sutton038

This essay of mine was originally published in Kings Review  and is republished here under Creative Commons licence A Knight on a chessboard can be looked at from two different perspectives. Firstly, we can zoom in and analyse it in absolute terms as a closed system. What is the shape of the Knight? What capabilities does it have? What kind of language does it use to describe itself?  Secondly, we can zoom out and analyse it in relative terms, like looking at a Knight in relation to the arrangement of Bishops, Pawns and Rooks on a chessboard, seeing it as but one element of a broader interactive system.  Likewise, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, can be seen from two broad perspectives. We can immerse ourselves in the code, in the Bitcoin community and in its rhetoric, and analyse whether these internal dynamics are positive or not. Or we can ignore the particularities of the code, the self-proclaimed goals of the proponents, and instead analyse Bitcoin and its conne...

Ahoy, it's been pirated! My 2013 book - the Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money -  has found its way onto Aaaaarg.org , and also onto a Belgian activist's  dropbox , where it is easily downloadable (she was kind enough to send me an email saying that she was "sad to know that it is not being distributed under an open license, since it would benefit many people who cannot afford to buy it"). I'm not against pirating, provided it's going to help humanity, and I hope my book can do that in some small way. I can't speak for my publishers Pluto Press, but they are swashbucklers who publish the likes of Chomsky, so I'm sure they're not surprised. Besides, the book is about HACKING THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SECTOR!  so screw it, let's let it circulate globally! For those who don't know, it's endorsed by Cambridge economics professor Ha-Joon Chang and Bill McKibben of 350.org and has received some great reviews (check...

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...