Layered Money

Nik Bhatia offers one clean, powerful idea: money has always been built in layers. Gold coins sat at the base; paper claims on that gold formed a second layer; bank deposits and central-bank reserves stacked on top of those. Seeing money this way suddenly makes the modern system legible — what a dollar actually is, why central banks sit where they do, and how instruments derive their value from the layer beneath. Bhatia then places Bitcoin and stablecoins into the same framework, sketching how a future monetary pyramid might be organised around a Bitcoin base layer. Concise and unusually clarifying.

It connects Bitcoin to how the existing financial system genuinely works, instead of treating it as a separate curiosity. The 'layers' model is a tool you will reuse every time you try to make sense of banking, the dollar or Lightning. A great step up once the beginner books have done their job.