Thread by @ECBSJ

The top quotes/lines from The Bitcoin Standard by @saifedean

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1/History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours.

3/Each country’s money supply was not a metric to be determined by central planning committees stocked with PhD holders, but the natural working of the market system.

4/But with the suspension of the gold standard, running out of financing was not enough to end the war; a sovereign had to run out of its people’s accumulated wealth expropriated through inflation.

5/All spending is spending, in the naïve economics of Keynesians, and so it matters not if that spending comes from individuals feeding their families or governments murdering foreigners: it all counts in aggregate demand and it all reduces unemployment!

6/It is theoretically possible to create an artificially scare asset to endow it with a monetary role. Governments around the world did this after abandoning the gold standard, as did Bitcoin’s creator, with contrasting results.

7/Government control of money has turned money from being the reward for producing value to the reward for obedience to government officials.

8/The work of monetary cranks like John Maynard Keynes taught in modern universities the notion that government spending only has benefits, never costs.

10/And having lived off of his family’s considerable fortune without having to work real jobs, Keynes had no appreciation of saving or capital accumulation and their essential role in economic growth.

12/It was hard money that financed Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos while easy money financed Miley Cyrus’s twerks.

13/In an economy with a central bank and fractional reserve banking, the supply of loanable funds is directed by a committee of economists under the influence of politicians, bankers, TV pundits, and sometimes, most spectacularly, military generals.

14/Creating new pieces of paper and digital entries to paper over the deficiency in savings does not magically increase society’s physical capital stock; it only devalues the existing money supply and distorts prices.

15/Unsound money makes such manipulation possible, but only for a short while, of course, as reality cannot be deceived forever.

16/Imagining that central banks can “prevent”, “combat”, or “manage” recessions is as fanciful and misguided as placing pyromaniacs and arsonists in charge of the fire brigade.

17/One can only imagine the sort of confusion that would happen to all engineering projects were the length of the meter to oscillate daily with the pronouncements of a central measurements office.

18/The fundamental scam of modernity is the idea that government needs to manage the money supply.

20/Unsound money is itself a barrier to trade between countries, because it distorts value between the countries and makes trade flows a political issue, creating animosity and enmity between governments and populations.

21/Democracy thus becomes a mass delusion of people attempting to override the rules of economics by voting themselves a free lunch and being manipulated into violent tantrums against scapegoats whenever the bill for the free lunch arrives via inflation and economic recessions.

23/For as long as the credit keeps flowing, the victims are oblivious, and an illusion of increased wealth is created across society as both the victim and the robber think they have the money.