Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard, argues that fiat money is the central ill afflicting modern society. “The 20th century is just an enormous amount of wealth being taken away from people who produced it and being sent to the meat grinder of war. And this is what fiat does,” he told Cointelegraph. “If you take that away, we get a lot less murder and death, and then we get a lot more prosperity, productivity and a lot more wealth.”
His new book, The Gold Standard, explores that premise through an alternate history: what if, soon after World War I began in 1915, a decentralized, immutable system of value transfer backed by gold emerged? How might history—and human flourishing—have changed?
In our timeline, World War I devastated Europe for four years, causing tens of millions of deaths, toppling empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern), fracturing the Ottoman Empire and spawning revolutions and novel political movements such as communism and fascism. The war reshaped borders, upended social orders, and produced economic chaos that influenced the rest of the 20th century.
The Gold Standard reimagines the period after the Belle Époque, when central banks and fragile international financial arrangements set the stage for catastrophe. Ammous argues that the traditional gold standard’s weakness was unchecked extension of bank credit without matching savings, and that imperial ambition combined with poor policy paved the way to war.
In Ammous’ alternate 1915, French aviator Louis Blériot partners with the Wright brothers to found the Blériot Transport Corporation (BTC). They build a fleet of advanced aircraft to carry and deliver gold across borders, allowing commerce to bypass central banks. As war restrictions and bank failures raise demand for transferable, private gold, the wealthy entrust BTC rather than surrendering reserves to national banks. Capital flees state coffers; central-bank gold reserves are drained; governments can no longer fund large-scale warfare.
This capital flight, allied with other pressures, forces armies to withdraw. By early 1915 the trenches empty and peace spreads across Europe. A Treaty of Geneva and the International Committee for Self-Determination (ICSD) institutionalize dispute resolution, and a persistent global gold standard—immutable and widely used—enables sustained peace and prosperity. Gold dramatically appreciates in value in a process Ammous calls “hypergoldenization.”
A new form of governance emerges: corporate-style governments-for-hire that compete to provide security and services efficiently. With central banks impotent, large wars become prohibitively expensive; the ICSD makes conflict resolution more feasible without mass mobilization. Ammous suggests that many historical outcomes tied to fiat finance—widespread socialism, the Great Depression, World War II, chronic unemployment, and even certain environmental and food-system trends—would either not occur or would look very different under this regime. He ends with a vignette of a prosperous Smith family in London enjoying abundant energy, plentiful food, and routine comfort.
Ammous’ intellectual path helps explain the book’s message. He encountered Austrian economics around 2007 and initially favored gold as sound money. He discovered Bitcoin on internet forums and, after researching mining in 2014, became convinced of its merits, which led to his bestselling The Bitcoin Standard. The Gold Standard departs from his prior non-fiction economic treatments by using alternate history and thought experiments to convey the consequences of monetary regimes.
Ammous says he chose World War I as a focal point because it was the decisive turning point of the 20th century; World War II, he argues, is largely a continuation of the first conflict’s disruptions. He sought to make the alternate scenario believable—not a fantasy where peace magically appears—but a plausible chain of events that illuminates how different monetary institutions can alter incentives, capital accumulation, and political outcomes.
Critics note tensions in the narrative. The BTC aircraft in the book—exemplified by a 1911 Lightning prototype capable of 280 km/h and 1,400 km range—far exceed historical aviation performance, representing a deus ex machina that enables cross-border gold transport decades before real-world planes matched those specs. The book’s depiction of soldiers quietly deserting as funding collapses overlooks historical patterns where unpaid armies often mutinied, looted or sparked wider unrest. Ammous also has monarchs removed through assassinations that, in the book, do not produce the succession crises and civil conflict history suggests they might. Some longer-term claims—such as the absence of climate change or shifts toward more beef-heavy diets—strike some readers as speculative.
Ammous acknowledges the uncertainties of counterfactual history but defends the exercise as a way to teach the core lessons of his other works: that preserving money’s purchasing power encourages saving and capital accumulation, which lowers capital costs and spurs investment, productivity, and growth. “If that money is kept, then people will save it, they will accumulate capital. Then the world becomes more capital abundant. We have more capital. Capital becomes cheaper. People are able to invest more. They’re able to save more. They’re able to grow more,” he told Cointelegraph.
The Gold Standard is thus a thought experiment that reframes monetary history: replace fiat-driven, state-financed wars and interventions with private, hard-money institutions and imagine the institutional, technological and social paths that follow. Whether one accepts the specific speculative turns, the book aims to make readers wrestle with how monetary systems shape incentives and the arc of history.
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