Joakim Book

Bitcoin Community Comes Together in the Face of Devastating Self-Custody Heist If you, for some unfathomable reason, have missed it: immediately go check on your Coldcard. Funds secured by Coldcard products (mk3-5, Q) are in grave danger; move them.

Authored by Joakim Book via The Mises Institute, I live in a small village at the edge of lands surrounded by very harsh nature. Those who occupied these valleys in ages past lived ruthlessly dangerous lives, where starvation was a constant worry,…

I live in a small village at the edge of lands surrounded by very harsh nature. Those who occupied these valleys in ages past lived ruthlessly dangerous lives, where starvation was a constant worry, the sea just as often nurtured as it took away, and…

Jeff Deist pithily describes Taleb’s prose as “Rothbard meets Hayek.” But Taleb shares some ideas in common with Ludwig von Mises as well.

This is an opinion editorial by Joakim Book, a Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, contributor and copy editor for Bitcoin Magazine and a writer on all things money and financial history. “If crypto can be good for the…

Bitcoin is not a bubble. It’s the monetary escape hatch we need now that the COVID-19 cat is out of the bag... I trained as a financial historian. My academic work focused on banks and financial markets in the past, and I was always fascinated by…

I trained as a financial historian. My academic work focused on banks and financial markets in the past, and I was always fascinated by iconic bubbles of financial history — the tulip mania, the financial boom of the 1690s, the South Sea Company and…

En av de kanske viktigaste artiklar jag någonsin skrivit bär titeln “You’re Not Worth My Time”. Trots att den är några år gammal och världen har blivit än mer navelskådande och intolerant sedan dess är den ett rättesnöre väl passande i ett kapital…

I joined Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s very extensive block list about two years ago. It’s not a very exclusive crowd and many more erudite people than me have received the patented “Imbecile” tweet that signals an imminent Taleb block. My crime? I had…

Here’s a financial and ethical principle you can generalise: If you’re liable for the downside, you deserve the upside. It works in the opposite way too: If you’re in on the upside, you should carry the downside risk. Any trader gets this. A large…

Print Here’s a financial and ethical principle you can generalize: if you’re liable for the downside, you deserve the upside. It works in the opposite way too: if you’re in on the upside, you should carry the downside risk. Any trader gets this. A…

När jag gick på gymnasiet hade jag en excentrisk lärare i samhällskunskap, Lucas. Han var inte så mycket för regler och byråkrati, och brydde sig mycket mer om de idéer han entusiastiskt försökte lära ut till sina elever. Det här var under tiden…

Print “Just because you know a lot about shit doesn’t mean you know shit.” (overheard on Zoom) Purity is a poor test for us fallen creatures: Nobody, bar perhaps the occasional Mother Teresa, is that good. Not strictly because we individually fall…

1 Comment If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Niall Ferguson, the celebrated British historian now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has spouted his own version of that age-old riddle. In Doom: The…

Si un árbol cae en el bosque y no hay nadie que lo oiga, ¿hace ruido? Niall Ferguson, el célebre historiador británico que ahora trabaja en la Institución Hoover de Stanford, ha lanzado su propia versión de este viejo enigma. En Doom: The Politics of…

Print Professor Niall Ferguson, the celebrated British historian and now Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has written a long and dense book. It doesn’t feel like it, partly because the pages are Bible-thin and the prose…

As a once-devout environmentalist, I have a T-shirt with a slogan heavily used by activists. Often credited to the Abenaki Alanis Obomsawin, it speaks directly to our modernity-hating followers in the Church of Climate: When the last tree is cut, the…

Print As a once-devout environmentalist, I have a T-shirt with a slogan heavily used by activists. Often credited to the Abenaki Alanis Obomsawin, it speaks directly to our modernity-hating followers in the Church of Climate: When the last tree is…

Print History doesn’t repeat itself, but according to the quote erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, it rhymes. My preferred objection to that saying comes from two of financial history’s greatest heroes, Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal; in their A…

Print It’s become quite common to find silver linings to the pandemic. We’re all quite sick of doom-and-gloom stories of how everything is terrible and disrupted and strange and uncomfortable, and how we want to get back to some pre-pandemic…