Show Notes
"The idea that some authority can deduce the correct level of this balance is not merely wrong, it is not even wrong, it is methodologically incoherent. Asking for the 'correct' interest rate is like asking how much the color orange weighs."
~ Allen Farrington & Sacha Meyers
What if deflation isn't the economic boogeyman we've been told to fear, but the very *signal* that progress is happening?
In Part 2 of Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers' brilliant essay, we dismantle the central myth of fiat economics – that printing money creates growth – and reveal why falling prices are the only honest measure that innovation has actually occurred. If the fiat prescription worked, where's the evidence? And why have central authorities never let us run the experiment?
Check out the original article: Number Go Down by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers (Link: https://x.com/allenf32/status/2045477517201477686)
References from the episode
Part 1 of "Number Go Down" – make sure you catch it before this one. (Link: https://fountain.fm/episode/fLqds61ds9YbsnqGOkE8)
"Bitcoin is Venice" by Farrington & Meyers – second edition announced for 2027. (Medium: https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitcoin-is-venice-8414dda42070) (Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Venice-Essays-Future-Capitalism/dp/B09TTTGT11)
"On the Manipulation of Money and Credit" by Ludwig von Mises. (Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=2212135)
And the companion Guy's Take coming soon on Bitcoin, Trust, and The Human Problem.
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“Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
~ Isaac Asimov
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I break down the biggest lie we've all deeply internalized about the economy: that prices are just supposed to go up. In a productive and advancing society, almost everything should actually be getting more affordable over time.
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In this Take, I break down why the biggest AI labs, while deeply unprofitable sitting on massive future compute obligations, are racing toward trillion-dollar valuations. I explore how open-source competition, especially from China, is crushing their moat, and why that pushes them toward lobbying for fear-driven regulation, immunity, and government partnerships. Ultimately, I argue that the AI panic is about preserving a failing business model and building a centralized surveillance infrastructure, and why we shouldn’t be the ones paying their bill.
***"The dollar is going to continue to lose purchasing power. Bitcoin is going to continue to gain purchasing power. It's going to keep on happening over the rest of the century. We will at some point have enough people that have most of their wealth in bitcoin that they don't have anything else to spend and they will start to spend their bitcoin. And when they start to encounter more people like them on the other side of the transaction, they will no longer convert to some other currency on the merchant side for that transaction."