Blogs & Articles: Austrian Edition 🔗 1 year ago

The Bitcoin Times. Edition 5.

The Austrian Edition

Welcome to the fifth edition of The Bitcoin Times.

This is the fourth year of the publication, and the first time I’ve decided to take it seriously and pursue it as a commercial endeavor, instead of just a side project or hobby.

The result is the introduction of the long-awaited physical collectible, alongside a series of other mediums through which the content we produce will be made available. This will include web-essays, Amazon mass market paperbacks, Audible editions and hopefully soon, large, hardcover omnibus editions for the home coffee table.

I have also made the final decision to do 21 editions over 21 years. That means one per year, over what may be the most formative decades of Bitcoin’s early life. Quality over quantity.

I am committed to making The Bitcoin Times the premier publication for timeless, evergreen Bitcoin content that is pure signal, original and written by the very best of the best.

Of course, I cannot control what writers do with their lives and their reputation once things have been submitted, but since this is not a collectivist history-erasing publication, you will never see me pretending like their original contributions never happened.

What has been written for The Bitcoin Times, will always be a part of it. Forever Laura. Forever.

So with that being said, let me give you a short overview on what this year’s edition will be about. Of course the title gives it away, and if you’re reading this now, you’ve likely been drawn in by the names of this year’s contributors.

I mean…Saifedean, Bitstein, Pierre, Graf, Rahim, Parker. What more can be said? They are the best minds with respect to both Bitcoin through an Austrian lens, and vice versa.

There are others of course, for example Stephan, Tuur and Vijay, who of course will make up part of a future edition.

In this edition, you will learn about Bitcoin from first economic principles.

Bitcoin is fundamentally an Economic beast, and I say that with the greatest depth of concept in mind. When I think about economics I think about the use of time, energy and scarce resources toward ends. I think about behavior, action and relationships between actors. I think about incentives and disincentives. What more base study exists, at least in relation to living things?

One can find ‘economics’ in more than just human society. The parallels of energy usage, prioritization (use of time), incentives and disincentives exist in all living systems. We as humans have the ability to develop a study from it and the most profound, accurate and important mode of this study is the Austrian School of Economics.

Bitcoin may well be its crowning achievement.

In the pages that follow, you’ll go down a rabbit hole exploring time preference and its relationship to the hardness of money, history and prior practical applications of the Austrian school, energy, a deeper definition of money and ‘value’, what it truly means to save the product of one’s labor, how Bitcoin has actually solved the key uncertainties plaguing money throughout all of civilisation, and so much more.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continued support, and I want to thank Parker Lewis, Ross Stevens, Gazelah Barman, Will Reeves,Alan Lane and all their teams for helping bring this edition to life!

Aleksandar Svetski
The Bitcoin Times
December 5th, 2021

The Bitcoin Times

The Bitcoin Times is a publication with a mission:

To produce, collect and publish rare, timeless and unique content from the best minds in and around Bitcoin.

The goal is Quality over Quantity, so we will do one annually, for 21 years.
Pure Signal across 21 Editions.

The Bitcoin Times is available in multiple formats, which you can learn more about at bitcointimes.io

You can get a free copy of each edition by joining the mailing list, or you can tip some sats in exchange for a high-resolution PDF.

And of course, you can pick up The Collectible Print.

bitcointimes.io

Austrian Edition was originally published in The Bitcoin Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.