The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

From the necessity of centralizing gold arose government money backed by gold, which was more salable in scale, but with it came government expansion of the money supply and coercive control which eventually destroyed money's soundness and sovereignty.

Two important facts must be understood about government money from the outset. First, there is a very large difference between government money redeemable in gold, and irredeemable government money, even if both are run by the government. Under a gold standard, money is gold, and government just assumes a responsibility of minting standard units of

When money was nationalized, it was placed under the command of politicians who operate over short time‐horizons of a few years, trying their best to get reelected. It was only natural that such a process would lead to short‐term decision making where politicians abuse the currency to fund their reelection campaigns at the expense of future generat

This world came crashing down in the catastrophic year 1914, which was not only the year of the outbreak of World War I, but the year that the world's major economies went off of the gold standard and replaced it with unsound government money. Only Switzerland and Sweden, who remained neutral during World War I, were to remain on a gold standard in

The interest rate in a free market for capital is positive because people's positive time preference means that nobody would part with money unless he could receive more of it in the future.

First, there is the lack of coincidence in scales: what you want may not be equal in value to what you have and dividing one of them into smaller units may not be practical. Imagine wanting to sell shoes for a house; you cannot buy the house in small pieces each equivalent in value to a pair of shoes, nor does the homeowner want to own all the shoe

Initially, metals were bought and sold in terms of their weight,1 but over time, as metallurgy advanced, it became possible to mint them into uniform coins and brand them with their weight, making them far more salable by saving people from having to weigh and assess the metals every time. The three metals most widely used for this role were gold,

While the data is not complete for all countries and all years, the average growth of money supply is 32.16% per year per country.

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