#111 'Tu Tu Main Main' In the Information Age

This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question:&#160;how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?<br/><br/>PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration on all podcasting platforms courtesy of the good folks at&#160;<a href="https://www.ad-auris.com/">Ad-Auris</a>. If you have any feedback, please send it to us.<br/><br/>Global Policy Watch #1: A Bit About Bitcoin<br/><br/>Bringing an Indian perspective to burning global issues<br/><br/>&#8212;&#160;RSJ<br/><br/>What should we make of bitcoin? Should we think of it as the best performing asset class in the last decade? After all, it was priced at $1 in April 2011 and its current price is about $45,000. But was it designed to be an asset? Surely, no. Satoshi Nakamoto, who invented bitcoin, was driven more by angst than greed while writing the 31,000 lines of code that he put out to the world on Jan 3, 2009. Satoshi (a pseudonym) wrote a 500-word essay - Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System - to explain the working of the system he had created. The logic was simple - a software system that would spew out some 21 million bitcoins over two decades with people interested in the coins &#8216;mining&#8217; for them using their computing prowess.&#160;<br/><br/>Satoshi was clear about his aim. He had seen the global financial crisis and he could no longer trust the conventional currency (also called fiat currency) issued by the governments. All he could see around him was central bankers printing money mindlessly to prop up a system where the ordinary individual had no say. And the banks were willing to design more creative and more toxic products that only benefitted them. As he wrote:<br/><br/>&#8220;T