The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous

The creed of Keynes, which is universally popular today, is the creed of consumption and spending to satisfy immediate wants. By constantly expanding the money supply, central banks' monetary policy makes saving and investment less attractive and thus it encourages people to save and invest less while consuming more. The real impact of this is the widespread culture of conspicuous consumption, where people live their lives to buy ever-larger quantities of crap they do not need. When the alternative to spending money is witnessing your savings lose value over time, you might as well enjoy spending it before it loses its value. The financial decisions of people also reflect on all other aspects of their personality, engendering a high time preference in all aspects of life: depreciating currency causes less saving, more borrowing, more short-termism in economic production and in artistic and cultural endeavors, and perhaps most damagingly, the depletion of the soil of its nutrients, leading to ever-lower levels of nutrients in food.