The Satoshi Papers Explores The Role Of The State In A Post-Bitcoin World:

By Finance News On Dec 23, 2024

Natalie Smolenski has made a name for herself in the Bitcoin space in recent years by sharing her dynamic insights on Bitcoin and how it shapes the world moving forward.

The PhD-holding anthropologist is on the verge of upping the ante around her Bitcoin-related thought contributions with the new book she’s edited and to which she’s contributed, The Satoshi Papers: Reflections On Political Economy After Bitcoin (published by the Bitcoin Policy Institute‘s imprint of Bitcoin Magazine Books and available for pre-order now).

The book is a collection of texts from some of the most prominent academics who write about Bitcoin, including Andrew M. Bailey, Avik Roy and Leopoldo Bebchuk. With pieces entitled “Easy Money, Easy Wars? The Evolution of War Finance, Forever Wars, and the Prospects of a Bitcoin Peace” and “Dispute Resolution Without the State,” Smolenski and her colleagues explore the potential shifts in politics and power that may occur as a result of Bitcoin’s existence and proliferation.

I sat down with Smolenski to discuss why she chose to publish The Satoshi Papers at this moment in time, who she hopes to reach via the book and why the book isn’t an “apology” for Bitcoin.

What was the impetus to put The Satoshi Papers together?

Back in 2020, a friend of mine, Lee Bratcher, and I co-founded the Texas Blockchain Council, which was a trade association representing the Bitcoin industry in Texas. We also set up the Texas Blockchain Summit, which was our annual conference and one of the first policy-focused conferences around Bitcoin in the United States.

After the very first Texas Blockchain Summit, I was speaking with a good friend of mine who suggested that the time may be right to publish some essays about this moment in the historical adoption of Bitcoin — that this was kind of a refounding moment for the American Republic.

Bitcoin is a part of that story, but it’s not the whole story. So, there seemed to be an opportunity to collect works from interdisciplinary voices to talk about and investigate what the relationship between the individual, society and the state looks like in a post-Bitcoin world.

I took that as a kind of mission, and I founded the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3), an education-focused charity. I took a step back from the policy space in order to focus more on some of the theoretical and scientific issues that I think need to inform the policy conversation going forward.

How did you decide on the roster of contributors for the book?

There were some people we invited personally, because I knew them, and I knew that they were strong thinkers in the Bitcoin space. A number of them came back and said, “Yes, we’d love to contribute an essay.”

So, we had some personal invitations go out and then we also had an open call for papers and those went through a couple of rounds. Initially, people just submitted an abstract, and we gave the most promising abstracts feedback if we thought they could…