The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking: Ammous, Saifedean: 9781119473862: Amazon.com: Books

I learned a lot from this book – enough to earn it 5 stars. I learned not just about bitcoin, but money in general. Despite its flaws, I recommend this book even to those who don’t care about bit coin. It’s a good overview of the history of money and how it works.

However, there are two flaws the reader has to look past to get the most from this book.

One is repetition, especially towards the end. Sadly, this is commonplace these days. Authors have 70-80 pages of material but seem to feel like it’s not a real book unless they can turn it into 250-300 pages. I’ll pay for a short, concise book if it has something valuable to say.

The second flaw is more unique to this book. The author strays far from his subject matter to poop all over all kinds of things.

He clearly despises John Maynard Keynes. That’s fine. But Keynes’ personal life has nothing to do with the subject of this book. And usually when an author resorts to attacking a person rather than that person’s ideas, that means the author’s ideas can’t stand up to the ideas it is criticizing, and thus has to attack the person behind the ideas to distract the reader.

This is an unfortunate “self-own” / own-goal by Ammous, because his ideas clearly have merit. He should have let them stand on their own. The second half of Chapter 5 and parts of Chapter 7 can be skipped by anyone interested solely in the topic the book purports to cover.

He also poops all over modern society and sees the era of the gold standard as a utopia that would return if we simply used bitcoin. For example, “Any industry in which people complain about their [jerk] boss is likely part of the [problem of loose money] because bosses can only really afford to be [jerks] in [this] economic fake reality….” In his hard-money utopia, “bosses who mistreat their workers will either lose the workers to competitors or destroy their business quickly.” Does he not remember that in the era of hard money he longs for many bosses literally owned and beat their workers? Hard money doesn’t guarantee a society free of jerk bosses.

And can one really consider the rocket engine and transistor simply iterations on or somehow less significant inventions than the internal-combusting engine and lightbulb? Based on Ammous commentary you’d have to believe that.

He resorts to evidence-free assertions that the arts, culture, and society of yesteryear are better than today’s. None of this is empirically verifiable, and more importantly, none of it is relevant to his arguments about. “It was hard money that financed Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos while easy money financed Miley Cyrus’s twerks.” Please. There was plenty of the equivalent of twerking happening in Bach’s day, and there is art produced the last few decades that will last for centuries. The anguish he cites of Michelangelo over his art reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s over some of his, despite Leonard Cohen being part of our debauched soft-money era. And the poem he cites from Michelangelo is no more void of ego than some of the modern pop artists the author disdains. The author cherry-picks once-in-a-century artists of the past and compares them to some of the basest performers of today, a false comparison, and one he doesn’t even pretend to back up with any evidence or argument.

“[O]nly long pretentious diatribes shaming others for not understanding the work give it value.” This is his criticism of modern artists. The lack of irony with which he writes this, given it describes the exact chapter it appears in, shows a sad lack of self-awareness. He should have kept these off-topic opinions to himself rather than letting it soil what is otherwise the really solid case he is making.

All of this is a sad and distracting (as evidenced by how much I’m writing about these digressions compared to the book as a whole) digression from the point of his thesis. It really deserves reducing my rating by 2-stars. But because I still recommend this book despite those flaws, I’m only deducting 1 star and giving it a 4-star rating.