When Saif mentioned he was working on a fiction book about an alternative history—specifically, what the world might look like if it had stuck to a gold standard after WWI—I was excited to see what he would come up with. I pre‑ordered the book on his website, and I finally finished it.

Below are my three main takeaways from the book.Below are my three main takeaways from the book.

1. Saif does a really good job explaining the history leading up to WWI. He prepares the reader well for what is real and what is fictional. I don’t know much about WWI beyond the popular facts—like the shooting of the Austria‑Hungary archduke that ignited everything—but Saif explains clearly why the European powers aligned themselves the way they did. One thing that really shocked me was how all the monarchs were basically family. It low‑key reminded me of Game of Thrones. All of this bloodshed could have been avoided if the family had just gotten along.
2. If you’ve read a lot of Saif’s books (like I have), you’ll see many of his biases show up in a major way. All of his gripes about food, energy production, his weird obsession with monarchy being the best form of government, and the lack of development in aviation are present here. To kick off the gold standard before WWI got out of hand, it’s a fleet of airships that performs bank‑to‑bank gold settlements, causing central bankers to become insolvent and perish.
3. When I think of fiction and alternative futures (or pasts?), I expect drastic changes from the status quo. I thought Saif was going to run wild with his imagination and tell a story about how the gold standard evolved, but instead the creativity felt lacking. Maybe if you’re outside the Bitcoin space and read this book, you might find something appealing, but for me it was more of the same. If you’ve read The Gold Standard, The Fiat Standard, and Principles of Economics, I almost feel like you can skip this book. The story isn’t anything you didn’t already know. There’s no real character development—just writing and discussions about large macro events that could possibly change under a gold standard.

My biggest issue with the book is Saif’s linear thinking. Even under a gold standard, the world would still have evil people, yet he never addresses how evil is dealt with. There’s no organized crime running fake gold bars, no rival stealing secrets from the BTC Flight Crew (yes, that’s what he named the company doing gold settlements in 1920), and no one cornering the market and killing progress in aviation. Everything is just expected to get better, which makes the book a bit boring and predictable.

Overall, the book was okay. I probably should have known, given Saif’s background and how his previous books read, that his attempt at fiction would lack creativity—and it definitely did.

I took a lot of notes while reading. I’ll share them below with my personal commentary for anyone who wants to dive deeper into some of the economic outcomes presented in the book.

Cost of Goods and Salary of employeesCost of Goods and Salary of employees

$40 computers and $2 smartphones

$0.64 for a barrel of oil

Natural gas $0.30

Cars $100

House 115 pounds (wage of 75 pounds takes 1.5 years to save for a house)

Wage

$400 per year in 1900

Declined to $300 in the 50s

Americans have 10 years worth of gold savings

Teaching was the job that saved everyone. Due to sound money the best schools had one to one student teacher ratios

Page 33:Page 33:

After the assassination of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists, Austria seemed overconfident in its ability to bring Serbia to heel.
Russians were extremely cavalier about smashing the Austrians in defense of Serbia. The Germansa, gripped by paranoia that the British, French, and Russians were aiming to destroy Germany, seemed to think they could take on France, then Russia, and expect Britain to stay out. The French vastly overestimated their ability to fight the Germans and regain Alsace-Lorraine, and the British imagined their entry would decisively and quickly settle the war.
They were all unfathomably wrong

This miscalculation caused so many lives to be lost. Makes me angry.

Page 49:Page 49:

Across the decades before 1914, Russia's moves formed a coherent strategy aimed at one supreme objective. From the annexation of Kars-Ardahan-Batum in 1878, the significant militarization and migration of Russians into the annexed region, the constant quarrels over the Turkish Straits, the Treaty of San Stefano and its revision at Berlin in 1878, the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908-09, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, Russia's strategy was to contain Austria in the Balkans and defeat the Ottomans in Anatolia to open the path to the grand prize: Tsargrad and its waterways.

