{"id":29455,"date":"2022-11-09T15:45:31","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T23:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=29455"},"modified":"2022-11-09T15:45:31","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T23:45:31","slug":"decentralizing-money-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/decentralizing-money-spirituality\/","title":{"rendered":"Decentralizing Money & Spirituality"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the book The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking<\/em>, Saifedean Ammous lays out a fabulous history and sociology of money. He dives deeply into this discussion, while dropping one-liners and understandable definitions that summarize and synthesize his main points. As someone who is frankly averse to economic concepts, Ammous makes this conversation accessible, and yet I felt challenged and clearer by the end of the book.<\/p>\n

Ammous begins his presentation by laying out the foundation of mediums of exchange, which he defines using two forms: direct exchange vs indirect exchange. Direct exchange is reflected in the barter system where, for example, a good is exchanged for a service or vice versa. The value is place in the good being exchanged and received, but this only works in small, specific situations, and proves unsustainable when supply and demand fluctuate. Indirect exchange measures all goods and services by an intermediary or a medium, which allows a buyer or seller to more fluidly make exchanges. Ammous writes, \u201cBeing a medium of exchange is the quintessential function that defines money.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

Money, Ammous asserts, can be easy or hard, which refers to the variable or fixed nature of the supply. He employees the term \u201ceasy money trap\u201d to indicate the mistake made when value is placed in a good that has a variable supply that can increase or decrease drastically. He writes of the easy money, \u201canything used as a store of value will have its supply increased, and anything whose supply can be easily increased will destroy the wealth of those who used it as a store of value.\u201d[2]<\/a> \u201cThe corollary to this trap,\u201d writes Ammous, \u201cis that anything is successfully used as a money will have some natural or artificial mechanism that restricts the new flow of the good into the market, maintaining its value across time.\u201d[3]<\/a>\u00a0Ammous calls Bitcoin\u2019s fixed (hard) amount, at around $21 million, a feature that protects users from the easy money trap. For a medium of exchange to survive over the long haul it must \u201cappreciate when people demand it as a store of value, but its producers have to be constrained from inflating the supply significantly enough to bring the price down.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

Ammous ends chapter 1 and sets the stage for examining the Bitcoin standard writing, \u201cBy examining the history of the tools and materials that have been employed in the role of money throughout history, we are able to discern the characteristics that make for good money and the ones that make for bad money. Only with this background in place can we then move on to understand how bitcoin functions and what its role as a monetary medium is.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

In light of this, I found Ammous\u2019 section on gold fascinating both historically and alchemically. Gold cannot be created, it does not rust, and the supply cannot be manufactured to meet rising demand. This means that it has a high salability as a store of value by keeping the supply and price stable regardless of the increase in demand. For these reasons and more, gold is superior to any other mental or natural resource as a store of value. Ammous argues that Bitcoin is even more so. He writes, \u201cUntil bitcoin\u2019s invention, all forms of money were unlimited in their quantity and thus imperfect in their ability to store value across time. Bitcoin\u2019s immutable monetary supply makes it the beset medium to store the value produced from the limited human time, thus making it arguable the best store of value humanity has ever invented.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

Ammous writes extensively on the movement away from the gold standard and toward paper receipts during WWI when governments needed more cash to fund their war efforts, but did not want to tax the people any further. Governments\u2018 demand for money increased so they simply increased supply to meet the demand. Unfortunately, this demolished the value of their currency, which disproportionally impacted the poor and working class. Ammous advocates for decentralized forms of currency because they cannot be manipulated by those who print the money when their demand increases, and bitcoin is the prime example of this.<\/p>\n

Now, I don\u2019t live in the realm of economics and bitcoin, though I see correlates with social systems, spiritual formation, and shadow work. I\u2019ve been fascinated by the concept of \u201cdecentralization\u201d particularly within spirituality, spiritual practices, and the church institution. My organization, Deep Water, is a sort of decentralized spiritual community. If we think of the church as a sort of market, then the people who come to Deep Water find they have access to spiritual community in a way that the church institution simply doesn\u2019t allow. Now, the church institution may see Deep Water\u2019s work and mistake its decentralization for deconstruction, but in fact it\u2019s simply a more stable \u201cmarket\u201d for spiritual growth.<\/p>\n

We are seeing a mass movement away from the church, and it would be easy to quote Solzhenitsyn saying, \u201cMen have forgotten God\u201d, but my hunch is that the God-image of the church institution can no longer hold the value of human spirituality. Perhaps the veil is tearing, and God is being decentralized once again. Of course, there is still the need for a “medium of exchange” to facilitate and hold space for spiritual practices. I believe this is where spiritual direction and shadow work come in. A great read to extend this topic would be\u00a0The Archetype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation by Robert Johnson.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking<\/em> (Newark, UNITED STATES: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2018), http:\/\/ebookcentral.proquest.com\/lib\/georgefox\/detail.action?docID=5329351. 3.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid. 5-6.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid. 6.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid. 21.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid. 9.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid. 198.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the book The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, Saifedean Ammous lays out a fabulous history and sociology of money. He dives deeply into this discussion, while dropping one-liners and understandable definitions that summarize and synthesize his main points. As someone who is frankly averse to economic concepts, Ammous makes this conversation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2437],"class_list":["post-29455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ammous","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29456,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29455\/revisions\/29456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}