Scientific progress depends heavily on money, and the way that money is distributed profoundly shapes what gets studied, who gets to study it, and how quickly important discoveries are actually made. For most of modern history, the funding of research has flowed through a relatively small number of large and established channels, government agencies, private…
Read MoreIn almost every other part of ordinary economic life, people know what they will pay before they decide to buy. A menu lists the price of a meal, a tag shows the cost of a shirt, and a website clearly displays the full fare before a flight is ever booked. Healthcare in the United States…
Read MoreIn decentralized finance, the relentless pursuit of yield, the return earned by putting idle crypto assets to productive work, has given rise to a whole class of tools designed to do that work automatically and optimally on a user’s behalf. Yield aggregators take a user’s deposited assets and automatically deploy them across various lending platforms,…
Read MoreEvery price in a financial market is the visible result of an essentially invisible negotiation, the constant pushing and pulling of countless buyers and sellers, each trying to transact on the best terms they can possibly get. Most people who follow markets see only the final outcome of this negotiation, the price ticking up and…
Read MorePublic blockchains were built, from their very inception, on a principle of radical and uncompromising transparency. Every single transaction is recorded on a shared public ledger that anyone in the world can freely inspect, a design that allows the network to function without any trusted intermediaries and lets anyone, anywhere, independently verify that the rules…
Read MoreScience advances through what looks like a deceptively simple cycle of asking questions and then testing answers, yet the very first step, the formulation of a good hypothesis, has always depended on something genuinely difficult to systematize or teach. A productive hypothesis emerges when a researcher who has absorbed a vast body of knowledge notices…
Read MoreWhen a person donates to a cause or a foundation awards a grant, an act of trust quietly takes place that is rarely examined but is always present. The donor trusts that the money will reach the intended purpose, that it will not simply be lost to overhead and administration along the way, that the…
Read MoreA plumber finishes repairing a leak under a kitchen sink, a hairstylist completes a cut at a client’s home, a food vendor serves the very last customer at a busy market stall, and in each of these cases the same small but surprisingly consequential moment finally arrives, the moment of actually getting paid for the…
Read MoreCryptocurrencies are famous for their volatility, with prices that can swing dramatically within a single day, and this very volatility makes them poorly suited for many of the everyday uses that money is supposed to serve. A currency whose value might fall by a fifth between morning and evening is a difficult thing to price…
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