How Bitcoin Is Redistributing Wealth to a New Generation of Innovators

This article was posted originally at the Epoch Times. Normally, the concept of wealth redistribution involves government using force to take from some people and give to others. But the bitcoin revolution is redistributing wealth differently. For the sake of simplicity, and to avoid confusion, we will talk about only the original bitcoin in this article and avoid the likes of cryptocurrency products such as ethereum and initial coin offerings, as well as recent duplicates of the original protocol. On the one hand, at a price of $15,500 and a market capitalization of $277 billion at the time of writing, bitcoin has made many people

Why Does Bitcoin Have Value?

This article was posted originally at the Epoch Times. Up 158 percent against the U.S. dollar this year, bitcoin is now the best-performing currency. Many are confused as to how this mathematical protocol can be worth more than $2,600, and why it keeps going up. The short answer: Bitcoin is money, just a little better and cheaper than the alternatives. If you don’t understand money, you cannot understand bitcoin. For most of us, money is the U.S. dollar, the fiat currency of the United States issued by the Federal Reserve and maintained by the commercial banking system. But even this system

Banks Are Creating Our Money — And It’s Not Working for the Rest of Us

This article was posted originally at the Epoch Times. The one force that causes the most harm in our economy also happens to be the least well-known and understood. While the left blames greedy corporations and individuals, and the right blames the government, it is in fact the collusion between the government and private banks that leads to problems like environmental degradation, unemployment, income inequality, and many more. In the United States and most other countries, the government grants private banks the right to create money out of nothing and forces individuals to accept said money as legal tender and to use

Central Banks Were Invented by Communists

This article was originally posted at the Epoch Times. If you visit the Federal Reserve’s Facebook page, you will seldom find a positive comment. That’s because people who don’t care about central banking won’t go to the Fed’s Facebook page. That leaves only the ones who are positive about it—if they exist—and the ones who don’t like central banks. The right doesn’t like central banks because of their centrality. The banks centralize power over interest rates, and the right doesn’t like central control over pretty much anything. The left doesn’t like central banks because they represent money, capitalism, and “too big

Freedom Is the Only Thing That Works in Economics

This article was posted originally at the Epoch Times. Mainstream economics is under heavy pressure. Consistently wrong policies and forecasts have damaged the field dubbed “the dismal science.” But what do critics propose should supersede the prevailing neo-Keynesian and neoclassical schools? Almost all alternative economists are calling for more government involvement to “fix” the free market and make it work better. But there is one school of economics, once prevalent in academia until it was pushed into obscurity, that places the power to fix the world’s problems in the hands of the people. “Economists err if they forget that economic life existed