The thing is that most of the articles in this edition deserve their moment in the focus of Hacker News. Money is the ultimate software, it is a protocol agreement that drives human behavior in the real world. Money may be the illusion of value, or merely an allusion to value; but it is also the dominant abstraction of the age of abstractions. You need money to live as a member of society, and to be effective within society you need more than some minimal threshold amount of money. And while we don't wear our bank accounts on our sleeves (or social media profiles) we do have a finely honed sense for who has money in quantity and who does not and it is one of the primary determinants of social status in our society.

Money is a topic worthy of investigations, and of criticism and critique. It is also a fertile ground for entrepreneurial improvement.

"Kublai Khan was ahead of his time: He recognized that what matters about money is not what it looks like, or even what it’s backed by, but whether people believe in it enough to use it."

That belief is based on some form of backing eventually. It could be a hard and liquid commodity or a government demanding taxes in that particular currency.

The full article here http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/a-brief-history-...

Note that money has little to do with abstraction, but rather confidence. People hark back to the 'good old days' of hard money not because they're incapable of abstraction, but because they distrust a political authority to preserve that confidence.

Hurrah, Bitcoin! Thank you, IEEE.

Did you read their article on bitcoin? In the first paragraph they pretty much claim that it was invented to let people buy porn anonymously over the internet. That article is not going to do bitcoin any favours at all. And as for their handy "infographic" on what happens when a transaction takes place...

I get a 404 error :(