Saifedean Ammous: “The Bitcoin Standard” | SALT Talks #127

Dr. Saifedean Ammous is the author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the best-selling groundbreaking study of the economics of bitcoin. The book was a pioneer in explaining bitcoin's value proposition, and the implications of its unique properties. As a peer-to-peer software for operating payment network, Bitcoin acts as the native currency. Bitcoin is totally protected from inflation because Bitcoin’s source code makes it mathematically impossible to exceed 21 million Bitcoins- a fixed monetary supply. The entire world was effectively on the gold standard, because it was the hardest money at the time, but more gold can continually be introduced into the supply. “Anything that gets held as a form of money, the value of it rises, and because the value rises, it gives people an incentive to make more of it.” Bitcoin offers a way to remove the third-party intermediaries in the financial transaction. The decentralized nature of the blockchain, on which Bitcoin exists, creates security via transparency. There is no one single point of failure in the way that a third-party financial institution, entrusted with money, must secure itself from hackers or thieves. ————————————————————————— To learn more about this episode, including podcast transcripts and show notes, visit salt.org/talks Moderated by Anthony Scaramucci.