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SAIFEDEAN AMMOUS

“This is a historical lesson of immense significance and should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks his refusal of Bitcoin means he doesn't have to deal with it. History shows it is not​ possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours.”

SAIFEDEAN AMMOUS

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Hard Money, Easy Money

Hard Money, Easy Money

Money whose supply is hard to increase is known as hard money (sound), while easy money is money whose supply is amenable to large increases (unsound).

  • The easy money trap: anything used as a store of value will have its supply increased, and anything whose su...

74

420 reads

The World Before Money

The World Before Money

How did it work? It was pretty simple: people just swapped things. It worked fine, except if you didn’t have something your neighbor needed. Once people figured out you could exchange universally valued objects for goods, everything changed.

From there, we’ve gone from all ...

72

802 reads

The Gold Standard

The Gold Standard

  • Different currencies were simply different weights of physical gold, and the exchange rate between one nation’s currency and the other was the simple conversion between different weight units, as straightforward as converting inches to centimeters.
  • In the same way ...

71

474 reads

Consumption Is Key

The 20 century’s binge on conspicuous consumption cannot be understood separately from the destruction of sound money and the outbreak of vilifying savings and deifying consumption as the key to economic prosperity.

  • The reduced incentive to save is mirrored with an increased i...

69

320 reads

The Flaw of The Gold Standard

The fatal flaw of the gold standard was that settlement in physical gold was heavy, 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.

70

455 reads

Money Backed By Gold

  • Money has come in all shapes and sizes throughout history, but there’s only ever been one truly sound system: money backed by gold.
  • The “gold standard” underwrote an age of prosperity and stability. That all changed in the early 20th century when European governments...

70

539 reads

What Makes Good Currency

  • What makes good currency is that it is salable or easily sold. With the technology of smelting metals, early pre-Christian civilizations could make highly salable coins that were also extremely portable.
  • The preferred type of coin was gold.
  • When transportatio...

69

727 reads

Bitcoin As a Reserve Currency

Bitcoin can be seen as the new emerging reserve currency for online transactions, where the online equivalent of banks will issue Bitcoin-backed tokens to users while keeping their hoard of Bitcoins in cold storage, with each individual being able to audit in real time the holdings of the interme...

70

315 reads

Bitcoin: The Challenges

Bitcoin: The Challenges

We know it is incredibly promising, but of course, there are challenges.

  1. One of these is price volatility. This volatility is mostly due to demand, and because it’s so new, demand is highly variable. People wonder how it can be reliable if it fluctuates.

72

328 reads

Salability

Salability

A good’s salability across time refers to its ability to hold value into the future, allowing the holder to store wealth in it. For a good to be salable across time it has to be immune to deterioration.

Similarly, with money, it was inevitable that one, or a few, goods wou...

73

599 reads

Time Preferences of Money

Time Preferences of Money

Time preference for money is an individual's preference for possession of a given amount of money now, rather than the same amount at some future time. The time preference for money is generally expressed by an interest rate. This rate will be positive even in the absence of any ...

69

344 reads

The New Gold Standard

The New Gold Standard

After the First World War, financial deficits forced European powers to drop the gold standard. They introduced fiat money, which was backed by decree instead of gold. This switch led to an age of unsound money where governments could intervene in the economy to ...

71

318 reads

The Importance of Sound Money

  • It protects value across time, which gives people a bigger incentive to think of their future, and lowers their time preference (this is what initiates the process of human civilization and allows for humans to cooperate, prosper, and live in peace.)
  • Sound money allows for trade to...

68

383 reads

Verification > Trust

Verification > Trust

  • Bitcoin can thus be understood as a technology that converts electricity to truthful records through the expenditure of processing power.
  • Those who expend this electricity are rewarded with the bitcoin currency, and so they have a strong incentive to maintain its integrity. As a r...

70

312 reads

Bitcoin Could Replace Money As We Know It

... because it is scarce, secure, and unique.

  • Bitcoin has a fixed supply— there will never be more than 21 million in existence.
  • They also have a stable supply because, like gold, bitcoins are mined.
  • Bitcoins are the only good defined by absolute s...

71

336 reads

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gra_maa

"I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it." -Frank Howard Clark ⁠

A deep dive into the role money has played across history and how Bitcoin fits in.

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