The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

Product Description

In 
The Fiat Standard, world-renowned economist 
Saifedean Ammous applies his unique analytical lens to the fiat monetary system, explaining it as a feat of engineering and technology just as he did for bitcoin in his global bestseller 
The Bitcoin Standard.

This time, Ammous delves into the world’s earlier shift from the gold standard to today’s system of government-backed fiat money—outlining the fiat standard’s purposes and failures; deriving the wider economic, political, and social implications of its use; and examining how bitcoin will affect it over time.

With penetrating insight, Ammous analyzes global political currencies by analogy to bitcoin: how they’re “mined” whenever government-guaranteed entities create loans, their lack of inherent restraints on inflation, and the rampant government intervention that has resulted in heavy, devastating, and persistent distortions to global markets for food, fuel, science, and education.

Through these comparisons, Ammous demonstrates that bitcoin could be our next step forward—providing high salability across space, just like the fiat system, but without the unchecked fiat-denominated debt. Rather than a messy hyperinflationary collapse, the rise of bitcoin could look like a debt jubilee and an orderly upgrade to the world’s monetary operating system, revolutionizing global capital and energy markets.

Review

“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.”

—from the Foreword by Ross Stevens
 
 
“I have spent my entire career studying works about monetary theory, the gold standard, comparative monetary systems, central banks, and proposals for monetary and financial reform. I would rate a tiny fraction of the books I have read about any one of these topics as excellent. Dr. Ammous’s book 
The Bitcoin Standard contains an excellent treatment of all these topics in addition to one of the few enlightened and enlightening accounts of bitcoin that I have come across. It is essential reading for anyone interested in learning the role bitcoin could play in a future regime of free and sound money.”
 
—Joseph Salerno, Academic Vice President, the Mises Institute, on The Bitcoin Standard
 
 
“This book blew my mind; it is a work of genius. It put together the technical, economic, motivational, and related issues around bitcoin better than anything I’ve seen. The best compliment I can give this book is that I read it and I decided to buy $425 million of bitcoin. It was the most impactful on our way of thinking in Microstrategy, and it made us want to invert our balance sheet to base it on a bitcoin standard.”

 —Michael Saylor, Cofounder, Chairman, and CEO of Microstrategy, on The Bitcoin Standard

About the Author

Saifedean Ammous is a world-renowned economist and author of 
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the definitive and best-selling book on bitcoin, translated to 25 languages. He is also the author of the forthcoming textbook Principles of Economics. 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 Podca