A lot of things are connected and it's amazing when they pop up and reveal themselves as distant cousins. Today, my wife and I were listening to the radio and a trivia question came up, actually two.

Question one was a repeat/review from last week and was something like this:

See answer below image, but you might want to read the second question first before glancing at the answer.

Question two, for today, was something like:

Answer below image. For fun, try to figure it out, then look at the answer below.

https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/crrdlx/AK7vzCsU1QUHqBMposUSJd2SPah7kEfeHUxCjr7gu9G7wsrArM66VPPHpBLkPLR.jpg Image created at Leonardo.ai

My wife tossed out an answer first, "Where the North Star is located?" she thought out loud. That was a good answer, I thought. My guess is that a lot more people back then could locate the North Star and that far fewer than 25% can pick out Polaris from a night sky today. Going with the "people are pretty dumb today" theory, I wanted something more obvious. I thought of the moon and how many moons there are. "Please," I thought to myself, "don't let 25% of the people not know that we have only one moon." How about moons and other planets? Hmm.

I thought of Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer. I thought of Copernicus. He was about 500 years ago, I knew that. Maybe the answer was a heliocentric solar system. I wasn't sure about Ptolemy and the sun/earth relation. Things kind of fit, but, was Copernicus Polish? That doesn't sound like a Polish name. I cheated and looked up Copernicus...yep, he was Polish. So, the answer I gave was that the sun is the center of the solar system. Turned out that was the correct answer.

While we were waiting for the official answer, my wife asked rather randomly, "Do you know what Gresham's Law is?"

My chipmunk brain scanned its files. Something twinged in the back of my head, I thought I'd heard that before. I knew a fellow with the last name Gresham back in school, which is why the name perked up and why I thought I'd paid attention to it in the first place. But, I didn't know the law, so I answered, "No."

"Bad money drives out good money," my wife said. Such a clear and simple statement. And, being about money, I must have heard or read of that at some point while reading about bitcoin. I told her that I'm not sure I agree with that law. To my thinking, people will simply reject bad money and go with the good. Why would they not?

I looked up Gresham's Law and I'll summarize it here. The idea is that "good money" is "hard money", that is, gold or silver coins that truly are gold or silver. "Bad money" is "soft money" like "gold" coins that are only a fraction gold and mostly watered down by some other common metal. Or, it's like paper fiat money backed by nothing.

Why does bad money beat out good money? Why would people go with watered down coinage or paper fiat? The answer lies in power and force. Governments institute the bad money and they have to power to force people to use the bad money. They also have the brute force, in guns and soldiers and jails, to ensure the bad money is used. This, regardless of the people's preferences. Thus, bad money beats out good money...Gresham's Law.

I wondered, "How did Gresham's Law come up while my wife was looking up Copernicus?"

Turns out, Copernicus got robbed of his intellectual property. He wrote about good and bad money far earlier than Gresham. https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/crrdlx/23uFruunHpZKHJ3FCneXmDXVc1895s3phneWkxd2WbiPASZDqefuMxhqAAsmjfQb6eJjr.png

Evidently, Copernicus was a very clever person across many fields. Get a good lawyer and he's got a case.

What if the people just opted out of the "bad money?" Up until now, that has been difficult and maybe impossible. But, what if a system enabled such an opt out? Bitcoin just might do that. No one runs it and governments cannot just "ban bitcoin." I'm sure governments could make it very unpleasant...jail or other penalties...yet it would still run.

https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/crrdlx/23wWrwXHiRoGDpYReGVR3zE8qCqDgH47WWTo68nm6tehvQbLrDNeKVbZ1sqsVtKvckRyT.jpg Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/987403

Further, I'd love to hear what a clever person like Copernicus would say on this. Would he alter his "bad money drives out good money" premise to something like, "when bad money exists, people will replace it with good money."

It's neat when something like a silly trivia question rouses your brain to web together seemingly unrelated things: