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The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous

 An uneven and at times repetitive book, but yet a book that absolutely must be read by anyone who wants to learn about Bitcoin and why Bitcoin matters. 


Some chapters sing out with a compelling bull case for Bitcoin and offer lay readers an excellent rendering of monetary history. In other chapters the author gets bogged down in repetitive economic hand waving, while blaming everything bad about modernity (and I mean *everything* up to and including Miley Cyrus's twerking) on leaving a sound money standard. 

Most reasonable readers--and certainly anyone who's at least ankle deep in learning about Bitcoin--would agree on the value of sound money and the value of holding monetary authorities to a sound money standard.

But for Saifedean the lack of a sound money is a hammer in his hand... and the entire world is a nail. I've found this to be a problem for many Bitcoiners, especially Bitcoin maximalists, hence the often used phrase "Bitcoin solves this" used (only partially tongue in cheek) to address any and all problems of modernity. 

One could describe Ammous' near obsession with "stock to flow ratios" as another hammer, and in this case Bitcoin, or rather Bitcoin's future price, is the nail. There's a problem with using a stock to flow analysis to predict Bitcoin's price, because the halvenings (and when they will occur) are already well-known and well-mapped out, thus likely already incorporated in Bitcoin's price. I don't put much "stock" in this method of valuing Bitcoin. 

But these are minor criticisms compared to the real value of this book: it gives the reader a complete paradigm for how to think about Bitcoin, how to think about money, and how to think about preserving wealth in an imperfect world of loose monetary policy imposed by centralized and highly fallible monetary authorities. 

A few more bullet points: 

1) Excellent discussion of time preference, a very useful concept unfortunately not taught in schools, nor understood by the very people who would most benefit from this ultimate cheat code to life.

2) Keynesianism and monetarism, interestingly, are not much different from the democrat/republican paradigm that falsely divides ideology into two opposing factions (but really one-party rule) of modern pseudo-democracy.

3) Ammous creatively (and justifiably) reframes Keynes's famous maxim "In the long run we are all dead" as a high time preference statement of "libertine irresponsibility." He's right! Only a genuine narcissist wouldn't care about the state of the world after he or she was dead.

4) Intriguing thoughts at the end of the book where the author explores potential applications (or rather lack thereof) of blockchain technology, persuasively arriving at the conclusion that blockchain is a lot less useful than people think it is, except it's extremely useful for the specific application known as Bitcoin.

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