Why this is here
AI and robots are comparable to the Internet and printing press. Transformative technologies that would once have taken a generation to propagate are now arriving inside a product cycle, and most of our economic intuitions were built for a world where production was scarce and expensive. Those intuitions are going to break in the next decade, and watching which ones break first and what stands to replace them are the most interesting questions I think about.
Scarcity & Abundance is where I work that out in public. Some pieces are explainers, taking something technical and making it usable. Some are opinion, taking a position and trying my best to defend it. All of them are attempts to build a framework rather than react to a headline, which is the same instinct that shapes how I approach corporate announcements, editorial content, or product launches.
I have also written op-eds for Bitcoin Magazine, on network effects and on liquidity as an explanation for volatility.
Selected essays
If the supply of money is growing by 7% per year but consumer prices only rise 2%, where does the other 5% go?
Into assets.
Bitcoin doesn’t create deflation, it reveals it. The deflation was always there, baked into human progress and competition. We couldn’t see it because we measured with expanding currencies.
The core argument of this blog is that competition drives prices toward their marginal cost of production, so the natural state of a free market is deflation. A persistent 2% inflation is a policy output rather than an economic fact, and the gap between M2 growth and CPI has to be going somewhere. Each step is sourced, and the conclusion about inequality falls out of the arithmetic instead of being the starting position.
3.43% of applicants get accepted into Harvard. 98% of Harvard students graduate.
Your acceptance letter shows you are among the intellectual elite, while your degree certificate shows that you passed the required courses, along with 98% of your peers.
Universities reveal what they’re actually selling. They’re not exchanging tuition for knowledge, they’re exchanging tuition for human interaction and certifications.
Two public numbers are placed next to each other as the opening, with the argument stemming from these numbers. The piece then does the harder part by contrasting knowledge deflation against tuition inflation, which is the framework from the essay above applied to a different market. The headline catches reader’s attention and the argument underneath is what gives a nuanced take.
Network effects have existed for decades, but they’ve always enriched whoever controlled the center. Bitcoin is the first network where participating as an owner and participating as a user are the same thing.
When Facebook added its billionth user, Mark Zuckerberg got richer, but you didn’t. The people who actually built that value never owned a piece of what they created. They were the network, but they didn’t own it.
Explaining bitcoin’s security model usually requires the reader to already have some kind of vested interest. This piece borrows a mental model everyone has, platform network effects, and swaps out one variable. The three-participant structure that follows, holders and miners and node operators, is then just working out the consequences of network effects in bitcoin.
I am a perpetual student of this material and the writing is how I stay one, in what is probably the most interesting period any of us will live through.