The Bitcoin Standard

This book is misleading because of it's mixture of accuracy (what is money, gold) with opinion and factual inaccuracies. I personally view that mixture of a accurate facts with skewed ones more negatively as it's more deceptive.

The best way to treat it is, the first and last parts of the book are most accurate, while the middle is a narrow, fringe opinion that is far from the general consensus. There's a lot of cherry-picking evidence (ignoring other important evidence that doesn't fit the author's narrative well).

For the title of the book, and how little the author talks about it, the Bitcoin chapters were mostly reasonable. I think a lot of the other material in the book has to been evaluated with a lot of skepticism.

Some interesting questions to ponder related to the book:

- In 2018, Platinum has less total supply (~10,000 tons), has a current growth rate of 2% (~200 tons/year) and has the same industrial uses as gold (electronics). Why shouldn't platinum be better than gold for money?
- In 2018, ~3,200 tons of gold was mined in a year (https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/historical-mine-production) which marks an increase from amounts in the book by ~30%. This also applies to previous years (2016, 2017) being roughly around ~3,200 tons. Is this production (slowly?) adapting to demand of Gold?
- How can the Modern Austrian School of Economics make sound arguments when critics argue the school averse to mathematics, statistics; rejects empirical data, and scientific method? (The Author hints at this referring to Keynesian towards Scientism)
- Commodity money is always inflationary (at least, until max supply is reached), but with Fiat Money, one can also perform deflationary policies. Isn't it possible to separate the argument that Fiat Money is bad from the Keynesian policies?
- Bitcoin has a way to “destroy” currency: to lose the private key wallet that holds it. Doesn't that make it not like Gold since it's less than indestructible? (its estimated that, about 23% of bitcoin is currently lost forever
- Bitcoin also has a significant energy cost. Doesn't this imply that Bitcoin has a passive maintenance cost equivalent to the energy use of some countries as an effective tax on the system to use it?
- Wouldn't an economy on the Gold Standard, while also having advanced credit/borrowing systems still be susceptible to problems of Fiat Money?