That damn Tsargrad if it wasn’t for this maybe Russia doesn’t get involved?

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Wilhelm II sought to make Germany a leading world power through imperialism and building a navy. His ambition, as is so often the case with leaders, laid the foundations of his demise. Wilhelm II let the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse without renewal, probably because he thought his friendship with his cousin Isar Nicholas II would be enough to resolve differences with Russia, and possibly because he wanted to pursue an alliance with his uncle in Britain, and he thought Britain's colonial conflicts with Russia would get in the way of an alliance with Britain.

COUSINS!!

Page 98:Page 98:

American banks, particularly J. P. Morgan, had lent around $500m- 5600m to British and French banks." A major Anglo-French loan for $500m was floated, and expected to close in October 1915.

Ahh yes good lo J.p. morgan. Hello Jamie Dimon

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Transitions from non-fiction to fiction

Kicks it off with a letter from early French aviationist Octave Chanute to the Wright brothers def has Saifs fingerprints all over this one!

The world will benefit immensely more from what you produce in workshops than what you do in courtrooms. Your ingenu-ity, place in history, and first-mover advantage are unassailable, and you can channel these toward building better airplanes, benefiting from the improvements others make to airplanes to offer the world the best airplanes.
There are infinite opportunities for bringing flight to various fields of human commerce, and I hope you make the most of them. There are millions worldwide who travel long distances by boat, train, car, or foot, and would pay dearly to fly instead. Countless merchants would pay to have their goods delivered by plane. Countless banks would pay for same-day final settlement rather than wait on central-bank clearing. You will not capitalize on this demand by taking others to court. If you continue to try to use the courts to bludgeon other inventors, you will stymie human progress while sinking into irrelevant bitterness. I have spoken to Dumont, Blériot, and all the major French aviators and obtained their solemn promise that they will never sue you for patent infringement if you drop this lawsuit. I believe a new cooperative way is possible for our industry.

Saif flexing his fictional muscles here with a fake letter to the Wright brothers. Sound reasonable but I would have rejected it haha

Page 118:Page 118:

Bleriot’s makes the pitch to transport gold as a way to make aviation commercially viable and not to chase the Pommery Cup for flying the longest distance

I have thought long and hard about the killer app of flight, and at this point, I believe it is in the transportation of gold. For the foresecable future, gold is the only thing valuable enough to pay for it weight in an airplane. There is also demand for fast final settlement of gold. The train and the car have moved goods very quickly; and banks cannot keep up.

Saif and his love for flight!

Page 120:Page 120:

I'm developing a new peer-to-peer gold clearance system reliant on air-planes. It's decentralized, with no central bank, because everything is based on fast clearance. We are going to build a fleet of the world's fastest and most reliable aircraft, piloted by the world's best pilots, and we will create a peer-to-peer gold clearance network that enables banks, corporations, and individuals to trade gold directly with one another, without the need for central banks. Our clients will sleep easily knowing they control their own gold and do not have to trust shady central banks to refrain from engaging in risky financial shenanigans. We will propel aviation forward and upward to unimaginable heights with the revenue we generate. We will build planes that cross the Adlantic. We will make airplanes so abundant that even the poor will be able to afford them.

BTC is born for the gold standard. Again I am saying in my head REALLY.

Page 121:Page 121:

Central banks work just fine for the central banks and their owners, and they cannot even conceive why others might want to use something dif-ferent. They are too old, decrepit, and comfortable even to imagine what airplanes will accomplish. But even if they can understand it, how can they stop us? We will not be dealing with them in any way, so we don't need them for anything. Our planes can take off from any empty field and land in any empty field around the globe. By the time they see our planes, we will be out of the range of their guns. Nobody has ever managed to shoot down an airplane, and it will be a long time before anyone can figure out how to do it.

They don't have an infinite money printer to fund a police state to go after us.

The only thing they can do is cry harder.

