Saifedean Ammous

Saifedean Ammous was born in 1980. He studied mechanical engineering at the American University of Beirut, took a master’s degree in development management at the London School of Economics, and earned his PhD in sustainable development at Columbia University.

From 2009 to 2019 he taught economics at the Lebanese American University. In 2018 he published The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, a history of money from an Austrian School perspective that ends with bitcoin; according to its publisher, the book has been translated into 36 languages.

In the book, money is “hard” when its supply is difficult to increase, which Ammous measures by the ratio of existing stock to new production (stock-to-flow); whoever saves in “easy” money loses wealth to those who can produce more of it. The Fiat Standard (2021), on the system of government fiat money, and Principles of Economics (2023), a textbook in the Austrian School tradition, followed.

Reviewing The Bitcoin Standard in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Kristoffer Mousten Hansen called it a rarity, a reasonable treatment of bitcoin from the point of view of Austrian economics, but criticised its emphasis on the stock-to-flow ratio and parts of its monetary history. Ammous hosts The Bitcoin Standard Podcast and teaches economics courses on his website, saifedean.com.

Sources: Saifedean.com — About · Library of Congress — Ammous, Saifedean, 1980- · QJAE — Review of The Bitcoin Standard (K. M. Hansen) · Wikipedia — Saifedean Ammous