The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

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its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.” The Bitcoin Standard is being published in 37 languages: the original English, as well as Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese (traditional), Chinese (simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese. Although I agree with certain aspects of this assessment, it is clearly exaggerated and oversimplified. I also don't care at all about the author's approach to persuasion e.g. to name a few: 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.

The only scarcity, as Julian Simon brilliantly demonstrated, is in the time humans have to produce these metals, and that is why the global wage continues to rise worldwide, making products and materials continuously get cheaper in terms of human labor. 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. Really terrible. I thought this book would give some technical information on bitcoin, but instead gave me some libertarians shitty views on whatever it seemed like he was thinking about at the moment he was writing. His take on Modern art was among the most memorably idiotic parts of this publication. What it did say about bitcoin was basic knowledge I could have found on Wikipedia, and even that was barely touched and poorly written. Any industry in which people complain about their asshole boss is likely part of the bezzle, because bosses can only really afford to be assholes in the economic fake reality of the bezzle.The larger the market, the more the opportunities for specialization and exchange, but also the bigger the problem of coincidence of wants—what you want to acquire is produced by someone who doesn’t want what you have to sell. Note: Seems a bit much? I think the underlying point that money has a lot of downstream effects is good though 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. Systems - Leverage Systems to Be 10x More Effective, and Discover Frameworks that Yield Disproportionately Large Results

In The Bitcoin Standard, Ammous offers a take on why Bitcoin is the best version of what Austrian economists call “sound money” and why he believes that makes it the only cryptocurrency worth paying attention to. A major advantage in securing centralized credit is scale, as it appears quantitatively less risky to lend to large‐scale lenders. The larger the firm, the more predictable the formula for its success, the larger the collateral in case it fails, and the more secure bank bureaucrats feel when making loans according to central bank lending criteria. While many industries could benefit from economies of scale, centralized credit issuance accentuates the advantages of size above and beyond what would be the case in a free market.This book could have been much better... There are good parts to it, especially in the beginning, a historical review of money is very interesting. However pretty soon the author loses credibility in my eyes as it slowly switches from presenting facts and interesting analysis to the ramblings of a madman. Beginning with a history of gold, Ammous looks at different types of money in history and shows how Bitcoin fits in. delay his gratification to engage in risky production over a longer period of time is that these longer processes will generate more output and superior goods. In other words, investment raises the productivity of the producer. It's also worth noting that there was no meaningful mention of bitcoin throughout this part of the book.

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. In conclusion, the Bitcoin coders face a strong incentive to abide by consensus rules if they are to have their code adopted. The miners have to abide by the network consensus rules to receive compensation for the resources they spend on proof‐of‐work. The network members face a strong incentive to remain on the consensus rules to ensure they can clear their transactions on the network.the key property that leads to a good being adopted freely as money on the market, and that is salability—the ease with which a good can be sold on the market whenever its holder desires, with the least loss in its price. 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.

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. People are allowed to have ideologies, but it shows good faith to be explicit that this is what is being discussed: this is political ideology, not economic or monetary theory per se. Ammous is at least clear in affirming that “The political vision of Bitcoin” is essentially based around Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism: government should stay out of people’s lives (other than helping secure property). The book’s principle citations are from Rothbard and his fellow travellers, von Mises and Hayek (with some reference to other libertarian thought and modern Austrian school writers such as Salerno and Hoppe). The middle section of the book is von Mises and Rothbard on steroids. It has a feeling of lecture notes stitched together without the benefit of a serious editor: almost plagiaristic in parts, dumbed down for mass-market appeal in others, always displaying a touch of venom. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown 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.main difference being that the monetary discipline of the gold standard was almost entirely lost in this world where there were no effective controls on all central banks in expanding the money supply, because no citizens could redeem their government money for gold.