Ajay Shah: “At the heart of cryptocurrency is the idea that it is possible to create money, to achieve transactions, without the state-built institution of a central bank. Eric Raymond coined an important phrase and insight: “The cathedral and the bazaar”. A land title system can be run through a cathedral (a depository) or through the bazaar (the blockchain). Money can be constructed through a cathedral (a state-backed central bank) or through the bazaar (bitcoin). A big idea of the modern world is the remarkable extent to which bazaar solutions can be constructed. Technical advances suggest that bazaar-made money could work well in the coming years. This will give the people greater choice in how they wish to organise their lives. Faced with competition, it is not surprising that central banks and their clubs have been unhappy.”
Viktor E. Frankl: “Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.” [via Atanu Dey]
Robert Kaplan: “The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.”
