What am I doing here?

Let me tell you something about me. I want to explain why I started this blog and what I intend to do with it.

My primary goal is not to persuade others. I just want to find the truth. I want to understand. I’m a selfish persistent bastard who will continue hammering on others disagreeing with me on things that interest me. I will go at great lengths to try to reach a conclusion, i.e. that either them or me admit they were wrong. Because contradictions cannot exist. I can go on for years.

Somehow, as a side effect though, it looks like if I am sufficiently vocal about it, I end up persuading others. I’ve been commenting about Bitcoin on various places, among other things on mises.org. I’ve been researching Bitcoin for about 1.5 years, and I presented some of my findings at the London Bitcoin conference in September this year. Imagine my surprise when later that day another attendee approached me in a bar and told me that because of my comments on mises.org, he “converted” to Bitcoin. I had never met him before or even knew he existed.

So it looks like the market magic works. It transforms individual vices into a public good. My research of Bitcoin can, I believe, help people understand, just like it helped me to understand.

Last month, a part of my research ended up in my master’s thesis. Some of you might have already downloaded it. I didn’t have yet time to clean it up, I was rushing the deadline and there are some typos and various minor errors, and I have problems converting it into mobi. If you can hold on for a day or two, I will clean it up and make it available for download in multiple formats. It is a proper scholarly work, including quotations, a lot of empirical analyses and so on, and I try to explain Bitcoin to economists. I take a heavy Austrian approach in the theoretical part and I think it will help Austrian economists understand Bitcoin and why it is important. I also address some of the things that were mentioned in comments to my earlier posts.  Those who already read the original won’t have to re-download, it will be just a cleanup, there won’t be any real content changes.

Stephan Kinsella, with whom I discussed a lot of Bitcoin and IP-related topics and early drafts of my thesis, liked my thesis and recommended me to Jeffrey Tucker, the executive editor of Laissez Faire Books (and formerly heavily involved with the Mises Institute and the mises.org website). So, after a chat with Jeffrey, I’m also working on a more mainstream publication about Bitcoin that is not so heavy on science/economics, and LFB will publish it. So you guys have a lot to look forward to.

In addition to these two publications, there are a lot of topics that I thought a lot about, related to Bitcoin, money and property rights, and that don’t fit into either publication. So far I have been posting all over the internet at comments to zillions of websites. I think that gathering everything under one umbrella, this website, might be better.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my motivation for this blog. Condemn me or praise me, but please take my arguments seriously.