A History of Money and Banking in the United States | Book Review

Episode 20: Rothbard's "A History of Money and Banking" — Central Banking as Cartelization | Bitlemmas Is central banking a neutral fix for money shortages — or a legal cartel built to coordinate inflation? In this episode, Watson and B. Sovereign break down Murray Rothbard's A History of Money and Banking in the United States, reading it as a counter-history of U.S. money rather than a simple timeline of coins and banks. We cover four counterintuitive truths from the book: how monetary scarcit

The Hidden Architecture of Money: Rothbard on Central Banking, Inflation, and Monetary Power Episode Description In this episode of BitLemmas, Watson and B. Sovereign examine one of the most influential and controversial books in monetary economics: A History of Money and Banking in the United States by Murray Rothbard. Rather than treating money as a neutral economic tool, Rothbard argues that monetary history is fundamentally a story about institutional power, legal privilege, and who benefi

Watson and B. Sovereign review "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization" by Alexander Galloway - a book that argues removing the center from a network doesn't eliminate control, it just relocates it into the rules everyone must follow to participate. The episode covers Galloway's three-stage model of control: sovereign, disciplinary, and protocological, and explains why the Internet's own architecture - the tension between TCP/IP and DNS - is a live example of how power can be distri

Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein Watson and B. Sovereign break down Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein — a deep dive into how development lending by the IMF and World Bank can function less like aid and more like a financial control system. The book's central argument is blunt: when you follow the money — who controls the credit, who writes the conditions, who gets the contracts, who receives the exports, and who carries the debt — the "development" story starts to look a lot more like extr

The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous · Book Review Watson and B. Sovereign break down The Bitcoin Standard — not to repeat Bitcoin slogans, but to understand the monetary argument from first principles. Saifedean Ammous opens with a deceptively simple question: what makes something money? His answer upends the standard story. Money isn't created by government decree — it's selected by markets for saleability. Hard money isn't about rarity — it's about supply inelasticity. And Bitcoin d

A Monetary History of the United States Milton Friedman & Anna Schwartz · Book Review Watson and B. Sovereign break down one of the most consequential economics books ever written — and ask what it means for builders working outside the legacy monetary system. A Monetary History of the United States dismantles the classical view that money is just a neutral veil over the real economy. Friedman and Schwartz argue instead that the money stock — currency plus bank deposits — is structural infrastr