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The Fiat Standard

The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

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The Fiat Standard

By: Saifedean Ammous
Narrated by: Saifedean Ammous, Guy Swann
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In The Fiat Standard, world-renowned economist Saifedean Ammous applies his unique analytical lens to the fiat monetary system, explaining it as a feat of engineering and technology just as he did for bitcoin in his global bestseller The Bitcoin Standard.

This time, Ammous delves into the world's earlier shift from the gold standard to today's system of government-backed fiat money—outlining the fiat standard's purposes and failures; deriving the wider economic, political, and social implications of its use; and examining how bitcoin will affect it over time.

With penetrating insight, Ammous analyzes global political currencies by analogy to bitcoin: how they're "mined" whenever government-guaranteed entities create loans, their lack of inherent restraints on inflation, and the rampant government intervention that has resulted in heavy, devastating, and persistent distortions to global markets for food, fuel, science, and education.

Through these comparisons, Ammous demonstrates that bitcoin could be our next step forward—providing high salability across space, just like the fiat system, but without the unchecked fiat-denominated debt. Rather than a messy hyperinflationary collapse, the rise of bitcoin could look like a debt jubilee and an orderly upgrade to the world's monetary operating system, revolutionizing global capital and energy markets. Economics
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Even though the reality has always many nuances, what many analysts fail to do when analyzing current issues is understanding the role that money and monetary policy has played on a particular issue.

This book helps the reader understand what (fiat) money is, what is it useful for, and the incentives it creates. Through this lens, the history of the past century since the 1910s with the first introductions of fiat money, gains a whole new dimension.

Brand new way of understanding the root cause of many issues

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A very nice addition to the Bitcoin standard. Another angle that shows how weak the current fiat system really is.

An honorable part 2

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Just like The Bitcoin Standard, large parts of this book are amazing and teach invaluable lessons. However, in my opinion the author takes his „fiat is the root of all evil“ mentality too far in the second part of the book, e.g. by implying that all modern dietary guidelines are merely the result of governments trying to hide inflation.

Amazing

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Has good base ideas / questions, but often ignores other factors, disagree on quite some things with the author because the view is quite one dimensional.

But good food for thought nonetheless.

Take it with a grain of salt

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While some elements of the book are interesting it is mostly a political pamphlet and too focused on promoting Bitcoin.... While the titel is promising a book on Fiat money ....

Unscientific and Bitcoin biased

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