110+ Saifedean Ammous Quotes Unraveling the Complexities of Economic History

Saifedean Ammous is a renowned economist and author, specializing in the field of monetary economics and the study of cryptocurrencies. He is best known for his book The Bitcoin Standard, which explores the historical context and economic implications of Bitcoin. With a background in finance and a deep understanding of monetary systems, Ammous has become a leading voice in the cryptocurrency space. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Saifedean Ammous on money, bitcoin, education.

Top 10 Saifedean Ammous Quotes

1. Instead of saving for the possibility of a rainy day, fiat makes you borrow against all of your future sunny days.
2. History shows that you cannot insulate yourself from the consequences of other people having a stronger currency than yours.
3. Mandating laws against humans’ self-interested nature does not change human nature; it reduces the incentive to behave legally and so destroys society’s respect for laws.
4. Johnson asked a federal bureaucrat to concoct a fraudulent health scare around perfectly nutritious food for reasons that had nothing to do with science.
5. You do not get a job or funding in this system by producing important scholarship that is productive and useful to the real world, but by furthering the agenda of the funders.
6. Bitcoin effectively combines gold’s salability across time with fiat’s salability across space in one apolitical, immutable, open-source package.
7. But money’s marginal utility declines far slower than any other good, because it declines along with the utility of wanting any good, not one particular good.
8. The criminal part of fiat money is that you have to earn it twice. Fiat removes the ability to save and forces everybody to become an investor, or more accurately, a gambler.
9. The higher the ratio of the stock to the flow, the more likely a good is to maintain its value over time and thus be more salable across time.
10. Sound money is also an essential element of a free society as it provides for an effective bulwark against despotic government.

Saifedean Ammous Short Quotes

• The main factor that determines a man's choices in life is his time preference.
• A good that assumes the role of a widely accepted medium of exchange is called money.
• Microprocessors will subvert and destroy the nation-state.
• It is the third element, salability across time, which is the most crucial.
• As H. L. Mencken put it: Every election is an advanced auction on stolen goods.

Saifedean Ammous Quotes About Money

Based on the foregoing analysis, the real advantage of bitcoin lies in it being a reliable long-term store of value, and a sovereign form of money that allows individuals to conduct permissionless transactions. — Saifedean Ammous

The problem with government-provided money is that its hardness depends entirely on the ability of those in charge to not inflate its supply. Only political constraints provide hardness, and there are no physical, economic, or natural constraints. — Saifedean Ammous

What matters in money is its purchasing power, not its quantity, and as such, any quantity of money is enough to fulfill the monetary functions, as long as it is divisible and groupable enough to satisfy holders’ transaction and storage needs. — Saifedean Ammous

In the twentieth century, government control of money has meant a new and very important criterion being added to salability, and that is the salability of money according to the will of its holder and not some other party. — Saifedean Ammous

This is a historical lesson of immense significance, and should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks his refusal of bitcoin means he doesn’t have to deal with it. History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours. — Saifedean Ammous

In 1899, when American writer Nellie Bly set out on her record-breaking journey around the world in seventy-two days, she carried British gold coins and Bank of England notes with her. It was possible to circumnavigate the globe and use one form of money everywhere Nellie went. — Saifedean Ammous

Austrian economists are rarely dogmatic or objectivist in their definition of sound money. They define it not as a specific good or commodity, but as whichever money emerges on the market, freely chosen by the people who transact with it. — Saifedean Ammous

A money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce. — Saifedean Ammous

As Friedrich Hayek put it: I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop. — Saifedean Ammous

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

Saifedean Ammous Quotes About Bitcoin

Bitcoiners and shitcoiners are not on the same team. They couldn't be more different. Bitcoiners see a once-in-a-millennium chance for the total eradication of seigniorage & monetary parasites. Shitcoiners just see an opportunity for them to become the monetary parasites. — Saifedean Ammous