Hahahahah @ the cry harder sentence. Zero creativity esp. if you are a bitcoiner reading this

Page 122:Page 122:

“if you do f believe me or don’t get it I don’t have time to convince you sorry”

HFSP

More bitcoin tropes.

Page 124:Page 124:

By the end of their three weeks together, Blériot and the Wrights produced a working prototype of Lightning, the most technically advanced airplane in the world. On 1 June 1911, it flew its maiden flight in Ohio, with Biériot at the helm. It could reach a speed of 280 km/h and possessed a range of 1,400 kilometers, with the capacity to carry two pilots and 100 kilograms of load. Ir was a technical miracle, made possible by the harvesting of the best ideas in aviation from around the world.

After successfully flying Lightning, Blériot and the Wrights agreed to start a new joint venture, Blériot Transport Company (BTC), which would build Lightning jets and deploy them in the clearance of gold. Blériot would own 51% of the company's stock, the Wright brothers would own 25%, and the remaining 24% would be divided equally among 24 pilots recruited from across the United States and Europe. The Wrights immediately began work on building a factory in Dayton, and Blériot returned to Paris, where he also built one. The factories would produce four jets each in 1911, and a further eight jets in 1912.

Of course the faster plane is named Lightning because why not!!!

Page 141:Page 141:

After ten days of nine hours of testimonies, the inquiry ended on November 2, 1915, and its members retired to deliberate. They needed only one day to arrive at their decision. On November 4, the committee found guilty of grand treason: Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Foreign Minister Edward Grey, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, Treasury Secretary John Bradbury, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, Lord Chancellor Richard Haldane, Bank of England Governor Walter Cunliffe, Bank of England Cashier Gordon Nairn, his deputy Ernest Harvey, and Treasury's Liaison with the Bank of England John Maynard Keynes. All eleven men were sentenced to death. The remaining members of the cabinet who had stood by as Britain entered its greatest historical calamity were expelled from parliament and banned from holding public office for the remainder of their lives.
The Royal Inquiry recommended that the king shut down the Bank of England and liquidate its assets to help pay back pound note holders in gold. It also decreed unlimited personal liability for all the shareholders in the member banks of the Bank of England. The personal fortunes, mansions, and private property of the owners of the cartel banks were to be used to make the Bank of England's paper pounds payable in gold again at the original rate, and then to compensate bank depositors. By 1921, all holders of banknotes, local and foreign, had been compensated with the face value of their paper in gold at the pre-war exchange rate of £4.25 per ounce of gold. Bank depositors were not so fortunate, as they could typically recover only between 20% and 70% of their investments, depending on the state of their bank and its owners. Vast fortunes were liquidated and sold at the scrap heap to buy physical gold to redeem the pound. Storied banking dynasties were reduced to the rank and station

Casually kills Winston Churchill here hahaha

Page 150:Page 150:

On Friday, November 5, hundreds of thousands of people gathered outside the headquarters of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks to organize the Federal Reserve Bonfire Night, a joyous occi-sion still celebrated every year in America. All Federal Reserve buildings ere set on fire as families gathered around singing, joyously dancing. handing our sweets, and celebrating their and their descendants fourth and final deliverance from debt slavery:

YAY NO MORE FED!!! I can get down with this!! Bonfire Night hahah

Page 160:Page 160:

The delegations of the United States, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein acted as if they had been an alliance of victors, because staying out of the war was indeed the only victory possible. American democratic ideals meshed nicely with Swiss pluralist democracy, political decentralization, and the concept of self-determination as advanced by Prince Johann II. The US, Swiss, and Liechtenstein delegations broadly agreed on the path forward, which centered on three fundamental principles: self-determination, the right to secession, and free trade. These ideas were wildly popular with non-European delegations, most of whom were still incensed at the gold they had lost to Western central banks during the Great War. The European powers were unable to mount any serious opposition to this growing international consensus, primarily because they had disparate and conflicting interests and because they lacked an easy way to coordinate their positions, given that they were direct rivals and ene-mies. The US and Switzerland were now the world's economic superpowers.
With neutral European, Latin American, African, and Asian governments, they formed a more economically significant bloc than the bankrupt European powers, and they pushed for self-determination, secession, and free trade.

