Parker Lewis has been out making noise recently, particularly hating on the Saylorbois online. Deservedly so. (Their sycophantic braincells work, uh, suboptimally...)

This was somewhat lengthier a review, and a book I kind of enjoyed reading. At least from the point of view of today's madness and infighting, the optimistic we-against-the-world sense of two years ago feels amaze. I miss it. Gradually, Then Suddenly: A Framework for Understanding Bitcoin as Money, released winter 2023-24, iirc

"It’s getting crowded at the top." 

The competition for the best Bitcoin book of the year — perhaps the decade — is raging on: Saifedean Ammous’ Principles of Economics, Lyn Alden’s Broken Money, and some of BM Books’ own titles, with Aaron van Wirdum’s The Genesis Book launching as I type this a few days into 2024.

Parker Lewis’ excellent essays for Unchained Capital under the “Gradually, Then Suddenly” brand is another worthy contender. While most of the content is “old” — many Bitcoiners may have read one or another of Lewis’ essays, but few have read all of them — there is an added value in reading all the essays together. The distinct smell of printed pages and @proofofpaint’s tasteful cover art now decorating my crowded Bitcoin bookshelf are nice additions as well! (That said, the margins in my copy of Gradually, Then Suddenly are noticeably smaller than what’s common and it has pages falling off its hinges. Add to that the month-or-so delay in shipping and I’m not exactly impressed by the delivery. Given that the content is so much better than the not-quite-perfect container, I suppose all is forgiven.)

"The book itself is unbelievably quotable: Someone needs to set up an Instagram/Nostrgram service to deliver Parker Lewis wisdom to our digital doorsteps, one pithy sentence at a time"

Even though the series of articles are written independently over the course of two-three years, the final result feels remarkably well planned out, organized as it is into fundamentals, common misconceptions, and how bitcoin compares with the legacy system. 

The decision to release the title exclusively via Saif’s online store, and not on legacy book publishing platforms, is pretty ballsy. Lewis explains the decision in a December Rabbit Hole Recap episode: In part, he wanted to give thanks to Saif for the impact his work had on Lewis during the latter’s journey down the rabbit hole. Additionally, he wanted to avoid the immense book publishing noise on Amazon: Putting Gradually, Then Suddenly next to the few and very select titles proudly available next to The Bitcoin Standard “will create a filter… if it’s a good-quality product, people will find it.” Instead of drawing various ad-fueled Amazon crypto nonsense, this excellent and long-lasting book will here make a mark next to other serious Bitcoin books.

All of Lewis’ highly erudite reasoning about Bitcoin stems from his understanding of “how bitcoin credibly enforced its fixed supply” (page 7). The three components he identifies for this point are

1. a tangible, real-world cost to mining, 
2. a supply schedule incorporated in validation of blocks, and 
3. divorcing mining from the ownership of the network.

Bitcoin’s supply schedule is credible, not because the software says so (the 21-million limit isn’t even in the code or white paper, but a sum that the block-rewards-plus-halving-schedule spit out) but “because it is governed on a decentralized basis and by an ever increasing number of network participants” (page 43).

From this foundational point flows all the virtuous consequences of this much-needed upgrade to our monetary system — sometimes comically so, as in the chapter about governments banning bitcoin. It’s irrational, says the author, to believe that bitcoin succeeds so well at its monetary task that governments will ban it. That kind of argument “cedes that bitcoin is viable as money while at the same time ignoring the principal reasons as to why: decentralization and censorship resistance” (page 221).

Same with criminals. If you’re so concerned with Bad People™ doing things you don’t like with this freedom money, you’re also “admitting that bitcoin is functional as a currency” (page 208).
Money wants to be one, Lewis observes at so many points in the book that it almost becomes repetitive. If it’s a better, harder, less corrupted money than the others on offer, it will win out. Simple as that. Besides, since the chapters were stand-alone essays — and the author didn’t want to meddle too much in what was written during a specific time period — rather than becoming too tedious, this constant reiteration serves to enhance the major points in his story: what money’s role in society is, how it coordinates economic activity, that bitcoin’s value comes from its fixed supply and the network’s (credible!) ability to enforce it. Economic systems, he repeats, “converge on one form of money” (page 7).

...oh wow, is THAT appropriate musings now in BIP-110 times...

Bitcoin presents as a different thing to everyone; you can never know which portion of Bitcoin will most resonate with someone. If the most important thing that Jason Maier’s book A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin — which I reviewed here for the Withdrawal Issue — does is speak clearly and persuasively to those least likely to think favorably of Bitcoin, Lewis’ creation may do the same for those with a background in finance. The segments on financialization, central bank policies, and price volatility land hard and suggest a before-and-after divide: How could I have not always seen the fiat system for the monstrosity that it is?

It really shouldn’t take long for those steeped in Wall Street, investing, and its mentality of “you need to make your money grow” (page 115) to ask questions about the sanity in the system in which they operate. Hang on, is all this Fed watching, monetary alchemy, reading tea leaves (sorry, FOMC statements), and alphabet-soup of patchwork liquidity programs* really a productive use of some of society’s most well-compensated and highly educated individuals?

“Financialization has been so errantly normalized that the lines between saving (not taking risk) and investing (taking risk) have become blurred to the extent that most people think of the two activities as being one and the same […] An overfinancialized economy is the logical conclusion of monetary inflation, and it has induced perpetual risk-taking while disincentivizing savings. A system that disincentivizes saving and forces people into a position of risk-taking creates instability, and it is neither productive nor sustainable” (pages 115, 117).

Maybe everything is broken and maybe — just maybe — bitcoin is the civilizational zero-to-one change that fixes most of what’s wrong with the world, markets, and economies today. Only then, suggests Lewis, can anything else still broken “begin to repair itself” (page 281).

It’s quite clear what the solution is, suggests Lewis, when the problem is “an economic system plagued by a form of money that can be easily printed”; replace it with one where money can’t be printed. 

"It’s not easy, but it’s that simple; one gradual step at a time."

---

I believe this review was featured in The Halving Issue (Q1, 2024), but can't be sure; online backlog and ToC of past magazines are removed from the website and I don't all my physical mags with me. (Bonus zaps to stackers who can verify; pics or didn't happen...)

BOOK on BOOKS review archive:

Fiat Ruins Everything: How Our Financial System is Rigged and How Bitcoin Fixes it, by Jimmy Song (#1530254)

Bitcoin One Million, The Final Chapter of Fiat, by Fred Krueger & Ben Sigman (#1521960)

Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC, by Roger Ver (#1525907)

The Philosophy of Bitcoin, by Álvaro D. María (#1517354)