Because each bitcoin is divisible into 100 million satoshis, there is plenty of room for the growth of bitcoin through the use of ever-smaller units of it as the value appreciates. — Saifedean Ammous

Bitcoin is the world’s first digital monetary network. — Saifedean Ammous

Bitcoin consumes so much energy because it uses a fully mechanical & digital process to ascertain truth. It doesn't rely on the authority of anyone. It isn't a more energy-intensive way of doing consumer payments; it's a less energy-intensive way of achieving consensus than war. — Saifedean Ammous

The introduction of Bitcoin, as a currency native to the Internet superseding national borders and outside the realm of governmental control, offers an intriguing possibility for the emergence of a new international monetary system, to be analyzed in Chapter 9. — Saifedean Ammous

If you use it as a store of value, they'll make more of it. The more value you store in it, the more they make. That's why you have bitcoin: they'll never make more of it. — Saifedean Ammous

But in October 2009, an Internet exchange sold 5,050 bitcoins for $5.02, at a price of $1 for 1,006 bitcoins, to register the first purchase of a bitcoin with money. The price was calculated by measuring the value of the electricity needed to produce a bitcoin. — Saifedean Ammous

The introduction of Bitcoin, as a currency native to the Internet superseding national borders and outside the realm of governmental control, offers an intriguing possibility for the emergence of a new international monetary system. — Saifedean Ammous

Bitcoin exchanges are run by people who learned fiat finance. Gambling with depositors' money is normal & healthy for them, because in the fiat system the central bank destroys the currency to bail them out every time it goes wrong. — Saifedean Ammous

On May 22, 2010, someone else paid 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizza pies worth $25, representing the first time that bitcoin was used as a medium of exchange. The token had needed seven months to transition from being a market good to being a medium of exchange. — Saifedean Ammous

Saifedean Ammous Quotes About Economics

While microeconomics has focused on transactions between individuals, and macroeconomics on the role of government in the economy, the reality is that the most important economic decisions to any individual’s well-being are the ones they conduct in their trade-offs with their future self. — Saifedean Ammous

French economist Jacques Reuff coined the phrase “deficit without tears to describe the new economic reality that the United States inhabited, where it could purchase whatever it wanted from the world and finance it through debt monetized by inflating the currency that the entire world used. — Saifedean Ammous

Democracy thus becomes a mass delusion of people attempting to override the rules of economics by voting themselves a free lunch and being manipulated into violent tantrums against scapegoats whenever the bill for the free lunch arrives via inflation and economic recessions. — Saifedean Ammous

Saifedean Ammous Famous Quotes And Sayings

The Yap Island chiefs who refused O’Keefe’s cheap Rai stones understood what most modern economists fail to grasp: a money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce. — Saifedean Ammous

When the central bank manipulates the interest rate lower than the market clearing price by directing banks to create more money by lending, they are at once reducing the amount of savings available in society and increasing the quantity demanded by borrowers while also directing the borrowed capital toward projects which cannot be completed. — Saifedean Ammous

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

This world came crashing down in the catastrophic year 1914, which was not only the year of the outbreak of World War I, but the year that the world’s major economies went off of the gold standard and replaced it with unsound government money. Only Switzerland and Sweden, who remained neutral during World War I, were to remain on a gold standard into the 1930s. — Saifedean Ammous

Two particular technological advancements would move Europe and the world away from physical coins and in turn help bring about the demise of silver's monetary role: the telegraph, first deployed commercially in 1837, and the growing network of trains, allowing transportation across Europe. With these two innovations, it became increasingly feasible for banks to communicate with each other, sending payments efficiently across space when needed and debiting accounts instead of having to send physical payments. This led to the increased use of bills, checks, and paper receipts as monetary media instead of physical gold and silver coins. More nations began to switch to a monetary standard of paper fully backed by, and instantly redeemable into, precious metals held in vaults. — Saifedean Ammous

See Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, p. 250, for a discussion of how uncertainty about the future is the key driver of demand for holding money. With no uncertainty of the future, humans could know all their incomes and expenditures ahead of time and plan them optimally so they never have to hold any cash. But as uncertainty is an inevitable part of life, people must continue to hold money so they have the ability to spend without having to know the future. — Saifedean Ammous

There is no climate crisis. There is a crisis of lack of affordable essential hydrocarbon fuels caused by the morons who believe in a climate crisis. Kindly stop being one of those morons as billions of lives depend on these fuels & you can't control the climate. — Saifedean Ammous

With government-issued money with negligible value as a commodity, salability can be compromised by the governments that issued it, declaring it no longer suitable as legal tender. Indians who woke up on November 8, 2016, to hear that their government had suspended the legal tender status of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes can certainly relate. In the blink of an eye, what was highly salable money lost its value and had to be exchanged at banks with very long lines. — Saifedean Ammous

Civilization no longer means capital accumulation per se; rather, it means what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, flourishing and the freedom to seek greater meaning in life when their basic needs are assured and the most immediate dangers are under control. — Saifedean Ammous

As an economics professor, I make it a point to teach the marshmallow experiment in every course I teach, as I believe this is the most important lesson that economics can teach individuals, and I am amazed that this lesson is ignored as part of the university curriculum in economics, to the point where many academic economists are completely unfamiliar with the term time preference or its importance. — Saifedean Ammous

Canadians pay half their income in taxes, wait 2 years to see a specialist, and bleed for 18 hours in an ER next to a dozen addicts looking for free drugs, and then rave about how awesome it is that they have free healthcare. — Saifedean Ammous

History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation to inflate the money supply. Whether because of outright corruption, a 'national emergency' or an infestation of inflationary schools of economics, the government will always find a reason and a way to print more money, expanding the government's power and reducing the wealth of currency holders. — Saifedean Ammous

The operation of a market economy is dependent on prices, and prices, to be accurate, are dependent on a common medium of exchange, which reflects the relative scarcity of different goods. If this is easy money, the ability of its issuer to constantly increase its quantity will prevent it from accurately reflecting opportunity costs. Every unpredictable change in the quantity of money would distort its role as a measure of interpersonal value and a conduit for economic information. — Saifedean Ammous

Under the reign of Caracalla, the gold content was further reduced to 6.5 grams, and under Diocletian it was further reduced to 5.5g, before he introduced a replacement coin called the solidus, with only 4.5 grams of gold. On Diocletian's watch, the denarius only had traces of silver to cover its bronze core, and the silver would disappear quite quickly with wear and tear, ending the denarius as a silver coin. — Saifedean Ammous

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

Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties. In other words, Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code decentralized among thousands of network members, none of whom can alter the code without the consent of the rest. This makes Bitcoin the first demonstrably reliable operational example of digital cash and digital hard money. — Saifedean Ammous

As it stands, a large number of firms in all advanced economies specialize in warfare as a business, and are thus reliant on perpetuating war to continue being in business. They live off government spending exclusively, and have their entire existence reliant on there being perpetual wars necessitating ever‐larger arms spending. In the United States, whose defense spending is almost equal to that of the rest of the planet combined, these industries have a vested interest in keeping the U.S. government involved in some form of military adventure or other. This, more than any strategic, cultural, ideological, or security operations, explains why the United States has been involved in so many conflicts in parts of the world that cannot possibly have any bearing on the life of the average American. Only with unsound money can these firms grow to such enormous magnitude that they can influence the press, academia, and think tanks to continuously beat the drums of more war. — Saifedean Ammous

According to Cantillon, the beneficiaries from the expansion of the money supply are the first recipients of the new money, who are able to spend it before it has caused prices to rise. Whoever receives it from them is then able to spend it facing a small increase in the price level. As the money is spent more, the price level rises, until the later recipients suffer a reduction in their real purchasing power. This is the best explanation for why inflation hurts the poorest and helps the richest in the modern economy. — Saifedean Ammous

