Laissez Faire Books

Today, I discovered Laissez Faire Books while looking into a book mentioned by bitcoin investor Trace Mayer in this interview.

We have a long history of brilliant minds encountering opposition…[Nicolaus Copernicus] came up with the quantity theory of money in 1516. He wrote a book on interest rates in 1526.

(Around 15:00)

Trace Mayer

After a bit of research, I found that this book was originally written in Latin. The book’s title has been translated many different ways, but “Essay on Money” is one of them — and is the title used by translator Gerald Malsbary. It can purchased directly from LFB (lfb.org), or Amazon.com, currently priced at $9.00 USD on both venues.

I’d like to see a way to buy “Essay on Money”, translated by Gerald Malsbary, with bitcoin. Perhaps a product like this could be offered via one of the services that allows people to sell digital goods for bitcoin, like Satoshi box, Coinbounce, CoinDL, Sellbox, or CoinLock.

Like Isaac Newton (who came later), Copernicus was both a scientist and an expert on coinage, consulted by his government. He worked on iterations of the Essay on Money on and off for over 20 years. The original Latin text is included as an appendix, but you can also see it here, accompanied by a (poor) machine translation by Google.