Thread by @TheStalwart

Should I do a tweetstorm on what I think mainstream Keynesians like @paulkrugman @Nouriel and @ObsoleteDogma get wrong about Bitcoin?

Ok. I might get interrupted doing this and have to take a break midway, but I'll start...

I think most Keynesian types see Bitcoin as a horribly inefficient medium of exchange, whose loudest advocates include many scammers, charlatans, misanthropes, and Austrian economics adherents. And tbh, this is basically all true...

But if you can look past all this (and I know that's asking a lot) at its core, Bitcoin is attempting to introduce the concept of cash to the digital realm...

And by cash, I mean something with a very specific property: money that Person A can hand off to Person B without Person C telling them they're not allowed.

Now most people probably don't have much use for cash tbh, but it should be obvious that there's all kinds of people who would like money that has this property to it...

Examples of people who might want to use cash include political dissidents, drug dealers, sex workers, free speech zealouts, enemies of oppressive state regimes and so on.

So the first thing people should ask themselves is whether they can understand why some people might want private money (cash) and then secondly they should ask whether they think a world in which private transactions simply cease to exist is desirable.

And if you do think that cash is an important component of a free society, then you should answer what's a superior way to get there. Because it's obviously a very difficult problem.

Because to create cash requires a difficult problem for computers (which tend to be good at destroying data scarcity, not enforcing it) and it also requires a cultural solution so that people coalesce around something neutral as a medium of exchange.

This last part is why evangelism is part and parcel to Bitcoin's culture. The meme isn't going to propagate itself. People need to bang the drum. And anytime there's something totally new, the first people who will be open to it will be the cranks and the crazies.

So while the shortcomings of the currency are easy to point out, and the arguments of many True Believers are easily debunked, there's still a strong case for why people value it and promote it that's not inconsistent with the priors of "normal" people.

And if you strip away all the Austrian rhetoric - which IMO is not at all essential to the case for the existence of digital cash - then there's nothing inconsistent at all between Bitcoin and a Keynesian worldview.