starts with the problem of “stackiYou Could Have Invented zk-SNARKs1y ago
I’ve written an introduction to zk-SNARKs designed to be accessible to anyone with just some high school math. You could have even invented them! See the pdf.History of European Coins - 500 to 15002y ago
The history of money is often glossed over in books about modernity or narratives about money. Assumptions and myths abound. But the reality of money’s history corresponds to no simple myth. Money has ebbed and flowed over millenia, with societies moving in and out of monetThe Properties of Money - Origin Account3y ago
This post is part of a series on the Properties of Money. See the introduction In the introduction we outlined that the key function of money is to make payments - to denominate and discharge debts - and that its three properties can be defined as follows: the Unit of Account is The Properties of Money - Intro3y ago
This is the introductory post in a series on the properties of money and the tensions between them. It is perhaps inevitable that every philosopher of money will venture at some point into the muck of money’s notorious “properties”, trying to make space for someCached hourly. Click a post to read on the source site.