What Every Parent Needs to Tell Their Children About Money. Cover illustration of a Yap Island stone disc with circuit-board traces and a Bitcoin symbol etched into its surface, set against a faded map of the Pacific.

Piketown Press

What Every Parent Needs to Tell Their Children About Money

Crossing the Rubicon

By Brian Connelly

138 pages · 6 × 9 inches · Paperback and ebook

Your great-grandparents could buy a year at MIT for four hundred dollars. Today it costs sixty-two thousand. The buildings are the same buildings.

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About the book

What changed was the dollar. And nobody told you why.

This is the book every parent needs before the conversation at the edge of the birthday party turns, for the fourth time this year, to how nobody can afford anything anymore. It traces the story of money from Yap Island limestone to the Federal Reserve, from Rome's debased coins to the $39 trillion national debt, and explains what Bitcoin actually is in language that does not require a computer science degree.

This is not a political book. It is a book about physics: the physics of trust, the mechanics of how value gets created and destroyed, and what you can do about it before your children inherit the bill.

About the author

Brian Connelly writes about money, technology, and the things that make both of them honest. After thirty years as a Fortune 500 technology consultant and a parallel career in clinical social work, he has spent the last several years helping ordinary people understand why sound money matters and how to use it safely.

He is also the author of How to Keep Your Bitcoin Alive and Well, Alice in Bitcoin Land, and Mara and the Stones of Stonewater.