The astonishing domes of Europe’s churches, built and decorated over decades of inspired meticulous work by incomparable architects and artists like Filippo Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, were all financed with sound money by patrons with very low time preference. The only way to impress these patrons was to build artwork that would last long enough to immortalize their names as the owners of great collections and patrons of great artists. — Saifedean Ammous

The inflation of the 1920s had caused large asset bubbles to form in the housing and stock markets, causing an artificial rise in wages and prices. After the bubble burst, market prices sought readjustment via a drop in the value of the dollar compared to gold, and a drop in real wages and prices. The pigheadedness of deluded central planners who wanted to prevent all three from taking place paralyzed the economy: the dollar, wages, and prices were overvalued, leading to people seeking to drop their dollars for gold, as well as massive unemployment and failure of production. — Saifedean Ammous

With the simple suspension of gold redeemability, governments’ war efforts were no longer limited to the money that they had in their own treasuries, but extended virtually to the entire wealth of the population. For as long as the government could print more money and have that money accepted by its citizens and foreigners, it could keep financing the war. Previously, under a monetary system where gold as money was in the hands of the people, government only had its own treasuries to sustain its war effort, along with any taxation or bond issues to finance the war. This made conflict limited, and lay at the heart of the relatively long periods of peace experienced around the world before the twentieth century. — Saifedean Ammous

A world of constant money supply would be one similar to that of much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marked by the successful flowering of the Industrial Revolution with increased capital investment increasing the supply of goods and with falling prices for those goods as well as falling costs of production. — Saifedean Ammous

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

Capitalism is what happens when people drop their time preference, defer immediate gratification, and invest in the future. Debt‐fueled mass consumption is as much a normal part of capitalism as asphyxiation is a normal part of respiration. — Saifedean Ammous

With the collapse of money, it becomes impossible to trade, produce, or engage in anything other than looking for the essentials of life. As the structures of production and commerce that societies have developed over centuries deteriorate due to the inability of consumers, producers and workers to pay each other, the goods that humans take for granted begin to disappear. — Saifedean Ammous

Hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government money. There was never an example of hyperinflation with economies that operated a gold or silver standard, and even when artifact money like seashells and beads lost its monetary role over time, it usually lost it slowly, with replacements taking over more and more of the purchasing power of the outgoing money. — Saifedean Ammous

Sound money allows people to think about the long term and to save and invest more for the future. Saving and investing for the long run are the key to capital accumulation and the advance of human civilization. Money is the information and measurement system of an economy, and sound money is what allows trade, investment, and entrepreneurship to proceed on a solid basis, whereas unsound money throws these processes into disarray. — Saifedean Ammous

The end of World War II and the dismantling of the New Deal meant the U.S. government cut its spending by an astonishing 75% between 1944 and 1948, and it also removed most price controls for good measure. And yet, the U.S. economy witnessed an extraordinary boom during these years. The roughly ten million men who were mobilized for the war came back home and were almost seamlessly absorbed into the labor force, as economic production boomed, flying in the face of all Keynesian predictions and utterly obliterating the ridiculous notion that the level of spending is what determines output in the economy. — Saifedean Ammous

Global bonds are collapsing in their fiat currencies, which are collapsing against the dollar, which is fast losing purchasing power. It will be months & years before the average fiat user realizes just how much they're getting ruined financially. The new normal is poverty. — Saifedean Ammous

Gold offered no mechanism for restraining the sovereigns, and had to rely on trust in them not abusing the gold standard and the population remaining eternally vigilant against them doing so. — Saifedean Ammous

Similarly, with money, it was inevitable that one, or a few, goods would emerge as the main medium of exchange, because the property of being exchanged easily matters the most. A medium of exchange, as mentioned before, is not acquired for its own properties, but for its salability. Further, wide acceptance of a medium of exchange allows all prices to be expressed in its terms, which allows it to play the third function of money: unit of account. — Saifedean Ammous

