The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

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Civilization is not about more capital accumulation per se; rather, it is about what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, the flourishing and freedom to seek higher meaning in life when their base needs are met and most pressing dangers averted.

But a slow drain of its monetary value over time will slowly transfer the wealth of its holders to those who can produce the medium at a low cost.But in a world where central banks allocate credit, the larger firm has an advantage in being able to secure funding at a low rate which its smaller competitors cannot get.

The monetary media that survived the longest are the ones that had very reliable mechanisms for restricting their supply growth—in other words, hard money. These historical facts are still apparent in the English language, as the word pecuniary is derived from pecus, the Latin word for cattle, while the word salary is derived from sal, the Latin word for salt.Investigative journalist Matthew Lysiak has written a fascinating inquiry into how the world's diet has changed over the past century, and the characters and institutions that have brought about this change. Bitcoin is also the first example of absolute scarcity, the only liquid commodity (digital or physical) with a set fixed quantity that cannot conceivably be increased. Second, sound money allows for trade to be based on a stable unit of measurement, facilitating ever‐larger markets, free from government control and coercion, and with free trade comes peace and prosperity. It is when we get into the middle section of the book that things really get bad: it’s overly long, with ideas scattered and repeated; the only narrative thread being the twin evils of ‘unsound money’ and John Maynard Keynes.

These three problems make direct exchange highly impractical and result in people needing to resort to performing more layers of exchange to satisfy their economic needs.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.