I found the following story on the NPR iPad App
If You've Ignored Bitcoin Up Until Now, This One's For You
by Emily Siner
NPR - February 26, 2014
If the idea of a crypto-currency confuses you to the point of avoiding the topic altogether, you're missing out on some good stuff worthy of a Dan Brown novel."WE EVEN HAD to host the servers in our own office." Naval Ravikant laughs as he describes how in 1999 he and some friends founded his first startup, Epinions, a website for consumer reviews. They had to raise $8m in venture capital, buy computers from Sun Microsystems, license database software from Oracle and hire eight programmers. It took nearly six months to get a first version of the site up and running.
LAKE MEAD, NEVADA
THE first rule for staying alive in a desert is not to pour the contents of your water flask into the sand. Yet that, bizarrely, is what the government has encouraged farmers to do in the drought-afflicted south-west. Agriculture accounts for 80% of water consumption in California, for example, but only 2% of economic activity. Farmers flood the land to grow rice, alfalfa and other thirsty crops. By one account, over the years they have paid just 15% of the capital costs of the federal system that delivers much of their irrigation water. If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that they would waste far less of it, and the effects of California's drought—its worst in recorded history—would not be so severe.
IN 1968 an American ecologist, Garrett Hardin, published an article entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons". He argued that when a resource is held jointly, it is in individuals' self-interest to deplete it, so people will tend to undermine their collective long-term interest by over-exploiting rather than protecting that asset. Such a tragedy is now unfolding, causing serious damage to a resource that covers almost half the surface of the Earth.
LOUIS XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, believed that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." It isn't just taxation that has rich-world companies hissing these days, but rhetoric and regulation as well.
"WE EVEN HAD to host the servers in our own office." Naval Ravikant laughs as he describes how in 1999 he and some friends founded his first startup, Epinions, a website for consumer reviews. They had to raise $8m in venture capital, buy computers from Sun Microsystems, license database software from Oracle and hire eight programmers. It took nearly six months to get a first version of the site up and running.
