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The Bitcoin Standard: a study course

One lesson per chapter of Saifedean Ammous's 2018 book: a short summary in our own words, key ideas and three self-check questions. It is a study guide, not a substitute for the book; we describe the author's arguments, some of which are contested. Not investment advice.

▶ Watch on YouTube Playlist: The Bitcoin Standard Channel @QBEin_net

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Lessons

Prologue: a new kind of money →▶ video
The book opens with Bitcoin's arrival: an anonymous developer posts a design to a mailing list, and within a decade the network is worth hundreds of billions without any company, central bank or government behind it.
Chapter 1: Money →▶ video
Money appears because direct barter rarely works: you need someone who has what you want and wants what you have, at the right size, place and time.
Chapter 2: Primitive moneys →▶ video
Through examples such as Yap's stone discs, shells and glass beads, the chapter shows how monies fail when outsiders find a cheaper way to produce more.
Chapter 3: Monetary metals →▶ video
Metals won because they were durable, divisible and costly to produce.
Chapter 4: Government money →▶ video
Because gold is heavy to move and store, it gathered in bank and central bank vaults, and paper claims circulated instead.
Chapter 5: Money and time preference →▶ video
Time preference is how much people value the present over the future.
Chapter 6: Capitalism's information system →▶ video
Prices carry information about scarcity and demand, and interest rates are the price of time.
Chapter 7: Sound money and individual freedom →▶ video
The author argues that the ability to create money funds large governments and wars without direct taxation, and that sound money would limit that power.
Chapter 8: Digital money →▶ video
This chapter explains how Bitcoin works in plain terms: a public ledger kept by many nodes, proof-of-work mining that makes rewriting history expensive, difficulty adjustment that keeps blocks about ten minutes apart, and a supply that halves new issuance roughly every four years toward a 21 million cap.
Chapter 9: What is Bitcoin good for? →▶ video
The author sees Bitcoin's main use as a store of value, then as a way to move value across borders without permission, and as a neutral settlement layer that could work like gold once did between banks.
Chapter 10: Bitcoin questions →▶ video
The final chapter answers common objections: is mining a waste of energy, who controls the rules, can the network scale, is it used for crime, and how could it be killed.