The better the money is at holding its value, the more it incentivizes people to delay consumption and instead dedicate resources for production in the future, leading to capital accumulation and improvement of living standards, while also engendering in people a low time preference in other, non-economic aspects of their life. — Saifedean Ammous

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

It was in the city-states that humans could live with the freedom to work, produce, trade, and flourish, and that was to a large extent the result of these city-states adopting a sound monetary standard. It all began in Florence in 1252, when the city minted the florin, the first major European sound coinage since Julius Caesar's aureus. Florence's rise made it the commercial center of Europe, with its florin becoming the prime European medium of exchange, allowing its banks to flourish across the entire continent. Venice was the first to follow Florence's example with its minting of the ducat, of the same specifications as the florin, in 1270, and by the end of the fourteenth century more than 150 European cities and states had minted coins of the same specifications as the florin, allowing their citizens the dignity and freedom to accumulate wealth and trade with a sound money that was highly salable across time and space, and divided into small coins, allowing for easy divisibility. — Saifedean Ammous

No government can successfully achieve all three goals of having a fixed foreign exchange rate, free capital flows, and an independent monetary policy. — Saifedean Ammous

One of the fundamental laws of economics is the law of diminishing marginal utility, which means that purchasing more of any good reduces the marginal utility of each extra unit of that good. Money, which is not kept for its own sake, but to be exchanged for other goods, will have its marginal utility diminished at a slower rate than any other good, because it can always be exchanged for another good. — Saifedean Ammous

When comparing different national currencies, we find that the major and most widely used national currencies have a lower annual increase in their supply than the less salable minor currencies. — Saifedean Ammous

The drain of gold from Britain is a little-known story with enormous consequences. Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance focuses on this episode, and does a good job of discussing the individuals involved and the drama taking place, but adopts the reigning Keynesian understanding of the issue, putting the blame for the entire episode on the gold standard. — Saifedean Ammous

With the economic liberation of the European peasantry came the political, scientific, intellectual, and cultural flourishing of the Italian city‐states, which later spread across the European continent. Whether in Rome, Constantinople, Florence, or Venice, history shows that a sound monetary standard is a necessary prerequisite for human flourishing, without which society stands on the precipice of barbarism and destruction. — Saifedean Ammous

But a government which raises taxes to fund a monarch’s lavish lifestyle will engender mass resentment among his population, endangering the legitimacy of his rule and making it ever more precarious. — Saifedean Ammous

Whether in Rome, Constantinople, Florence, or Venice, history shows that a sound monetary standard is a necessary prerequisite for human flourishing, without which society stands on the precipice of barbarism and destruction. — Saifedean Ammous

If you think propaganda doesn't work, remember your average university, TV, social media consumer is worried about cow farts & an essential trace gas rising from 0.028% to 0.041% of atmosphere, while seeing nothing concerning about inflation or totalitarian medical central planning. — Saifedean Ammous

The denarius was the silver coin that traded at the time of the Roman Republic, containing 3.9 grams of silver, while gold became the most valuable money in the civilized areas of the world at the time and gold coins were becoming more widespread. Julius Caesar, the last dictator of the Roman Republic, created the aureus coin, which contained around 8 grams of gold and was widely accepted across Europe and the Mediterranean, increasing the scope of trade and specialization in the Old World. Economic stability reigned for seventy-five years, even through the political upheaval of his assassination, which saw the Republic transformed into an Empire under his chosen successor, Augustus. This continued until the reign of the infamous emperor Nero, who was the first to engage in the Roman habit of coin clipping, wherein the Emperor would collect the coins of the population and mint them into newer coins with less gold or silver content. — Saifedean Ammous

For as long as the government could print more money and have that money accepted by its citizens and foreigners, it could keep financing the war. — Saifedean Ammous

