What Ashlee is Reading

 The key concept to understand from this chapter is "time preference". You can understand time preference if you think of the classic experiment with kids and marshmallows. Here's a marshmallow. You can eat it now, but if you wait fifteen minutes, I'll give you another one. Children with high time preferences eat the marshmallow immediately. Children with low time preferences wait for the double reward. In economic terms, when you are confident that your money will retain or increase its value, you have a low time preference, you are willing to be patient as you collect interest or invest in order to have more money in the future. If your money is rapidly losing value, you are better off spending it now, as you will not have enough to buy the same things in the future; you have a high time preference.  Societies with sound money have low time preferences. This allows them to invest in innovation and future growth. This is essential for the growth of civilization not j...

 Oh, boy, do I have a lot to learn. I've always fancied myself rather good with money, not that my circumstances have ever required me to be exceptionally so, but I feel I've always been good about balancing my spending, etc. But I had no idea how little I really understood money.  WWI marked the beginning of fiat currency, which was originally backed by (or redeemable into standardized amounts of) gold (or no one would want it). Since it is centrally controlled it is prone to having it's supply increased quickly compared to its stock (too easy and tempting to print more money without increasing gold supply to back it), impoverishing holders. This chapter gives examples of fiat currencies doing just that, collapsing, and ruining lives. Within only a few weeks of WWI, governments began printing money, above and beyond what their gold stores allowed. This was an incognito way (as opposed to taxation) of funding the war, which devalued people's stored wealth. If a governme...

 Ch. 2      This chapter starts with some historical examples of money and how it has worked in different cultures. Most notably, as the author indicated that it was the closest thing to how Bitcoin works, the Rai stones of the Yap people in Micronesia. The Rai stones were large limestone discs with a hole in the middle from when they were transported.  They had to be excavated and carved on a nearby island, making increasing the supply difficult, and their rarity made them beautiful and desirable. Although they came in different sizes to some extent, they were heavy ang bulky- they were not scalable across distance. This problem was solved by a different method of transferring them. The stones were left on display in a public place, and ownership was transferred by public decree. This system worked well for the Yap people for a long time, until an Irish man, David O'Keefe came along. When he couldn't entice the people to work for him (harvesting coconuts or som...

Every intro to Bitcoin that I have read or listened to begins with an explanation of what money is. I can guarantee you've spent a whole lot more time thinking about what money can do for you than what money is. And while it seems simple enough, this book explained some things about money that I"d never bothered to think about, and what characteristics are necessary for something to be a good monetary medium. Exchanging goods directly (my apples for your fish) presents three obstacles. In order to be a good monetary medium, an object must help overcome them.  1. Difference in scale. Imagine you want to sell your house. An interested buyer can offer you wheat. Wheat is great because you don't want to starve, but in order to match the value of your house, they'd have to give you more wheat than you are able to store or know what to do with. You can't just sell some portion of your house for wheat. Your monetary mediums have vastly different scales. Now, if they could...

    I have recently developed a taste for reading non-fiction. Much like my sudden shift from liking (ok, probably more like being addicted to) Diet Coke to liking LaCroix (I know, I know, I'm a monster), this shift in my reading taste was as unexpected as it was sudden. Murder mysteries will probably always have a place in my heart and on my bookshelf, but for now my long and ever growing reading list is dominated by economics, politics, cryptocurrency, and history. These new genres brought a new challenge- information retention. If I forgot the plot of a novel, it didn't matter, the enjoyment had already been had, but if I forget things I learn about the real world, well, that's an actual loss.      I tried keeping notes about what I had read, but I can't write (legibly) as fast as I can think and it was frustrating. I tried learning shorthand but I'm pretty slow at it and not patient enough I guess to get fast at it. So I thought I'd give this a try. I can ty...