The Bitcoin Standard

Foreword

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Let us follow the logic of things from the beginning. Or, rather, from the end: modern times. We are, as I am writing these lines, witnessing a complete riot against some class of experts, in domains that are too difficult for us to understand, such as macroeconomic reality, and in which not only is the expert not an expert, but he doesn't know it. That previous Federal Reserve bosses Greenspan and Bernanke, had little grasp of empirical reality is something we only discovered too late: one can macroBS longer than microBS, which is why we need to be careful of whom to endow with centralized macro decisions.

What makes it worse is that all central banks operated under the same model, making it a perfect monoculture.

In complex domains, expertise doesn't concentrate: under organic reality, things work in a distributed way, as F. A. Hayek has convincingly demonstrated. But Hayek used the notion of distributed knowledge. Well, it looks like we do not even need the “knowledge” part for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure.

It doesn't mean all participants have a democratic share in decisions. One motivated participant can disproportionately move the needle (what I have studied as the asymmetry of the minority rule). But every participant has the option to be that player.

Somehow, under scale transformation, a miraculous effect emerges: rational markets do not require any individual trader to be rational. ...