Last post, I revealed I'm a runner. (Shocking, I know.) But what most of you do know is that I'm a bookworm. So, instead of hoarding knowledge like a crypto whale sitting on a cold wallet, I'm sharing it—chapter by chapter.
Today's victim? The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous—the economics professor who turned Bitcoin into a philosophical battleground. And guess what? Nassim Nicholas Taleb (yes, that Taleb) wrote the foreword. Buckle up.
1. Nassim Taleb's Foreword: Central Banks Are Clowns
Taleb doesn't hold back:
- Federal Reserve bosses like Greenspan & Bernanke had no clue what they were doing. (Ouch.)
- Bitcoin is the first organic currency—no government, no central control, just math.
- Gold? Cute. But Bitcoin doesn't need banks to move it.
Takeaway: Bitcoin is insurance against an Orwellian dystopia where governments print money like Monopoly cash.
2. Ammous' Prologue: Bitcoin Isn't Magic Internet Money—It's Harder Than Gold
- Bitcoin's birth: Some mysterious dude named Satoshi Nakamoto emailed a cryptography mailing list in 2008 like, "Hey, I made digital cash. No banks needed. Cool, right?"
- First Bitcoin purchase? 10,000 BTC for two pizzas in 2010. (That's over $950M today. RIP, pizza guy.)
- Why Bitcoin works: It's decentralized, predictable, and immune to government meddling. Unlike fiat, which gets inflated into oblivion.
Takeaway: Bitcoin isn't just a "crypto"—it's digital sound money. And yes, that's a big deal.
3. The Big Idea: Sound Money = Freedom
Ammous argues:
- Good money (like gold, Bitcoin) = long-term thinking, savings, investment.
- Bad money (fiat, printed by governments) = short-term chaos, economic decay.
- Bitcoin fixes this by being programmable, scarce, and uncontrollable by any single entity.
Takeaway: If you think Bitcoin is just for "speculators," you've missed the point. It's a revolution.
Final Kick
"Bitcoin will go through hiccups. It may fail; but then it will be easily reinvented as we now know how it works." — Nassim Taleb
Translation: Governments hate this one weird trick.
Source: The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous (Foreword by Nassim Taleb).