The Fiat Standard Quotes

“Bitcoin effectively combines gold’s salability across time with fiat’s salability across space in one apolitical, immutable, open-source package.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“The problem with fiat is that simply maintaining the wealth you already own requires significant active management and expert decision-making. You need to develop expertise in portfolio allocation, risk management, stock and bond valuation, real estate markets, credit markets, global macro trends, national and international monetary policy, commodity markets, geopolitics, and many other arcane and highly specialized fields in order to make informed investment decisions that allow you to maintain the wealth you already earned. You effectively need to earn your money twice with fiat, once when you work for it, and once when you invest it to beat inflation. The simple gold coin saved you from all of this before fiat.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“Now imagine one day hyperinflation strikes, and the price of your ribeye increases to one hundred dollars while your daily wage remains ten dollars. What happens to the price of your basket of goods? It cannot rise tenfold because you cannot afford the one-hundred-dollar ribeye. Instead, you make do with the chemical shitstorm that is a soy burger for ten dollars. The CPI, magically, shows zero inflation.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“The case for bitcoin as a cash item on a balance sheet is very compelling for anyone with a time horizon extending beyond four years. Whether or not fiat authorities like it, bitcoin is now in free-market competition with many other assets for the world’s cash balances. It is a competition bitcoin will win or lose in the market, not by the edicts of economists, politicians, or bureaucrats. If it continues to capture a growing share of the world’s cash balances, it continues to succeed. As it stands, bitcoin’s role as cash has a very large total addressable market. The world has around $90 trillion of broad fiat money supply, $90 trillion of sovereign bonds, $40 trillion of corporate bonds, and $10 trillion of gold. Bitcoin could replace all of these assets on balance sheets, which would be a total addressable market cap of $230 trillion. At the time of writing, bitcoin’s market capitalization is around $700 billion, or around 0.3% of its total addressable market. Bitcoin could also take a share of the market capitalization of other semihard assets which people have resorted to using as a form of saving for the future. These include stocks, which are valued at around $90 trillion; global real estate, valued at $280 trillion; and the art market, valued at several trillion dollars. Investors will continue to demand stocks, houses, and works of art, but the current valuations of these assets are likely highly inflated by the need of their holders to use them as stores of value on top of their value as capital or consumer goods. In other words, the flight from inflationary fiat has distorted the U.S. dollar valuations of these assets beyond any sane level. As more and more investors in search of a store of value discover bitcoin’s superior intertemporal salability, it will continue to acquire an increasing share of global cash balances.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“Unsurprisingly, these [university] departments are heavily populated with semiliterate
intellectual midgets of the Marxist variety, as that ideology is perfectly
conducive to the furthering of government power and the anointing of a
parasitic, unproductive class to control the lives of the productive.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“Johnson asked a federal bureaucrat to concoct a fraudulent health scare around perfectly nutritious food for reasons that had nothing to do with science.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“One bitcoin block is expected to be produced around every ten minutes. Every 210,000 blocks, or roughly four years, the protocol halves the number of coins produced with each block. This means that the daily bitcoin production on any given day is half of what it was four years earlier. Four more years of successful operation will likely increase people’s awareness of bitcoin and increase the chances they place on its continued survival, thus increasing their subjective valuation and demand for it. So as long as bitcoin continues to operate, and its supply drops by half every four years, it is highly likely that marginal demand for it will be higher, and the marginal supply lower, than four years previously. This monetary time bomb keeps clicking with each new block, and it is time for economists to begin to seriously contemplate what its continued clicking means for the world’s monetary and financial system.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“In November 1914, the British government issued the first war bond, aiming to raise £350 million from private investors at an interest rate of 4.1% and a maturity of ten years. Surprisingly, the bond issue was undersubscribed, and the British public purchased less than a third of the targeted sum. To avoid publicizing this failure, the Bank of England granted funds to its chief cashier and his deputy to purchase the bonds under their own names. The Financial Times, ever the bank’s faithful mouthpiece, published an article proclaiming the loan was oversubscribed. John Maynard Keynes worked at the Treasury at the time, and in a secret memo to the bank, he praised them for what he called their “masterly manipulation.” Keynes’s fondness for surreptitious monetary arrangements would go on to inspire thousands of economic textbooks published worldwide. The Bank of England had set the tone for a century of central bank and government collusion behind the public’s back. The Financial Times would only issue a correction 103 years later,7 when this matter was finally uncovered after some sleuthing in the bank’s archives by some enterprising staff members and published on the bank’s blog.8”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“The fundamental engineering feature of the fiat system is that it treats future promises of money as if they were as good as present money because the government guarantees these promises”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“The messianic antimeat message might have been drowned out in a sane world, but it was highly palatable to the agricultural industrial complex who could cheaply produce the crops which were to replace meat in the fevered visions of the Adventists. It was a match made in heaven. Agroindustry profited enormously from producing these cheap crops, governments benefited from understating the extent of inflation as citizens replaced nutritious meat with cheap slop, and the Adventists’ crusade against meat provided the mystic romantic vision that would make this mass poisoning appear as if it were a spiritual step forward for humanity.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

“Instead of nutrients, Americans are increasingly subsisting on drugs and toxic industrial products. The ever-growing variety and quantities of flavored industrial sludge filling Americans’ refrigerators is not food, nor is it a satisfactory substitute.”
― Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization