Broken Money: Why Our Financial System Is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better is a book by Lyn Alden, published in 2023 (ISBN 978-1544542744). It is a comprehensive examination of global monetary systems through the lens of engineering and network economics, arguing that money is fundamentally a technology -- and like all technologies, it can be well-designed or poorly designed, and it evolves over time.
The book has been widely praised as one of the most rigorous and accessible analyses of why the current monetary system is failing and how Bitcoin fits into the broader arc of monetary evolution. It is frequently recommended alongside The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous as one of the essential texts for understanding Bitcoin in its full historical and economic context.
Central Thesis
Alden's core argument is that the current fiat monetary system is broken by design -- not through conspiracy, but through the accumulated structural incentives of debt-based money creation, political pressures on central banks, and the fundamental contradictions facing reserve currencies (the Triffin dilemma).
The book's distinctive analytical framework treats money as a ledger technology. Throughout history, humans have used various technologies to keep track of who owes what to whom -- from clay tablets and tally sticks to gold coins, paper certificates, and electronic database entries. Each of these technologies has specific properties -- portability, divisibility, verifiability, scarcity, and censorship resistance -- that determine its usefulness as money.
By evaluating each monetary system against these technical criteria, Alden builds an empirical case that transcends ideology -- the reader can assess each system's tradeoffs on measurable grounds rather than through political or philosophical priors.
Structure and Content
Part I: The History of Money Technology
The book opens with a comprehensive historical survey, tracing money's evolution through commodity money (shells, beads, cattle, salt), metallic money (the classical gold standard), paper money and banking (fractional reserves), Bretton Woods (the post-WWII monetary order), the Nixon Shock and the fiat era, and the post-2008 era of quantitative easing and zero interest rate policy.
Each transition is analyzed not as a political event but as a change in money technology -- with specific tradeoffs, winners, losers, and second-order effects.
Part II: The Current System's Failures
The middle sections examine how the current fiat system fails: the Triffin dilemma (the contradiction of a national currency serving as global reserve), financial repression (below-inflation interest rates eroding savers' wealth), the Cantillon effect (newly created money benefiting those closest to its source), and the impact on developing countries trapped in dollar-denominated debt cycles.
Part III: Bitcoin as Monetary Technology
The final sections evaluate Bitcoin empirically against the requirements of sound money. Alden analyzes Bitcoin's monetary properties (portability, divisibility, verifiability, absolute scarcity, censorship resistance), the Lightning Network as a scaling solution analogous to how the gold standard developed layers of abstraction, and multiple realistic adoption scenarios. The book honestly addresses risks including regulatory threats, scaling challenges, and energy consumption debates.
Reception
Broken Money has been praised across multiple audiences. Institutional investors highlight its rigor, the Bitcoin community values it as the best book for explaining Bitcoin to traditional finance professionals, and general readers note Alden's rare ability to make complex monetary economics genuinely accessible.
The book is frequently compared to The Bitcoin Standard as a complementary work. Where Ammous builds his case on Austrian economics, Alden builds hers on engineering analysis and empirical evidence. The two frameworks reach similar conclusions through different methodologies.
Significance
Broken Money may be the most effective book published to date at explaining Bitcoin to people who approach it from a traditional finance or macroeconomics background. Its engineering framework avoids the ideological language that can alienate mainstream readers, and its historical depth demonstrates that Bitcoin is not an anomaly but the latest chapter in a long story of monetary technology evolution.
The book has contributed several important ideas to the broader discourse: money as technology (subject to innovation and obsolescence), the layered money framework (all successful monetary systems develop layers of abstraction to scale), and the demonstration that Bitcoin's case can be made on purely empirical and technical grounds.
External Links
- Broken Money on Amazon
- Lyn Alden Investment Strategy Official Website
- Broken Money on Goodreads
- Lyn Alden on Wikipedia
References
- Lyn Alden -- author and macroeconomist
- The Bitcoin Standard -- complementary work by Saifedean Ammous
- Saifedean Ammous -- author of the complementary Austrian economics analysis
- The Fiat Standard -- Ammous's analysis of the fiat monetary system
- Lightning Network -- Bitcoin's primary Layer 2 scaling solution discussed in the book
- Bitcoin Whitepaper -- Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper
- Wences Casares -- whose Argentine experience exemplifies the book's themes of monetary failure