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Murtaza's Reviews > The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous
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This is an entertaining polemic on behalf of the Austrian School economists and against Keynesianism, with the tweak only coming at the end that Bitcoin offers a way to return to a world before money was delinked from gold and began its inflationary spiral. I hardly feel qualified to evaluate these arguments as a layperson but Ammous offers food for thought about how the type of money that a society uses tends to prefigure all of its values. Inflationary money that loses value with time incentivizes high time-preference behavior and thus superficiality, whereas money that holds its value for the long term and cannot be inflated (lets say gold, or bitcoin) leads people to think in terms of generations. One can see how money influences values not just in investments but in the type of culture that a society produces and the things that it places value upon � building a thousand-year cathedral seems almost incomprehensible to modern Europeans and Americans but its something that people once did. That we live in an ephemeral culture today and have even built 50-year ammortized monuments to its ephemerality is clear enough. I'm sure there are counterarguments to Ammous' pro-Austria School polemic against Keynes, but he raises interesting points regardless.

The book does not delve much into the Bitcoin protocol and its functioning but serves as a fairly good introduction to the subject. It is written with great passion and can be a bit repetitive at times, while also perhaps losing nuance in the midst of its enthusiasm for Bitcoin. That said it helped to understand more about the origins and nature of money, as well as how the way a money holds it value or not over time can totally transform society. Money is inherently political and its characteristics influence every part of the society it comes into contact with. I certainly hope that Bitcoin does live up to Ammous hopes in it.





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Reading Progress

March 2, 2021 – Started Reading
March 2, 2021 – Shelved
March 4, 2021 – Finished Reading

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