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The Bitcoin Standard
304 pages
A sweeping, uncompromising economic manifesto that reframes the history of human civilization through the lens of sound money.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting through a passionate, paradigm-shifting university lecture delivered by a fiercely uncompromising professor. It moves at a steady, deliberate pace, building its case not just on the mechanics of digital currency, but on a sweeping historical foundation of human trade, from seashells to the gold standard. The mood is highly intellectual and urgent, steeped in Austrian economic theory and a palpable frustration with modern central banking. Ammous's prose is direct, polemical, and deeply philosophical, challenging the reader to rethink the relationship between money, time preference, and civilizational flourishing. It is a deeply polarizing but undeniably compelling experience, tailor-made for armchair economists, libertarians, and anyone seeking a foundational, almost ideological understanding of decentralized finance.
- Mood
- intellectual
- urgent
- paradigm-shifting
- Tone
- authoritative
- polemical
- didactic
- uncompromising
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the nature of sound money · civilizational cycles · time preference and human progress · decentralization vs. authority
- The writing
- Direct, argumentative, and historically sweeping, driven by a sharp, uncompromising philosophical edge.
- The arc
- Begins with a sweeping historical curiosity about human trade, deepens into frustration with modern financial systems, and resolves into a zealous optimism for a decentralized future.
- Who it's for
- Libertarians, crypto enthusiasts, and armchair economists seeking a foundational, philosophical argument for decentralized finance.
About the book
When a pseudonymous programmer introduced “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party” to a small online mailing list in 2008, very few paid attention. Ten years later, and against all odds, this upstart autonomous decentralized software offers an unstoppable and globally-accessible hard money alternative to modern central banks. The Bitcoin Standard analyzes the historical context to the rise of Bitcoin, the economic properties that have allowed it to grow quickly, and its likely economic, political, and social implications.
While Bitcoin is a new invention of the digital age, the problem it purports to solve is as old as human society itself: transferring value across time and space. Ammous takes the reader on an engaging journey through the history of technologies performing the functions of money, from primitive systems of trading limestones and seashells, to metals, coins, the gold standard, and modern government debt. Exploring what gave these technologies their monetary role, and how most lost it, provides the reader with a good idea of what makes for sound money, and sets the stage for an economic discussion of its consequences for individual and societal future-orientation, capital accumulation, trade, peace, culture, and art. Compellingly, Ammous shows that it is no coincidence that the loftiest achievements of humanity have come in societies enjoying the benefits of sound monetary regimes, nor is it coincidental that monetary collapse has usually accompanied civilizational collapse.
With this background in place, the book moves on to explain the operation of Bitcoin in a functional and intuitive way. Bitcoin is a decentralized, distributed piece of software that converts electricity and processing power into indisputably accurate records, thus allowing its users to utilize the Internet to perform the traditional functions of money without having to rely on, or trust, any authorities or infrastructure in the physical world. Bitcoin is thus best understood as the first successfully implemented form of digital cash and digital hard money. With an automated and perfectly predictable monetary policy, and the ability to perform final settlement of large sums across the world in a matter of minutes, Bitcoin’s real competitive edge might just be as a store of value and network for final settlement of large payments―a digital form of gold with a built-in settlement infrastructure.
Description from Open Library.
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