Its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future. — Saifedean Ammous

Nero, who ruled from 54–68 AD, had found the formula to solve this, which was highly similar to Keynes's solution to Britain's and the U.S.'s problems after World War I: devaluing the currency would at once reduce the real wages of workers, reduce the burden of the government in subsidizing staples, and provide increased money for financing other government expenditure. The aureus coin was reduced from 8 to 7.2 grams, while the denarius's silver content was reduced from 3.9 to 3.41g. This provided some temporary relief, but had set in motion the highly destructive self-reinforcing cycle of popular anger, price controls, coin debasement, and price rises, following one another with the predictable regularity of the four seasons. — Saifedean Ammous

The quantity of money available in the whole economy is always sufficient to secure for everybody all that money does and can do. — Saifedean Ammous

Gold’s virtual indestructibility, in particular, allowed humans to store value across generations, thus allowing us to develop a longer time horizon orientation. Initially, metals were bought and sold in terms of their weight, but over time, as metallurgy advanced, it became possible to mint them into uniform coins and brand them with their weight, making them far more salable by saving people from having to weigh and assess the metals every time. — Saifedean Ammous

History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply. — Saifedean Ammous

A sound money, on the other hand, makes service valuable to others the only avenue open for prosperity to anyone, thus concentrating society’s efforts on production, cooperation, capital accumulation, and trade. — Saifedean Ammous

Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties. In other words, Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code decentralized among thousands of network members, none of whom can alter the code without the consent of the rest. — Saifedean Ammous

For anything to function as a good store of value, it has to beat this trap: it has to appreciate when people demand it as a store of value, but its producers have to be constrained from inflating the supply significantly enough to bring the price down. — Saifedean Ammous

The three metals most widely used for this role were gold, silver, and copper, and their use as coins was the prime form of money for around 2,500 years, from the time of the Lydian king Croesus, who was the first recorded to have minted gold coins, to the early twentieth century. — Saifedean Ammous

Civilization is not about more capital accumulation per se; rather, it is about what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, the flourishing and freedom to seek higher meaning in life when their base needs are met and most pressing dangers averted. — Saifedean Ammous

On October 16, 1929, Fisher proudly proclaimed in the New York Times that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau. The stock market was to crash starting October 24, 1929, and as the Depression deepened, it would not be until the mid-1950s, years after Fisher died, that the stock market would get back to the “permanently high plateau Fisher had proclaimed in 1929. — Saifedean Ammous

The total U.S. M2 measure of the money supply in 1971 was around $600 billion, while today it is in excess of $12 trillion, growing at an average annual rate of 6.7%. — Saifedean Ammous

The United States summoned representatives of its allies to Bretton Woods in New Hampshire to discuss formulating a new global trading system. History has not been very kind to the architects of this system. Britain's representative was none other than John Maynard Keynes, whose economic teachings were to be wrecked on the shores of reality in the decades following the war, while America's representative, Harry Dexter White, would later be uncovered as a Communist who was in contact with the Soviet regime for many years. — Saifedean Ammous

It is the author’s opinion that the history of China and India, and their failure to catch up to the West during the twentieth century, is inextricably linked to this massive destruction of wealth and capital brought about by the demonetization of the monetary metal these countries utilized. — Saifedean Ammous

The well-known phenomenon of the modern breakdown of the family cannot be understood without recognizing the role of unsound money allowing the state to appropriate many of the essential roles that the family has played for millennia, and reducing the incentive of all members of a family to invest in long-term familial relations. — Saifedean Ammous

As Friedrich Hayek put it: I don't believe we'll ever have good money again until we get the thing out of the government's hands, that is, we can't violently take it out of the government's hands, all we can do is somehow cunningly introduce something that they can't stop. — Saifedean Ammous

