Note: this is a pretty “rough” review. There was a lot of material in this book, and I hope at some point to give it a second read-through and then re-write this review, to provide a better survey of key points and a more nuanced treatment overall.] Have you ever thought about the world before money? How did it work? Actually, it was pretty simple: people just swapped stuff. They traded a horse for a cow and so on. It worked okay, except if you didn’t have something your neighbour needed. Once people figured out you could exchange universally valued objects for goods, everything changed. Bitcoin is also the first example of absolute scarcity, the only liquid commodity (digital or physical) with a set fixed quantity that cannot conceivably be increased. Svojo celotno kariero sem preučeval dela o monetarni teoriji, zlatem standardu, primerjalnih monetarnih sistemih, centralnih bankah ter o predlogih za monetarno in finančno reformo. Le peščici knjig, ki sem jih prebral o katerikoli izmed teh tem, bi pripisal odlično oceno. Knjiga dr. Ammousa, Bitcoin standard, poleg odlične obravnave teh tem vsebuje tudi enega redkih razsvetljenih in poučnih opisov bitcoina, na katere sem naletel, in predstavlja nujno branje za vse, ki jih zanima morebitna vloga bitcoina v sistemu svobodnega in zanesljivega denarja prihodnosti.” – Dr. Joseph T. Salerno, Inštitut Mises O KNJIGI The value of money, supposed to be the unit of account with which all economic activity is measured and planned, went from being the value of the least volatile good on the market to being determined through the sum of three policy tools of the government—monetary, fiscal, and trade policy—and most unpredictably, through the reactions of individuals to these policy tools. Governments deciding to dictate the measure of value makes as much sense as governments attempting to dictate the measure of length based on the heights of individuals and buildings in their territories. One can only imagine the sort of confusion that would happen to all engineering projects were the length of the meter to oscillate daily with the pronouncements of a central measurements office. Only the vanity of the insane can be affected by changing the unit with which they’re measured. Making the meter shorter might make someone whose house’s area is 200 square meters believe it is actually 400 square meters, but it would still be the same house. All that this redefinition of the meter has caused is ruin an engineer’s ability to properly build or maintain a house. Similarly, devaluing a currency may make a country richer nominally, or increase the nominal value of its exports, but it does nothing to make the country more prosperous.

Bitcoin Standard Book Summary and Notes - Taylor Pearson The Bitcoin Standard Book Summary and Notes - Taylor Pearson

differentiating between a good’s market demand (demand for consuming or holding the good for its own sake) and its monetary demand (demand for a good as a medium of exchange and store of value).

The Bitcoin Standard Summary/Review

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. 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. Further, decentralization is incredibly appealing for the grassroots power it brings to people. That's politically neutral. It's facilitative and enabling for whatever end. Where I disagree with libertarianism is in the social aspect. None of us live in a vacuum and history is relevant. We aren't all fungible nodes in a network. Humans are unique and individual which will involve prejudices that lead to historical injustices involving economic disparities NOT simply accounted for by the market. Societies are rather complex on the macro it turns out.

Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to

Jumping to the final three chapters, these are a worthwhile introduction to any newcomer wishing to understand the whole ‘crypto’ movement, although it should be understood that Ammous regards Bitcoin’s principal purpose as a form of universal ‘sound money’: a potential ‘Bitcoin Standard’ to replace the world economy’s long-abandoned gold standard. However, citing the white paper, Ammous clarifies Satoshi’s use-case for Bitcoin: There are good books available which give an introduction to Austrian School economics, not wholly tinged by a militant brand of libertarian ideology. There are good books about the political philosophy of liberalism. There are also good books on the history of monetary systems, and critiques of our current economic and monetary system, and the failures of central banking. This book is not one of them. Sin embargo, nada más comenzar su lectura comprendí que su autor había dado otro enfoque totalmente diferente.Note: Argument is that money is key technology of civilization. Presumably, because it enables social scalability. Hint, there isn't anything. The author just doesn't understand what nodes are doing under the hood to realize the processing of transactions as he described it is basically the extent of what a node does. Scarcity is the fundamental starting point of all economics, and its most important implication is the notion that everything has an opportunity cost. In the capital market, the opportunity cost of capital is forgone consumption, and the opportunity cost of consumption is forgone capital investment. bankers perform two highly pivotal functions for economic prosperity: the safekeeping of assets as deposits, and the matching of maturity and risk tolerance between investors and investment opportunities. Bankers make their money by taking a cut from the profits if they succeed in their job, but make no profit if they fail. Only the successful bankers and banks stay in their job, as those that fail are weeded out. In a society of sound money, there are no liquidity concerns over the failure of a bank, as all banks hold all their deposits on hand, and have investments of matched maturity. In other words, there is no distinction between illiquidity and insolvency, and there is no systemic risk that could make any bank ‘too big to fail.’ A bank that fails is the problem of its shareholders and lenders, and nobody else. Like the gold standard, or the fiat system, the Bitcoin standard is a proposed monetary system that was only theoretical until El Salvador recently went all in by passing a law that accepts Bitcoin as legal currency.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to

