The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

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Note: As more people store value in a form of money there is an incentive to increase the flow/supply which makes it a worse store of value. The preferred type of coin was gold. It has a few unique qualities. First, it’s almost impossible to make or destroy. It also is fairly hard to retrieve from the ground, so you need to mine to get it, and the more you get, the deeper you have to mine. So even as technology has improved for gold mining, the supply of gold grows both slowly and predictably. The author thinks modern art is bad. I understand feeling that "today's music ain't got the same soul" but it hardly makes a solid monetary argument. He thinks environmentalists are wrong apparently on the basis of a peak resource theory of a single person. 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: The Decentralized Alternative to The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to

It was in the city‐states that humans could live with the freedom to work, produce, trade, and flourish, and that was to a large extent the result of these city‐states adopting a sound monetary standard. For anything to function as a good store of value, it has to beat this trap: it has to appreciate when people demand it as a store of value, but its producers have to be constrained from inflating the supply significantly enough to bring the price down. The U.S. Fed’s inflationary policy ended by the end of 1928, at which point the U.S. economy was ripe for the inevitable collapse that follows from the suspension of inflationism. Pese a no ser lo que estaba buscando, es un libro que recomendaría a cualquier persona que se interese no solo en Bitcoin sino en la función y orígenes del dinero. En este sentido, la primera parte del libro es fantástica.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? 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 Standard Podcast - Saifedean Ammous The Bitcoin Standard Podcast - Saifedean Ammous

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. 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. 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 Bitcoin Standard Summary/Review

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 latest version, just released some three years after the original, is essentially unchanged other than the new foreword by the well-known BTC maximalist and promoter, Saylor. The previous foreword by Nassim Taleb was effectively withdrawn in an angry public disagreement with Ammous, implying he was “crankish” and a “lunatic”: Taleb pulled his endorsement of both the book and BTC as ‘digital-gold.’ So, what’s the fuss about? easy money trap: anything used as a store of value will have its supply increased, and anything whose supply can be easily increased will destroy the wealth of those who used it as a store of value. 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. Note: Credit gets allocated to least efficient middlde of supply chain rather than more productive fringes

‎The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to

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 fundamental flaw of Friedman and Schwartz’s book is typical of modern academic scholarship: it is an elaborate exercise in substituting rigor for logic.

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. 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. The book’s 10 chapters are essentially in three parts: the first three chapters outline a particular theory and history of money; the next four intermix between a history of the gold standard and post-gold standard era, politics, and a kind of cultural anthropology of the impact of ‘sound money’ and time preference on society; the final three chapters are a more mundane description of the digital money vision of ‘ Bitcoin.’ Irrespective of the disapproval of the Austrian school, commodity monies have existed alongside other monies of varying types for thousands of years, variously competing and complementing according to context. Monetary systems largely emerged through top-down socio-political arrangements: from temples and priests, to Pharaohs, philosopher kings, Knights Templar, merchants, notaries, credit-brokers, bankers, governments and central banks. In contrast, the traditional methodology of the Austrian school seeks to develop theories and narratives based on a priori deductive reasoning of the presumed desires of individual human actions ( praxeology they call it). Any legitimate role of governance in the multidimensional socio-political relations around money is assumed away by ideological fiat, derided as an unnecessary intervention in the market which can only end in disaster. More dogma than theory or history. The history of money is complicated, and far more interesting than the simplistic narrative presented.

The Bitcoin Standard Summary - Four Minute Books The Bitcoin Standard Summary - Four Minute Books

Los 4 primeros capítulos son un fantástico repaso de los distintos bienes que han actuado como dinero a lo largo de la historia y un resumen de cómo ha cambiado el consenso económico respecto a cuál es la política monetaria ideal. Los capítulos 5 – 7 son una introducción a la teoría austriaca de economía pero con una postura demasiado “one-sided” en favor de esta y contra el keynesianismo y monetarismo (que teorías acertadas o no, tienen mejores argumentos para defender su política monetaria ideal que las que se exponen en el libro). Además, en esta parte se introduce un fuerte componente ideológico libertario y el autor se va por las ramas opinando sobre temas como el arte contemporáneo o la vida de Keynes, que son claros “off-topics”.

The Bitcoin Standard Quotes and Notes

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. 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. 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. Sin embargo, nada más comenzar su lectura comprendí que su autor había dado otro enfoque totalmente diferente. Note: Every dollar you spend could be invested and vice versa. You hvae to choose but printing money tries to do both?