Siggy asked #1516333, and Den delivered... that's how the boomer-youngster relationship works: They shall ask and we shall provide. Have fun enjoying that sweeeet SS while it lasts... unfortunately too fucking long.

I don't know Álvaro D. María, don't believe we've met. Bitcoin Magazine Books released a translation of his book in the summer of 2023 but I can't recall it having too large an impact on me — or seeing María on the podcast tour.

It's nice to look back at this review, too, to revisit the state of mind I was in and how I found the book back when I read it. What strikes me is the calm, balanced, dispassionate tone of voice — something I certainly have not carried over into SN.

At the time we still just called these book reviews "Joakim Book's reviews" or "The Book Club"; we hadn't quite figured out that "Book's Books" with bitcoin-₿ was genius-level stuff.

I read this one, and three others, for our inaugural book-review segment, in a heatwave-stricken Germany a little over three years ago... right after I had finished editing Lyn Alden's Broken Money manuscript.
Bitcoin wasn't stupid yet, and even though the price (the marker of our success, the value of what we're doing) was 55% lower than it is today — which, symbolically, is now 55% lower than last year's peak — those times felt way more optimistic and interesting. We were building things, we were conquering the world.

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars // Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.""We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars // Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."

The Philosophy of BitcoinThe Philosophy of Bitcoin

Klaus Schwab’s WEF and the globalist establishment want a “Great Reset”, but the great reset that Bitcoin ushers in is of a different kind. In this book, comfortably read in an afternoon and just recently translated from Spanish, Álvaro María posits that two closely held beliefs will crumble in Bitcoin’s path: that money must be backed by a government and that nation-states as they currently exist are the only possible political formations.

The destructive effect of Bitcoin mirrors its technological innovation, says María. Bitcoin’s promise is massive, its destructive effect on now-outdated institutions will be equally vast. Every major technological change washed away a past that was no longer compatible with it; welfare states, pension schemes, and defunct political authorities will go the way of horse-and-buggy makers and telegraphists. Only institutions suitable for a 21st-century governed by 21 million coins will remain.

The young’s hopelessness, the institution of inheritance, and the misunderstood concept of city-states versus nation-states all make an appearance. Hobbes was afraid; Aristotle misunderstood. María marshals powerful concepts and beautiful words in what’s a pretty academic text, at times even difficult to parse. The most elegant parts explore the role of money in economic societies, clearly explained as the ultimate tool for social cooperation. “It is credited with fostering individualism by untying social ties when it is precisely the most social product of all” (page 21). Governments, up and down recent centuries, have both monopolized the issuance of this crucial societal component and completely bungled it: “Monetary history is the story of how governments have defrauded their citizens in the task of giving them good money” (page 28).

The book’s greatest shortcoming is that it’s too short, the argument too sprawling and underdeveloped. The author’s initial criticism against practicing economists is that they unwittingly do philosophy, but he doesn’t flush out where they go wrong and how his thesis improves on them.

A half-dozen pages or so towards the end are dedicated to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, a long-standing macro story for how money printing confuses consumers and entrepreneurs and cause them to consume and invest in ways not warranted by the underlying real economic conditions. It’s a neat and concise description, but it’s unclear what it’s doing in a book about Bitcoin’s philosophy and societal implications.

The defense of Bitcoin as the sole purpose of blockchain “technology” is fresh, sharp, and essential for undermining any shitcoiner’s misplaced beliefs. Again, situating that conversation in a big-picture book for the great transformation of the State is strange: Bitcoin is here to cure other ills — unearned authority and top-down planning among them. Like the author posits toward the end, “Bitcoin is the greatest weapon against the State” (page 91). Then why bother with the shitcoins?

I always included extracted quotes like these (four to a review; never less, never more), as a summary of the best the author had... and pow evidence I read it.

Here's the BM store link and the print-edition of the Withdrawal Issue, links to which and explicit mentions were a condition of my republishing the review.