Here Saif explains the peaceful political governance for the whole book. Secession!!

Page 176:Page 176:

I-Switzerland, the United States, and other neutral countries will restrict outbound capital movements to countries that commit to:
1 - The total freedom of import and export of capital and economic goods.
All import duties and fees must not exceed 5% of the cost of goods.
2 - Respecting the right of self-determination of all residents on the territories they control, according to the framework described below.

More governance rules for the new order. 5% max tariffs on goods!!

Page 191:Page 191:

All the world's prewar currencies were reborn on the modern gold standard and operared in a similar way. Several British banks issued a paper pound redeemable for gold at Newton's old rate of 7.3224 grams of fine gold. These notes were differentiated in their insignia and colors across banks. There was no monopoly on the use of the term "British pound," meaning anyone could issue one, but the price of these notes was freely determined by buyers and sellers as well as exchange houses. American banks issued a dollar redeemable for 1.504 grams of gold, Russian banks issued a ruble at 0.7742 grams of gold, German banks issued a mark redeemable for 3584 grams of gold, Austrian banks issued krones with 0.3049 grams of gold, Turkish banks issued their liras at 6.6152, and Dutch banks issued their guilders at 0.6048 grams of gold.
French and Swiss banks continued issuing francs according to the specification of the Latin Monetary Union, at 0.2903 gram, which was the same rate for the lira issued by Italian banks, drachma issued by Greek banks, peseta issued by Spanish banks, leu issued by Romanian banks, lev issued by Bulgarian banks, and dinars issued by Serbian banks.

Exchange rates fiat —> gold.

Page 197:Page 197:

of these currencies. The smaller denominations began to be printed on pa-per, and long-forgotten smaller denomination coins were reintroduced after decades of decommissioning. Some new, smaller denominations were intro-duced. In the US, the half dollar was printed on paper in 1936, the quarter dollar was printed on paper in 1933 for the first time, the dime followed in 1956, and the nickel followed in 1985. The half cent, which had been issued between 1793 and 1857, was brought back in 1933. The milli, equal to a tenth of a cent, had been used as a notional accounting unit previously, but was introduced as a coin in 1965. In Britain, the half-pound note was first re-introduced in 1928, and the ten pence note was first introduced in 1951, followed by the shilling note in 1981. The half-farthing, equal to a quarter of a penny, which had last been minted in 1856, returned to circulation in 1943.
In 1982, the milli was introduced at a valuation of a tenth of a penny. Whereas in the past these smaller denomination coins were minted in copper or silver and traded at the market value of their metal content, they were now merely units of paper or metal redeemable in gold, or for paper redeemable in gold.

Coinage

Page 220:Page 220:

Swiss banks were the hrst to offer zero interest rates in 1941. They had become awash with gold in the Great War, and they were a safe neutral country with solid banking institutions. The abundance of capital and the dearth of investment opportunities in the warring nations meant its owners were willing to accept negligible interest rates (as low as 2%, for lending). Even after the war ended, Switzerland maintained a significant amount of gold deposits, as many investors saw the value in a politically neutral safe haven. Interest rates rose slightly as depositors withdrew their gold, but not by much. As the ICSD industry continued to grow, it also brought in large quantities of gold. By the mid-1920s, Swiss interest rates began a steady and slow decline, and in 1981, Swiss bank Credit Suisse began to lend at 0% interest.
This development puzzled economists. There was no Swiss authority mandating the interest rates, but the borrower, bank, and bank depositors were all willingly going along with the transaction. Many economists tried to rationalize it as an aberrant exception that would be reversed quickly, but they could not have been more wrong. More Swiss banks began to offer 0% loans, and then other European, US, and Canadian banks followed. The more peaceful, prosperous, civilized, and productive a society was, the faster its interest rates went to zero. By 1995, most large financial institutions in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand offered 0% interest rates.
Other parts of the world saw their rates decline steadily, and by 1999, there were no publicly traded banks offering interest-based lending. It continued to exist only in pawn shops and payday loans in poorer communities.

