's Key Ideas from The Bitcoin Standard
by Saifedean Ammous

In a Keynesian economic order, foreigners are actively subsidized to come buy the country at a discount. Each country is impoverishing its citizens to boost its exporters and raise its GDP, and complaining when other countries do the same.

In an academic system corrupted by government money, the curriculum is not determined through its accordance with reality, but instead with the political agenda of the governments funding it. Governments love Keynesian economics for the same reason they did in 1930s: it offers them the justification for acquiring ever more power and money.

You won’t get a job or funding in this system by producing important works productive and useful to the real world, but by furthering the agenda of the funders. Since the funding is from one source only, the idea of a free marketplace of ideas is impossible.

Blockchain technology can best be understood as the conversion of electric power to verifiable undisputed records of ownership and transactions.

It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It performs a useful service that people will pay for. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. If any one copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any fuss. It is transparent: anyone can see its code and exactly what it does.

It can’t be changed, argued with, tampered with. It can’t be corrupted or stopped or interrupted.

Even if a nuclear war that destroys half our planet occurs, it would continue to live, uncorrupted.

The digital revolution will destroy the power of the modern state over its citizens, reduce the significance of the nation state as an organising unit, and give individuals unprecedented power and sovereignty over their own lives.

There are many, but almost all pose economically infeasible or unprofitable for the attacker. The only 3 that pose a real threat are:

• a hardware attack, especially through miner equipment producers (one of bitcoins only less centralised points and therefore weaknesses)
• the creation of another solution to what bitcoin solves, which is highly unlikely but possible
• a serious technical threat would be the breaking of the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but again it is not clear how or when this might happen, and difficult to succeed.

Bitcoin solves the issue of a monetary solution that is saleable across, space, scale and time. Gold for example, is inconvenient to move across space. Additionally, it is not decentralised as banks had to store it in order to keep the gold standard. Bitcoin solves all of these issues, something never seen before. Bitcoin offers digital sound money and digital cash.

however, bitcoin has its flaws. Its nature means high transaction costs, and therefore will probably be used for everyday transactions and replacing fiat entirely. It can however act as a new global reserve currency and allowing cross border payments without intermediaries and replacing the forex market.

The non-monetary demand for bitcoin can be explained as: The demand for the coins is a prerequisite to using the network. Unlike industrial demand for gold, completely independent from its monetary demand, demand for bitcoin to operate the network is inextricably linked to demand for it as a store of value.