The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

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Note: You need a single or few monies to allow specialization. This is part of memetic fitness. The people who adopt a money which facilitates greater specialization will outcompete those who don’t. See Lydia. With the simple suspension of gold redeemability, governments’ war efforts were no longer limited to the money that they had in their own treasuries, but extended virtually to the entire wealth of the population. This book is a polemic and that is what makes it so funny. His views on Keynes are increasingly scatologial, starting from his being born with a silver spoon in his mouth and not really being an economist at all to JMK being a pederast trawling the brothels of Europe in his spare time. I hope that he has enough evidence for this to keep lawyers at bay. He has no time for modern art or music - it doesn't take enough time to produce and therefore can have no value. He doesn't appear to believe in increasing scarcity of resources based on the human race despoiling the planet, calling people like George Monbiot "hysterics".

money whose supply is hard to increase is known as hard money, while easy money is money whose supply is amenable to large increases. This] should be required reading for everyone in modern society,” writes Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, in his foreword to the latest version of The Bitcoin Standard (subtitled, the decentralized alternative to central banking) by Saifedean Ammous. state of the economy is determined by the lever of aggregate spending, and any rise in unemployment or slowdown in production had no underlying causes in the structure of production or in the distortion of markets by central planners; rather it was all a shortage of spending, and the remedy is the debauching of the currency and the increase of government spending. Saving reduces spending and because spending is all that matters, government must do all it can to deter its citizens from saving. Imports drive workers out of work, so spending increases must go on domestic goods. sound money is an essential requirement for individual freedom from despotism and repression, as the ability of a coercive state to create money can give it undue power over its subjects, the power which by its very nature will attract the least worthy, and most immoral, to take its reins.First off, I’m grateful to Saifedean for writing this book. I found it informative and thought-provoking, and loaded with potent one-liners that capture some of Bitcoin’s most exciting characteristics, and refute some of the most common arguments against it. And, yes, I have more than a few objections to share as well. But on the whole, I consider it worthwhile reading for anyone who is interested in the history, and future, of monetary systems. money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard‐earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.” The second half of the book is largely raw Bitcoin Maximalism. Not all of it is wrong per se, but it reeks of a zealotry. The sections of the book covering the scaling debate are incredibly biased, presented without nuance, and even factually wrong in many places. My favorite chapters were the first 4, which take us through phases of monetary evolution in history. Saifedean’s knowledge and expertise is on full display as he talks about seashells, Rai stones, glass beads, Roman gold coins (and the eventual debasement thereof), and the essential principles that underpin the trajectory and fate of each system. He clearly knows this territory well, and gives the reader a deft and lucid tour. He also does a fine job of introducing the principles of Austrian economics, as a counterpoint to the dominant Keynsian paradigm. I particularly liked the section on Roman and post-Roman coinage, which intimates that the fate of an empire can be very closely tied to how responsible or irresponsible of a monetary policy it maintains. In ‘The Bitcoin Standard,’ economist and author Saifedean Ammous delves deep into the history of money, its evolution, and the transformative potential of Bitcoin as a game-changer for the global financial system. The book presents a detailed analysis of the fundamental principles of Bitcoin, its potential impact on economic systems, and its significance for the future of money. The Evolution of Money: A Journey Through Time

Potentially the best explanation of the characteristics of money and how they work together to solve the "coincidence of wants" issue. None of the criticisms here are seeking to deny either that we have a major problem with runaway central banking, or that much of modern economics has lost its way. But far better critiques are out there. Lovers of ‘DeFi’ should appreciate that post-Keynesian monetary economics, while generally coming from a more left-wing perspective (take it or leave it), is deeply critical of the system but has a far superior understanding of the internal workings of our bank-credit based monetary system and the failures of central banking. Similarly, Free Banking literature critiques from the other side. But dreams of a return to a halcyon gold standard, of gold as a world reserve currency, are misguided—and not merely due to the technological limitations. Monetary and fiscal policy are firmly established tools of government—with plenty of additional beneficiaries. It’s difficult to see how any entity would willingly relinquish this kind of control. Friedrich The fatal flaw of the gold standard at the heart of these two problems was that settlement in physical gold is cumbersome, expensive, and insecure, which meant it had to rely on centralizing physical gold reserves in a few locations—banks and central banks—leaving them vulnerable to being taken over by governments. But it is in this same chapter that I started to see some of Saifedean’s bias or overindulgence: he seems to believe that a monetary standard is almost the sole determinant of a society’s fate. Describing Europe after the fall of Rome, he says “…the absence of a widely accepted sound monetary standard severely restricted the scope for trade, closing societies off from one another and enhancing parochialism as once-prosperous and civilized trading societies fell into the Dark Ages of serfdom, diseases, closed-mindedness, and religious persecution.” (pg. 29) Surely, there were many other factors at play beyond just the monetary standards of the time. Furthermore, how can this claim co-exist with the modern state of affairs, in which we have no sound monetary standard but worldwide trade is busier and richer than ever?

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Further, wide acceptance of a medium of exchange allows all prices to be expressed in its terms, which allows it to play the third function of money: unit of account.

What makes good currency is that it is salable or easily sold. With the technology of smelting metals, early pre-Christian civilizations could make highly salable coins that were also extremely portable.Los capítulos sobre Bitcoin son básicos en cuanto a la tecnología criptográfica que lo soporta, pero creo que explican muy bien por qué sus propiedades son ideales para convertirse, en el mejor de los casos, en la base de un patrón monetario alternativo que sustituya al actual, o al menos en un activo muy atractivo para actuar como depósito de valor durante las próximas décadas. A lot of the argument hinges on the notion of time preference – that a sound money which can’t be inflated away incentives people to think longer term. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Bitcoin_Standard_-_Saifedean_Ammous.pdf, The_Bitcoin_Standard_-_Saifedean_Ammous.epub If society were a little girl in that marshmallow experiment Keynesian economics seeks to alter the experiment so that waiting would punish the girl by giving her half a marshmallow instead of two, making the entire concept of self-control and low time preference appear counterproductive. Indulging immediate pleasures is the more likely course of action economically, and that will then reflect on culture and society at large. The Austrian school, on the other hand, by preaching sound money, recognizes the reality of the trade-off that nature provides humans, and that if the child waits, there will be more reward for her, making her happier in the long run, encouraging her to defer her gratification to increase it.