Book’s Books: Matt Sekerke and Steve Hanke, “Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System”

Bitcoin Magazine

Book’s Books: Matt Sekerke and Steve Hanke, “Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System”

Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System, by Matt Sekerke and Steve H. Hanke, Wiley, 368 pages, $34.95.

I’m about to do something I’ve never done before, something that’s borderline unforgivable for a book reviewer: review a book without reading it, or even remotely finishing it.

Suppose two well-regarded, established economists at Johns Hopkins University write a long, dense, detailed book on how to make money work better. In the year 2025, no less, the 17th year of our lord Bitcoin’s continued, flourishing existence, they flippantly dismiss this monetary newcomer in a single sentence. In that case, they deserve to have their own book similarly relegated to the dustbins… so I stopped reading Sekerke and Hanke’s book after 33 pages, concluding ceremonially that this title wasn’t worth my time — or indeed the attention of anybody concerned with building a monetary future to fix the monetary ills of our past and present.

“Behind every fiat money used in exchange lies a unit of account defined by a monetary standard [which is] underwritten by credible claims to future surpluses monetized by the government and/or the commercial banking system. […] Claims of a ‘Bitcoin standard’ or anything like it are completely indefensible” (p. 28).

The only reason they see bitcoin trading at a positive price at all — let alone all-time highs — is that malicious actors wishing to use it “must random a large enough quantity in U.S. dollar terms (usually) from existing holders” (p. 33), i.e., a holdup problem:

“Rises in the bitcoin price do not prove the intrinsic value (or network value, or whatever) of Bitcoin any more than a lack of homes for sale in a neighborhood makes those homes infinitely valuable” (fn 48, p. 33).

Like modern monetary theorists, Hanke and his coauthor observe that bitcoin isn’t issued, in the sense of created, by a government and not upheld by that government’s tax receivability, which therefore renders it unimportant and irrelevant for monetary analysis.

This is a crucial misstep, not at all a fault of Bitcoin’s monetary properties, but of the authors’ narrow field of vision.

Bitcoin is for anyone, but certainly not everyone. Some people are just too salty, too infected by Bitcoin derangement syndrome (BDS), too enamored by their own egos, or too stuck in the rapidly devolving status quo. Science progresses one funeral at a time.

BDS, a severe illness at the end of the fiat age, has taken better victims than Messrs Sekerke and Hanke, but it’s still tragic to see. A huge disappointment and missed opportunity for otherwise quite sharp minds to engage with the most interesting monetary phenomenon in our lifetimes.

This is a book review from The Lightning Issue of Bitcoin Magazine Print. Get your copy here.

This post Book’s Books: Matt Sekerke and Steve Hanke, “Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System” first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.