Martin Brochhaus's Reviews > The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

This book has a few flaws but I'm pretty sure, it is the most complete and easiest to understand and most factually correct book on bitcoin available right now. If you want to learn about bitcoin, and more importantly about money in general, this is a great and quick read by a clearly intelligent author.

Chapter 1 defines what is money in theory. Chapter 2 shows examples of primitive monies from the past. Chapter 3 raves about Gold as the best form of money man has known so far. Chapters 4-7 get a bit blurry and repetitive and preach about how governments have fucked up Gold as a sound money and basically enslaved us all. Up until this point there is no mention of bitcoin, so this is a good read for pretty much everyone. I learned a lot here and I wished this stuff would have been taught in school.

The author is a clear subscriber of the Austrian school of economics and spends many words in debunking and attacking the works of Keynes, even pointing out on several occasions that Keynes was a filthy little child-sex-tourist who never in his life studied economics and inherited all his wealth from his parents (who profited from an era of wealth accumulation powered by sound money, the irony!).

I have personally no idea if the world would be a better or worse place today if we had continued with a free market and following the Austrian school of economics. Saifedean's views of the golden past are probably simplistic and the problems of today's globally connected and overpopulated world are probably far more complex than the author (or anyone on the planet) could possibly understand - BUT I can see with my own eyes that my generation's buying power is absolutely ridiculous compared to my parent's generation, despite us working significantly longer hours in supposedly much higher classed and higher paid jobs.

There is an entire chapter about how sound money enabled better art and today's artists are somehow all unskilled hacks, which was written in a quite emotional and entertaining way but is probably utter bullshit. Claiming that no art today can stand the test of time like the Mozart's, Bach's and Michelangelo's of days gone by is probably a gross generalisation and not true. First of all, Mozart, Bach and Michelangelo were but three lucky bastards that we remember today. Who is to say that in their times there was an overwhelming number of "hacks" just as there is today which the world simply has forgotten about now? Furthermore, who is to say that 100 years from now, we will look back at an equally small number of genius artists that lived today and stood the test of time (spoiler alert: it will happen). I'm always very cautious of the "back then everything was better" argument. I think we still have the same amount of artists today, they are just more difficult to find because every idiot is able to create, so there is much more noise now.

In general, I would say, that Chapters 4-7 were not focused enough and too preachy and could have answered their headline's premises in half the amount of pages. It's a pretty good propaganda for the Austrian school of economics, and since I have no problems with that school of thought, I didn't mind slogging through the repetitive parts.

In chapters 8-10 we finally get to learn about bitcoin, and with the foundation that was laid out in the earlier chapters it becomes clear that bitcoin truly is an invention of the century, something so profound and groundbreaking, no one alive today will likely witness anything like it again. As a software engineer who has spent the last five years reading everything there is about bitcoin, I can say that everything the author says about bitcoin is correct. By the way, this is the work of a true bitcoin maximalist, so if you are just interested in "blockchain" or in "crypto", this book will leave a sour taste - but rightfully so. I too think that all altcoins in existence are scams and speculative assets for traders (read: gamblers) and they will eventually disappear as bitcoin continues to cement it's role as the one and only blockchain that actually solves a real world problem.

If you want to learn about the history of money, monetary policy, schools of economics and of course how it all connects with bitcoin, this book is the best work there is today. Please go and read it and join the revolution ;)