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CENTRAL BANK? This article originally appeared in the December edition of Penguin's ThinkSmarter Newsletter . Money pervades our everyday economic interactions. But, despite its importance, it is also pervasively misunderstood. Here are three common monetary myths – frequently perpetuated by economists – that need challenging. Myth 1: Money emerges from barter Economists often tell a tale about how old communities first used barter to exchange goods and services. Bartering throws up tricky situations. Take as an example a farmer trying to exchange a cow for bread from a baker, a clumsy and difficult negotiation. Thus, according the old economists like Adam Smith, money was supposedly 'invented' as a way to get around that inefficiency and confusion. This narrative is ahistorical and inaccurate. Anthropologists have long had a much more convincing account: in small communities without money, exchange does not take place through on-the-spot barter. Rather it takes place throu...

PHILOSORAPTOR'S RESEARCH, SOON APPEARING IN ECONOMETRICA JOURNAL Please note: An updated Peer-to-Peer Review 2015 is now available I decided to build a rather large database of academic research on Bitcoin . If you'd like to see it, click on the link. It's a Google Doc, and it allows you to comment if you think there is something I've missed. You can also download it as an Excel spreadsheet. It includes academic, and quasi-academic, research papers, journal articles and theses related to Bitcoin. Admittedly, the definition of 'academic' or 'quasi-academic' is pretty loose. It can include peer-reviewed papers that appear in major journals, to working papers released from university departments and think tanks, to a thesis of a PhD student, to independent research from people with clear expertise. I built this list because I myself like to write quasi-academic articles on Bitcoin , and have been trying to find good quality analysis of cryptocurrency, fru...

Note: I originally published this in June 2014 Issue of Contributoria . It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence. If you wish to republish, please also attribute the original article I once lived in a village on the rural Wild Coast of South Africa. It had a horizon so vast you could almost glimpse the curvature of the earth. There was one computer with a dial-up modem, and it almost never worked. That was just before I moved to London, to work in the steel and concrete of the city’s colossal financial sector. In London, as in many cities, you cannot see the horizon. The average visibility extends perhaps 30 metres in front of you. On the other hand, you are connected to a vast hallucinogenic web of broadband media connection, constantly. That is, of course, provided the electricity doesn't go out. In London, the electricity doesn't tend to go out. It is hooked into the all-powerful National Grid , a company I used to try sell financial derivatives to. In Sout...

Please note: This piece was originally commissioned by the magazine  MCD , and will be appearing in French in their December edition. I use Dogecoin because I’m emotionally drawn to the dog. Unlike the distant, fossil-like Queen on the Pound banknote, the Shiba Inu is at once transcendent and approachable, self-contained but cuddly, looking into my eyes with a sideways glance, as if it just noticed me and is wondering whether I want to play or be left alone. It’s not an aggressive dog, or for that matter, a bouncy dog trying to lick me. It has self-directed, quirky soul , and it’s almost impossible to imagine this dog being an asshole. Some people in the crypto-currency community have written Dogecoin off as a joke, or even a scam.  Maybe it’s both, but does this matter? All currency in the final analysis is really a scam, and the real question is which of those scams we want to agree to. I for one would rather pledge allegiance to a mystical pooch than to worship the image of...

(Note: I originally wrote this article for the July 2014 edition of Contributoria , and it is republished here under the following  Creative Commons licence. If you wish to use the article, please attribute the original) "Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch, a prison for your mind." This is a line from The Matrix . Morpheus is explaining to Neo that he’s actually stuck in a nightmare prison-world enslaved to computers. The world is not as you think Neo, but I can set you free, provided you take the red pill . In some ways Morpheus resembles one of those single-agenda zealots who goes around telling people that they have a certain secret truth that will liberate them, like the guy who corners you in a pub and says, “Don’t you realise we’re trapped in a corporate prison. The Bilderberg Group owns the world’s governments!” Morpheus, however, is also different to the average conspiracy theorist. The key dynam...