The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous

compared to liquid money so customers know exactly what they are getting and can make accurate economic calculations. Should any of these supposedly revolutionary decentralized currencies offer any real‐world valuable application, it is completely inconceivable that it would be paid for with its own freely trading currency. In reality, after examining this space for years, I have yet to identify a single digital currency that offers any product or service that has any market demand. The highly vaunted decentralized applications of the future never seem to arrive, but the tokens that are supposedly essential to their operation continue to proliferate by the hundreds every month. One cannot help but wonder if the only use of these revolutionary currencies is the enriching of their makers. No coin other than Bitcoin can lay a credible claim to being outside the control of anyone else, and as such, the entire point of utilizing the extremely complex structure underpinning Bitcoin is moot. There is nothing original or difficult about copying Bitcoin's design and producing a slightly different copycat, and thousands have done this so far. With time, one can expect more and more of these coins to enter the market, diluting the brand of all the other altcoins. Non‐Bitcoin digital currencies are, in the aggregate, easy money. No single altcoin can be considered on its own merits, because they are all indistinguishable in what they perform, which is also what Bitcoin performs, but v...