Bitcoin & hard money
Which one built your thinking?
Two reading paths for the same subject. One is the state-economics canon that most people
absorb without noticing, and that, read honestly, got the nature of money wrong. The other
is the hard-money tradition that explains money from first principles, and why a money no
government can print was always coming. Pick a side and read it top to bottom.
Numbered as a path. Read in order.
Fig. 1 · The slop
The Fiat Canon
Fiat money and state economics
The ideas that built the money almost no one questions. Worth reading precisely so you can see where each one quietly assumes money must be managed.
01
A Tract on Monetary Reform
John Maynard Keynes
Where a managed currency replaces a fixed anchor, and “in the long run we are all dead” waves away the long run.
02
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
John Maynard Keynes
The book that made deficits a tool and taught states they could engineer demand. The intellectual license for the money the world now runs on.
03
Economics: An Introductory Analysis
Paul Samuelson
The textbook that trained generations in the Keynesian synthesis, and kept projecting that the Soviet command economy would overtake the West.
04
A Monetary History of the United States
Milton Friedman & Anna Schwartz
Sharper than most, and still a manual for central banking: fix how the money supply is managed, but never question that it is managed at all.
05
Das Kapital
Karl Marx
Money as a symptom of exploitation rather than a tool of cooperation, built on a theory of value the market itself disproved.
06
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The political endpoint: abolish private property, and the honest price with it. Here because its assumptions still echo in policy.
Fig. 2 · The real thing
Hard Money
Austrian school, first principles
The tradition that explains what money is before it explains what to do with it. Read in order, it ends exactly where Bitcoin begins.
01
On the Origins of Money
Carl Menger
Start here. How money emerges from the market itself, chosen by traders, with no decree required.
02
The Theory of Money and Credit
Ludwig von Mises
Money gets a rigorous theory of value: its purchasing power is not a matter of government will.
03
Human Action
Ludwig von Mises
The full system. Dense, but the complete case for prices, markets and sound money as human cooperation.
04
What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Murray Rothbard
The short, sharp one. If you read a single title on either side, read this: how states capture and debase money, step by step.
05
Monetary Nationalism and International Stability
F. A. Hayek
Why politically managed national currencies breed instability, and the early case for money beyond the state’s reach.
06
The Bitcoin Standard
Saifedean Ammous
Where the tradition meets the present: the sound-money thesis carried into the age of a money no government can print.
