Publisher's Synopsis
Few people took notice in 2008 when a pseudonymous programmer announced: "a new electronic cash system that's peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party" to a small internet mailing list. Ten years later, and despite all odds, this fledgling autonomous decentralized software provides a hard money alternative to contemporary central banks that is unstoppable and accessible on a worldwide scale. The Bitcoin Standard examines the historical background of Bitcoin's rise, the economic characteristics that have fueled its rapid expansion, and the potential economic, political, and social ramifications.
Transferring wealth over time and place is an issue that has existed since the beginning of human society, even if Bitcoin is a relative innovation of the digital age.
Ammous takes the reader on a fascinating tour through the development of money-related technologies, starting with the earliest systems of exchanging seashells and limestones and progressing through metals, coins, the gold standard, and contemporary government debt. By examining what gave these technologies their monetary function and how most of them lost it, we can give readers a clear understanding of what constitutes sound money and lay the groundwork for a discussion of how this has an impact on people's attitudes toward the future, capital accumulation, trade, peace, culture, and the arts. Ammous convincingly demonstrates that neither the fact that the greatest human accomplishments have occurred in societies that have benefited from stable monetary regimes nor the fact that monetary collapse has typically been accompanied by the civilizational collapse are coincidences.
