Layered Money

Layered Money offers one elegant idea and uses it to explain everything: money has always existed in layers, from gold (final settlement) through bills and bank deposits to today’s central-bank pyramid — and each layer trades trust for convenience. Bhatia, a former treasuries trader, maps the modern dollar system onto this model, then places Bitcoin as a new neutral bottom layer and Lightning as the fast layer above it.

The book is short and disciplined: monetary history in the first half, the dollar plumbing and its 2019–2020 stress in the middle, and a measured sketch of a future multi-layer system (including CBDCs) at the end. No polemics, no lifestyle chapters — just the model, applied.

It suits readers who want a finance-literate framework rather than advocacy, and it pairs unusually well with Broken Money (which fills in the depth) and with our /fees and /supply pages (which show the layers live). Its brevity means some claims get asserted per the model rather than argued — that is the price of its clarity.