Author: Saifedean Ammous is a Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University, and member of the Centre on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University.
Book: The Bitcoin Standard analyses 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. It is dived in two main parts. The first one, which accounts for more than a half of the book, is devoted to monetary theory. Mr. Ammous explains how the monetary system of any prosperous society should work, how it doesn’t work like that, and thus, why bitcoin could solve the problem. As you can imagine he is an advocate of sound money and makes numerous references to Hayek, Mises or Rothbard. Finally, with that background in place, the book moves on to explain the operation of bitcoin in a functional and intuitive way. Both the key elements of the network and the most popular questions about the cryptocurrency are explained.
Opinion: I don’t remember enjoying a reading so much as with this book. I think the first part is one of the most comprehensive explications of the role of savings, time preference or capital accumulation in a prosperous civilization. For instance, I liked, among many other things, how he explains that fiat money is responsible of perpetual wars between nations. Finally, with respect to BTC, I cannot talk much about his accuracy because of my lack of knowledge about the internal functioning and the system in general. The future is uncertain, and nobody knows how will BTC end, however, I like to think of BTC as a call option on a new monetary system backed by digital gold.
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