Huw Evans's Reviews > The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

This is a laugh out loud book. I am sure it is meant to be deadly serious. Being curious, I tried tried to find out about him but, barring his book, his self-publicising website and his assistant professorship at the American University in Lebanon, there doesn't seem to be much. However, he is clearly of the Viennese school of Economics where the break from the Gold Standard and the invention of fiat currency and Keynsean economics was the end of the world as they knew it, until the arrival of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going to save us all, simply because it cuts out the middle man (i.e. the banks and/or the government) and cannot be adulterated. He outlines the history of money in terms of it being something valuable that cannot easily be generated and therefore does not lose its value (e.g. rai stones, cowrie shells, glass beads and gold) until a way of overproducing them is foun. He equates this with the mathematical exertions of endless PCs in generating bitcoin. There is a maximum amount of gold that can be mined and the number of bitcoin is finite - once there are 21 million of them, there can be no more. So for governments to function according to his rules there should be no ability to print money to dig them out of whatever whole they are in. No wonder when Keynes said it was fine to print money to pay for what you couldn't afford the USA and UK heaved huge sighs of relief. He uses this as an argument that wars were always short during the Gold Standard era, because it was possible that the rulers would literally run out of money - tell that to all those who suffered and died in the Thirty Years War!

This book is a polemic and that is what makes it so funny. His views on Keynes are increasingly scatologial, starting from his being born with a silver spoon in his mouth and not really being an economist at all to JMK being a pederast trawling the brothels of Europe in his spare time. I hope that he has enough evidence for this to keep lawyers at bay. He has no time for modern art or music - it doesn't take enough time to produce and therefore can have no value. He doesn't appear to believe in increasing scarcity of resources based on the human race despoiling the planet, calling people like George Monbiot "hysterics".

What he doesn't do (and this is what I had hoped to get out of this book) is explain why Bitcoin has any financial value in the real world. Sure, it obeys many of the rules of Viennese Economics in terms of the increasing difficulty of mining the last 2.5 million but once they are all mined, so what? How and by whom was it decided that something that is a mathematical exercise accomplished by electronic machines, using increasingly large resources, can actually be used to buy something? If I offered to pay for my groceries, a car, a house with bitcoin I would be told to go away (or worse) and come back with a recognised fiat currency. And yet this piece of electronic flummery (my opinon) has an exchange rate today of 30 684 GBP to one. How can something have financial value if you cannot do anything but hoard it? This seems to be the approach of the man who received only one talent in the parable.

Look, if you are a Viennese Economist then the world has gone to hell in a handcart since the Gold Standard was broken and you would also want to make sure that Guthenberg was never born so those nasty governments could never print fiat money. Books that are handwritten on vellum are inherently more valuable because of the time required to make them and global literacy can go hang. I am pretty sure that Economics is one of those subjects that is a self fulfilling prophecy and, personally, see less and less evidence of economists having any influence over money supply no matter what school they come from. To justify their existance they have to pretend that they can.

But if you want to read, or listen to, laugh inducing vitriol then this is a book you must acquire.