How Bitcoin combines capitalism & socialism.
Ideas to take with you.
- 01
The lived experience of the current order is capitalism for the public and socialism for the institutions closest to money creation, because losses at the top get absorbed by everyone holding the currency.
- 02
In a debt-based monetary system the money supply has to keep expanding, because every unit of money is someone's liability and a contraction would seize up the whole network.
- 03
Capitalism and socialism each respond to a real human impulse, one toward a level playing field and one toward a floor of dignity, and both get hollowed out when a small group controls the issuance of money.
- 04
A monetary base that cannot be expanded by decree would let the productivity gains of the wider economy reach holders through falling prices, rather than being captured first at the point of issuance.
- 05
A freer market is, in information-theoretic terms, a richer signal than a command economy, which is part of why central control of the money layer steadily degrades the quality of outcomes even when the surrounding economy is described as capitalist.
