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58 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 4 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
Even I've never heard of that book. What's your favorite thing about it?
Spang writes about how the French aristocracy made what amounts to an annuity on the lives of a bundle of young French women -- you invested your money, then got a payout over time in proportion to how many of them stayed alive. The world's most bizarre financial product.
(I'm probably describing this badly bc I don't know a lot about these arcane financial instruments, and it's been years since I read the book.)
But basically, it opened my eyes to just how elaborate financial engineering gets. Indirectly, it's a nice counterpart to btc, where there is no magical 'yield' and you can understand exactly how the monetary elements works. But also unsettling a bit -- if people want these things and there's an appetite (as there has been, historically), then will they find some way to get them, e.g., all the fintech / defi stuff?
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