Saifedean Ammous and The Fiat Standard

World-renowned economist Saifedean Ammous turns his unique analytical lens on the fiat money system in The Fiat Standard. Just as he dissected Bitcoin as a technological system in his bestseller The Bitcoin Standard, he now breaks down our current monetary structure as a piece of engineering and technology.

The Shift from the Gold Standard to Fiat Money

This time, Ammous dives deep into the transition from the gold standard to today’s government-backed fiat money system. He explains the goals and failures of this shift, the economic, political, and social consequences, and examines how Bitcoin may influence these systems over time.

Analysis of Fiat Money and Bitcoin

With sharp insight and without holding back, Ammous analyzes the world’s fiat currencies using Bitcoin as an analogy: how fiat currencies are “mined” when banks issue new loans; why they lack a credible mechanism to limit inflation; and how unchecked government intervention has caused destructive and persistent distortions in global markets for food, fuel, science, and education.

Bitcoin as a Potential Alternative

Based on this analysis, Ammous shows how Bitcoin can be a step forward by offering high salability across space—just like the fiat system—but without uncontrolled credit expansion.

The Future of Bitcoin and Global Markets

The rise of Bitcoin could usher in a debt jubilee rather than a painful hyperinflationary collapse, and enable a long overdue improvement in global capital and energy markets.

Reviews

“SAIFEDEAN’S BRILLIANT INSIGHT is to explain how the fiat system works by comparing it directly to Bitcoin. In this context, we can think of fiat as a digital currency—an altcoin—with its own qualities, characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. Saifedean compares fiat mining to credit creation, and fiat miners to all institutions that operate with fractional-reserve obligations. Like Bitcoin miners, fiat miners are incentivized to maximize the issuance of tokens for themselves. Unlike Bitcoin miners, however, fiat miners face no difficulty adjustment. As a result, fiat mining has no built-in mechanism to limit issuance, explaining the explosive growth of fiat tokens—country after country, decade after decade. Saifedean’s framework further shows that apparent fiat collapses—like poorly engineered bridges—are simply the inevitable result of flawed design. While the analytical framework in The Bitcoin Standard focused on salability through time, explaining the monetary rise of gold and Bitcoin, The Fiat Standard uses the framework of salability across space to explain the rise of fiat and how it replaced gold. This framework also forms the basis for evaluating Bitcoin’s emergence in a fiat world, its security model, and its prospects for long-term success.”
— From the foreword by ROSS STEVENS, Founder & Executive Chairman, NYDIG

Specifications

Author: Saifedean Ammous
Subtitle: Debt Slavery as an Alternative to Human Civilization
Publisher: Konsensus Network
Publication Date: 11-7-2022
Pages: 424
Weight: 0.7 kg
Dimensions: 24 × 16 × 2.7 cm
Format: Paperback