Bank runs, money supply collapse, and the Great Depression — what Friedman and Schwartz got right that almost everyone else missed. When depositors panic and pull cash, the money stock doesn't just shrink — it can disappear. Watson and B. Sovereign break down the panic cascade from A Monetary History…
A Monetary History of the United States | Milton Friedman & Anna Schwartz | Bitcoin & Monetary Policy What really caused the Great Depression - and what does it mean for anyone building outside the legacy financial system today? In this episode, Watson and B. Sovereign review A Monetary History…
Keynesian economics meets Bitcoin sovereignty. Watson & B. Sovereign break down why effective demand — not supply — controls employment, and what that means for builders today. In Episode 15 of Bitlemmas, Watson and B. Sovereign do a deep dive into John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and…
Dawn of Everything | Review of the book by David Graeber & David Wengrow Is hierarchy really the price of scale — or have we just been told that story so many times we stopped questioning it? In this episode of the BitLemmas Podcast, Watson and B. Sovereign break down…
Cities without kings. Complexity without bureaucracy. Sound impossible? It already happened — we just weren't taught about it. Human history isn't a straight line toward domination. It's a story of experimentation. And the deepest thing we lost wasn't equality. It was the belief that we could reconfigure it all.
What if hierarchy was never inevitable? 👀 Early farming communities with no ruling class. Ancient cities built without domination. It sounds controversial — because we've been taught the opposite our whole lives. But the evidence is there. Civilization didn't require hierarchy. We just chose it. Or had it chosen for…
Domination isn't one thing — it's a stack. Sovereignty and the monopoly on violence. Control of knowledge. Control of charisma. Early states only needed two of the three. The modern state fuses all of them — and that's what makes it so powerful. For builders, this is your diagnostic tool:…
The most powerful prison is the belief that reconfiguration is impossible." 🔓 The antidote? Three freedoms — to move, to disobey, to reconfigure. And the systems we need to make them real: portable identifiers, open data, interoperable protocols.
What's the most powerful prison? One you can't see. Author [Name] breaks down the three freedoms that break domination — move, disobey, reconfigure — and asks the real question: what should we build? Systems where exit is easy. Open data. Interoperable protocols. Freedom by design.
Bitlemmas | The Book Club for the Open-Source World Open-source built the internet. Linux, Git, Apache, PostgreSQL — the backbone of modern computing was written by communities, not corporations. But today, those same communities are slowly being captured: by corporate foundations, centralized governance, and infrastructure they no longer control. Who's…
When institutions decline, what do people actually do? Albert Hirschman's classic framework gives us three answers — and they're not what you'd expect. In this episode, Watson and B. Sovereign break down *Exit, Voice, and Loyalty* and extract four counterintuitive truths with direct implications for builders working on open protocols,…
The Bitlemmas Podcast | Episode 11 | Digital Technology and Democratic Theory Book Review: "Digital Technology and Democratic Theory" — Bernholz, Landemore & Reich 📍 Runtime: ~1 hr 24 min Digital democracy. Platform governance. Censorship resistance. Decentralized identity. Open-source governance. Free speech online. Bitcoin philosophy. Civic tech. Algorithmic filtering. Participatory…
Bitlemmas | The Book Club for the Open-Source World Open-source built the internet. Linux, Git, Apache, PostgreSQL , the backbone of modern computing was written by communities, not corporations. But today, those same communities are slowly being captured: by corporate foundations, centralized governance, and infrastructure they no longer control. Who's…
In this debut episode of the BitLemmas Podcast, Watson walks through a detailed review of Jeff Booth's The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future. The discussion covers Booth's core argument that technology is inherently deflationary — meaning prices should be falling as outputs rise…
