Note: Once one power did it without causing a run on the bank then they sort of all had to do it because otherwise they would be outspent and lose the war. Could appeal to nationalism to prvent bank run. The fatal flaw of the gold standard at the heart of these two problems was that settlement in physical gold is cumbersome, expensive, and insecure, which meant it had to rely on centralizing physical gold reserves in a few locations—banks and central banks—leaving them vulnerable to being taken over by governments. Contrary to the most egregiously erroneous and central tenet of the state theory of money, it was not the government that decreed gold as money; rather, it is only by holding gold that governments could get their money to be accepted at all. Note: Seems a bit much? I think the underlying point that money has a lot of downstream effects is good though 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.

Saifedean Ammous is an internationally best-selling author and economist. In 2018, Ammous authored The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the best-selling book on bitcoin, published in 36 languages. In 2021, he published The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization, available in 12 languages. In 2023, he published Principles of Economics, a comprehensive introduction to economics in the Austrian school tradition. Saifedean teaches courses on the economics of bitcoin, and economics in the Austrian school tradition, on his online learning platform Saifedean.com, and also hosts The Bitcoin Standard Podcast. The author then introduces the concept of “sound money” — money that maintains its value over time and is resistant to inflation. Ammous explains that the gold standard, which linked the value of currencies to gold, served as a reliable monetary system for many years. The stability it provided to economies across the globe, and the constraints it placed on government spending, were hallmarks of the gold standard era. The Unraveling of the Gold Standard and the Emergence of Fiat Currency Unlike the Romans and the Byzantines, Arab and Muslim civilizations’ collapse was not linked to the collapse of their money as they maintained the integrity of their currencies for centuries.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. In ‘The Bitcoin Standard,’ economist and author Saifedean Ammous delves deep into the history of money, its evolution, and the transformative potential of Bitcoin as a game-changer for the global financial system. The book presents a detailed analysis of the fundamental principles of Bitcoin, its potential impact on economic systems, and its significance for the future of money. The Evolution of Money: A Journey Through Time

Bitcoin has a huge advantage over gold in transactions: clearance does not require a specific custodian. No government can control what code you have in your head. 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. I have personally no idea if the world would be a better or worse place today if we had continued with a free market and following the Austrian school of economics. Saifedean's views of the golden past are probably simplistic and the problems of today's globally connected and overpopulated world are probably far more complex than the author (or anyone on the planet) could possibly understand - BUT I can see with my own eyes that my generation's buying power is absolutely ridiculous compared to my parent's generation, despite us working significantly longer hours in supposedly much higher classed and higher paid jobs. The seminar is open to learners on Saifedean.com, and focuses on discussing the material of the courses, as well as a broader discussion of Bitcoin, Austrian economics, and various current affairs. It is perhaps one of the most remarkable achievements of the Internet that an online economy that spontaneously and voluntarily emerged around a network designed by an anonymous programmer has grown, in nine years, to hold more value than is held in the money supply of most nation‐states and national currencies.

Asking citizens in surveys is a meaningless exercise, because people’s choices are meaningless without a price to reflect the real opportunity cost involved in trade‐offs between choices. A lot of the argument hinges on the notion of time preference – that a sound money which can’t be inflated away incentives people to think longer term. 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. The only way to make maturity mismatching safe is with the presence of a lender of last resort standing ready to lend to banks in case of a bank run.