Gold standard drives interest rates to zero on a long time horizon.

Page 221:Page 221:

With 0% interest rate lending, the lending business declined in size markedly and became an increasingly insignificant part of the financial system.
Lending began to mostly take place between people who were familiar with one another at the 0% rate, while banks' business models shifted to two distinct activities: deposit banking and investment banking.
With deposit banking, clients would deposit their money at a bank and pay an annual fee to keep it there. The bank would hold the entire sum at all times and make it available to the client at any time. It was impossible to have a bank run when the money was always on hand. No amount of financial panic, confidence loss, rumors, or real calamities could affect the ability to redeem banknotes as long as banks held them all in reserve. Retail deposit fees converged to a simple menu: a flat vaulting fee plus a small percentage of average balance to cover insurance and audit. With investment banking, clients would deposit sums into an investment account to be managed by the bank.
The bank would make it clear to clients that the money would not be available to them for a set period, and during that period, the money would be allocated to entrepreneurs who engaged in production. At the end of the investment period, the investors would be given a return commensurate with their share of the business. The business could profit or lose, and the investor would share equally in the upside and downside. The bank simply acted as an intermediary, collecting a fee if the business was profitable. Banks could go out of business if their choices were unsatisfactory and they lost their customers, but they could not suffer a bank failure except in the case of overt fraud.

The way banking should be instead of this fractional reserve mess we have now.

Page 222:Page 222:

By the carly twentieth century, religious edicts had lost all power, as Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and many other populations, governments, and even religious auchorities were all openly engaging in interest lending. Even the Islamic Caliphate in Constantinople was borrowing at interest, which ultimately led to its demise. By the late twentieth century, religious edicts were rendered pointless, as people no longer wanted to, or were able to, engage in interest lending.

This sounds fantastic but we all know religion is beyond monetary gain. People don’t always act in their best interest when following a religion. I know this is a fictional book but it can’t be this easy to solve conflict

Page 226:Page 226:

JJC inc.

1. Policing and prison systems to ensure a murder rate under 1 per 100,000 residents:

2. 2 - A modern poblic road nerwork:
   3 - Garbage collection services;
   4- A corporate law framework based on the Cry of London commercial code, which had been adopted in Hong Kong:
   3 - Independent commercial judiciary services.

Government services as a service basically. If your country is screwed up you can vote to have these guys come in and run the basic services while people get on with their lives!

Page 236:Page 236:

Fixed flat fee per resident (1% cost to fund go)

Fee per employee for companies

The tax law. Very simple!!

Page 286:Page 286:

$40 computers and $2 smartphones

$0.64 for a barrel of oil

Natural gas $0.30

Cars $100

House 115 pounds (wage of 75 pounds takes 1.5 years to save for a house)

Wage

$400 per year in 1900

Declined to $300 in the 50s

Americans have 10 years worth of gold savings

Teaching was the job that saved everyone. Due to sound money the best schools had one to one student teacher ratios

The cost of goods and the number 1 profession is teaching! Can’t find a job teaching pays very well and
classroom sizes fall to 1 to 1!

Page 291Page 291

China first country to reach 100 ExaJoule per year in 1971 made it a national holiday.

Blackbird invented by end of 20th century. Translantic flights done in 3 hours made for middle and upper middle class

China still wins the energy race and finally we get our own planes parked at our homes. Can fly anywhere in the world in about 3 to 4 hours time.

Page 341:Page 341:

Face-detection technology allows train companies to deduct the fare from Andrew's gold-sterling account without him needing to carry change, like his grandfather, or reach for a card, like his father.

I guess privacy is dead with the gold standard!