Nero, who ruled from 54–68 AD, had found the formula to solve this, which was highly similar to Keynes’s solution to Britain’s and the U.S.’s problems after World War I: devaluing the currency would at once reduce the real wages of workers, reduce the burden of the government in subsidizing staples, and provide increased money for financing other government expenditure. In retrospect, the major difference between World War I and the previous limited wars was neither geopolitical nor strategic, but rather, it was monetary. Note: Seems a bit much? I think the underlying point that money has a lot of downstream effects is good though Think of the obnoxious frat bro who just read Ayn Rand for the first time and now has the world completely figured out, or the stoner who believes that the illegality of pot is the cause of all the planet's suffering: it's the sort of exaggerated, tenuously-connected rambling that occurs when someone stumbles across a decent idea and thinks that it is *THE* grand unifying idea that cures all ills.Knjiga Bitcoin standard bi morala spadati med obvezno branje za vsakogar v sodobni družbi. Ponuja jedrnato in razumljivo zgodbo o monetarni teoriji, zgodovini denarja, praktični ekonomiji in vplivu političnih odločitev na poslovni svet, kulturo in gospodarstvo. Knjiga vsebuje enega izmed morda najboljših opisov odlik močnega denarja in nevarnosti šibke valute, kar jih je bilo predstavljenih v sodobni poslovni literaturi. Bitcoin standard obenem mojstrsko razbije mite o sodobni monetarni teoriji in polomljenih idejah, ki so prevladovale v ekonomskem razmišljanju o fiat valutah od zgodnjega dvajsetega stoletja naprej.” – Odlomek iz predgovora Michaela Saylorja, Microstrategy Although gold was supposedly demonetized fully in 1971, central banks continued to hold significant gold reserves, and only disposed of them slowly, before returning to buying gold in the last decade. the importance of sound money can be explained for three broad reasons: first, it protects value across time, which gives people a bigger incentive to think of their future, and lowers their time preference. The lowering of the time preference is what initiates the process of human civilization and allows for humans to cooperate, prosper, and live in peace. Second, sound money allows for trade to be based on a stable unit of measurement, facilitating ever‐larger markets, free from government control and coercion, and with free trade comes peace and prosperity. Further, a unit of account is essential for all forms of economic calculation and planning, and unsound money makes economic calculation unreliable and is the root cause of economic recessions and crises.

The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous | Waterstones

money whose supply is hard to increase is known as hard money, while easy money is money whose supply is amenable to large increases. The Bitcoin Standard combines the arrogant self-assurance of both kindergarten Austrian economics and an anarcho-capitalist ideology into a folksy (yet vitriolic) morality play about the espoused benefits of thrift and self-denial. A 21st century re-writing of The Richest Man in Babylon, without the charm but with a vindictive and patronising attitude towards anyone who disagrees: “The vanity of the insane,” we’re warned. The book’s blind spots also demonstrate what undermines BTC’s ultimate narrative: like it or not, governments will regulate and seek control, regardless.

It’s a disconcerting reminder that ersatz ‘libertarian’ thought, at its edges, looks a little bit authoritarian: sound money forces you to be more morally upright. After all, the ostensible hero in this morality play is Rothbard whose ‘Ethics’ (cited by Ammous) ultimately resolve into allowing parents to starve their children to death if they wish (presumably a result of high time preference); a problem of neglect that, Rothbard tells us, could be solved through a free-market in babies. This is not classical liberalism, or even mainstream libertarianism, but the hard-core anarcho-capitalism of sociopaths. Sound money allows people to think about the long-term and to save and invest more for the future. Saving and investing for the long run are the key to capital accumulation and the advance of human civilization. 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". This is grade F stuff. Keynes is branded an authoritarian despot for arguing for individual liberty and freedom against the everyday suffocating threat of revolution and war. It’s not clear whether the wanton misrepresentation of Keynes’ thinking—and by implication, everything he allegedly represents as the Antichrist of ‘unsound money’—is due to ignorance, or mendacity. Perhaps Ammous has a high time preference when it comes to studying what Keynes actually wrote. Some compensation for fans of Keynes is that Ammous is nearly as dismissive of Milton Friedman and the “Friedman brand of libertarianism.” It’s Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism or bust.