After my earlier post on the BlackBerry outage, Dr Graeme Acheson, a co-author, friend, and the proud owner of a BlackBerry, has pointed out to me that there were some positive externalities associated with BlackBerry's outage - reduced road traffic accidents. Click here for more details.
According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money. George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here . Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.