Carl Menger, the father of the Austrian school of economics and founder of marginal analysis in economics, came up with an understanding of the key property that leads to a good being adopted freely as money on the market, and that is salability – the ease with which a good can be sold on the market whenever its holder desires, with the least loss in its price. — Saifedean Ammous

As with Rome, the fall of Constantinople happened only after its rulers had started devaluing the currency, a process that historians believe began in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos. Along with monetary decline came the fiscal, military, cultural, and spiritual decline of the Empire, as it trudged on with increasing crises until it was overtaken by the Ottomans in 1453. — Saifedean Ammous

The average savings rate of the seven largest advanced economies was 12.66% in 1970, but has dropped to 3.39% in 2015, a fall of almost three-quarters. — Saifedean Ammous

Any industry in which people complain about their *sshole boss is likely part of the bezzle, because bosses can only really afford to be *ssholes in the economic fake reality of the bezzle. In a productive firm offering valuable service to society, success depends on pleasing customers. Workers are rewarded for how well they do that essential task, and bosses who mistreat their workers will either lose the workers to competitors or destroy their business quickly. In an unproductive firm that does not serve society and relies on bureaucratic largesse for its survival. — Saifedean Ammous

An asset that holds its value is preferable to an asset that loses value, and savers who want to choose a medium of exchange will gravitate toward assets that hold value over time as monetary assets. — Saifedean Ammous

Sound money allows people to think about the long term and to save and invest more for the future. Saving and investing for the long run are the key to capital accumulation and the advance of human civilization. — Saifedean Ammous

It should be of interest to modern Keynesian economists, as well as to the present generation of investors, that although the emperors of Rome frantically tried to 'manage' their economies, they only succeeded in making matters worse. Price and wage controls and legal tender laws were passed, but it was like trying to hold back the tides. Rioting, corruption, lawlessness and a mindless mania for speculation and gambling engulfed the empire like a plague. With money so unreliable and debased, speculation in commodities became far more attractive than producing them. — Saifedean Ammous

A truly International Monetary System would be one where the whole world possessed a homogeneous currency such as obtains within separate countries and where its flow between regions was left to be determined by the results of the action of all individuals. — Saifedean Ammous

The death knell for silver's monetary role was the end of the Franco-Prussian war, when Germany extracted an indemnity of £200 million in gold from France and used it to switch to a gold standard. With Germany now joining Britain, France, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, and others on a gold standard, the monetary pendulum had swung decisively in favor of gold, leading to individuals and nations worldwide who used silver to witness a progressive loss of their purchasing power and a stronger incentive to shift to gold. India finally switched from silver to gold in 1898, while China and Hong Kong were the last economies in the world to abandon the silver standard in 1935. — Saifedean Ammous

Further, wide acceptance of a medium of exchange allows all prices to be expressed in its terms, which allows it to play the third function of money: unit of account. — Saifedean Ammous

Money that is deposited in a bank as savings is money taken away from consumption by people who are delaying the gratification that consumption could give them in order to gain more gratification in the future. — Saifedean Ammous

For Mises, the absence of control by government is a necessary condition for the soundness of money, seeing as government will have the temptation to debase its money whenever it begins to accrue wealth as savers invest in it. — Saifedean Ammous

Life Lessons by Saifedean Ammous

1. Embrace intellectual curiosity: Ammous's work demonstrates the importance of continuously seeking knowledge and questioning established norms. By delving into the complexities of monetary economics and cryptocurrencies, he encourages others to explore new ideas and challenge conventional wisdom.
2. Stay committed to your passion: Ammous's dedication to studying and understanding the intricacies of monetary systems is evident in his extensive research and writing. His commitment serves as a reminder to pursue one's passion relentlessly, even in the face of obstacles or skepticism.
3. Communicate complex concepts effectively: Ammous's ability to distill complex economic theories into accessible language has made his work widely appreciated and understood. By focusing on clear communication, he teaches the importance of effectively conveying ideas and making complex subjects relatable to a broader audience.