Hopefully Interesting

Cutting edge blogger that I am, I'd like to share some thoughts I've been having on the hot new thing that everyone was talking about last December when the price peaked and then crashed: bitcoin.  There have been a lot of people talking about bitcoin taking over from regular currencies or simply failing horribly.  I do think that failure is a possibility, but it seems to me that if bitcoin or some other crypto-currency does end up succeeding it will be beside conventional state-backed currencies instead of replacing them. Money is something we all use, and for several different purposes.  You can break out money's main functions as being a medium of exchange, being a unit of account, and being a store of value.  A medium of exchange is something that passes value from person to person, whatever you use to pay someone for something or settle a debt.  A unit of account is what we use to measure prices.  You can imagine a world where everyone expressed prices in dollars but

My parents have a boat and for basically my entire life I've spent at least a week each summer on it with them, sailing along the coast of Maine.  But this post isn't about that, it's about all the books I managed to read when I wasn't steering, fiddling with sails, putting down anchors or so on. The Rhesus Chart  by Charles Stross.  I think this book is now my favorite from the laundry series, and it nails the interplay of office politics and supernatural danger.  I also thought it did a very good job of playing with expectations in one place. Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths  by Harry Conolly.  A short story collection I got access to by backing his  Kickstarter .  Fairly entertaining, but read his excellent Twenty Palaces trilogy first. Technology in World Civilization  by Arnold Pacey.  An interesting book on comparative technological development and the transfer of technologies back in the old days. The Origins of Political Order  by Francis Fukuyama.