Description:
The Fiat Standard is an insightful study of the history, function, and impacts of the fiat monetary system on human society, economics, and politics over the past century. What are the possibilities for the rise of bitcoin in this system?
Brief description:
Saifedean Ammous is an internationally best-selling economist and author. In 2018, Ammous authored The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the best-selling book on bitcoin, publishedin 36 languages. In 2021, he published The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization, available in 12 languages, and in 2023, he published Principles of Economics, a university-level economics textbook. 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.
Review Quotes:
"Saifedean's penetrating insight is to explain the operation of fiat by analogy to the operation of bitcoin. In this context, we can think of fiat as a digital currency, like an altcoin, defining its qualities and characteristics and its strengths and weaknesses. Whereas The Bitcoin Standard's analytical framework centered around assessing salability across time, and how it explains the monetary rise of gold and bitcoin, in The Fiat Standard, Saifedean uses the framework of salability across space to explain the rise of fiat and how it replaced gold. Far from a one-sided attack on fiat, The Fiat Standard illustrates and explains the advantages that made fiat's global adoption possible. This framework in turn forms the basis for assessing bitcoin's rise in a fiat world, its security model, and chances of continued success."