The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

The emperor Diocletian has forever had his name associated with fiscal and monetary chicanery, and the Empire reached a nadir under his rule.

For Mises, gold's monetary status was due to its fulfillment of the criteria for sound money as he understood them: [T]he sound money principle has two aspects. It is affirmative in approving the market's choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government's propensity to meddle with the currency system.

When modern technology made the importation and catching of seashells easy, societies that used them switched to metal or paper money, and when a government increases its currency's supply, its citizens shift to holding foreign currencies, gold, or other more reliable monetary assets. The twentieth century provided us an unfortunately enormous numb

The end of World War II and the dismantling of the New Deal meant the U.S. government cut its spending by an astonishing 75% between 1944 and 1948, and it also removed most price controls for good measure. And yet, the U.S. economy witnessed an extraordinary boom during these years. The roughly 10 million men who were mobilized for the war came bac

The owner of the stone could use it as a payment method without it having to move: all that would happen is that the owner would announce to all townsfolk that the stone's ownership has now moved to the recipient. The whole town would recognize the ownership of the stone and the recipient could then use it to make a payment whenever he so pleased.

There are three fundamental reasons that drive the relationship between unsound money and war. First, 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. Second, government having acce

While Rome continued its economic, social, and cultural deterioration, finally collapsing in 476 AD, Byzantium survived for 1,123 years while the solidus became the longest‐serving sound currency in human history.

For a world that was growing increasingly globalized along with advancements in transportation and telecommunications, freely fluctuating exchange rates constituted what Hoppe termed “a system of partial barter.”13 Buying things from people who lived on the other side of imaginary lines in the sand now required utilizing more than one medium of exc

On the other hand, consider the universal status of the ethic of liberty, and of the natural right of person and property that obtains under such an ethic. For every person, at any time or place, can be covered by the basic rules: ownership of one's own self, ownership of the previously unused resources which one has occupied and transformed; and o

In terms of the stock‐to‐flow ratio discussed in Chapter 1, the existing stockpiles of Bitcoin in 2017 were around 25 times larger than the new coins produced in 2017. This is still less than half of the ratio for gold, but around the year 2022, Bitcoin's stock‐to‐flow ratio will overtake that of gold, and by 2025, it will be around double that of