Agreed. He may not be a software engineer or IT professional like many of us are on Hacker News, but he is a true hacker in the way he explores ideas and thinks about the world. It's a pleasure to read him every day.
Truly one of the greatest writers in journalism today, too. Excellent wordplay. One from last week with the pun about ether killed me. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-06/the-fall-...
"but here I want to stress what an old and dull idea this is. "People should be able to sell equity in themselves" is a perennial Finance 101 dorm-room musing -- as I've mentioned before, I wrote a paper about it in law school -- that has been tried repeatedly and never really gone anywhere, because (1) no one wants to sell equity in themselves and (2) no one wants to buy it. The obstacles are not technological but human, but people are going to keep trying to solve them with new technologies until human nature finally changes. You won't sell equity in yourself for dollars, but for ether, sure, knock yourself out. Cryptocurrency will give every dubious financial idea a second act: It didn't work before, but what if we tokenized it?"
Then again... Many great, new ideas are slight variations on old tropes. To quote pg's latest essay:
It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun. There are some domains where there's almost nothing new. But there's a big difference between nothing and almost nothing, when it's multiplied by the area under the sun.
