Fiat Capitalism

Everyone can feel it.

Left, right, center… it doesn’t matter. Something is fundamentally, structurally wrong with the way the world works. Crushing inequality. Corporate greed on a scale that defies comprehension. A political system so captured by money that voting feels like choosing which hand slaps you. Workers more productive than ever, yet somehow deeper in debt than their parents, their grandparents, or anyone in the history of the species.

Everyone agrees the system is broken. And almost everyone blames capitalism.

Here’s the thing… they’re half right. What they’re describing IS broken. But what they’re describing isn’t capitalism. Not even close.

If your country has a central bank controlling the price of money, the single most important commodity in the entire economy, you’re already halfway to socialism. That might sting whether you lean left or right, and that’s exactly the point. What we’re living under isn’t a free market. It’s a market with a price-fixer at the center. A regulatory body with supernatural abilities to distort everything it touches, backed by unlimited funding, answerable to no one, and operating with the kind of unchecked power that would make a Bond villain blush.

“Fiat” comes from the Latin for “let there be.” As in, let there be light. As in, creation by decree.[1] So fiat money is money by decree. Fiat capitalism is capitalism by decree. Not capitalism by merit, not capitalism by competition, not capitalism by the natural signals of supply and demand. Capitalism because a small group of people said so.

And the deviousness of it, as Jimmy Song put it, is that “fiat money makes government violence look like a market process.”[2]

This distinction matters. Because if you don’t have the right diagnosis, you’ll never find the right cure. You’ll keep reaching for more regulation, more government intervention, more of the exact medicine that’s making you sick. Everyone shits on capitalism when really what they mean is fiat capitalism. They blame the free market for outcomes that were engineered by its absence.

Bitcoin exposes this distinction. Not by arguing about it… but by existing as the alternative. The exit from fiat capitalism back to something that actually resembles what capitalism was supposed to be. A system where prices are real, savings are rewarded, and nobody gets to print their way to power.

But before we get to the exit, we need to understand the building we’re trapped in.

The 50-Year Experiment

Here’s something most people never think about. For thousands of years, money was tied to something real. Gold. Silver. Physical things with actual scarcity, things you couldn’t just conjure into existence because you needed to fund a war or win an election.

Then, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon walked in front of a camera and severed the last link between money and reality.

That was it. One speech. One decision by one man. And the entire world shifted from money backed by something to money backed by… nothing. By decree. By fiat.

Never before, in thousands of years of human history, has the entire world been using a money that has no resource cost or constraint. It's an experiment, and we're five decades into it.

— Lyn Alden

Five decades. That’s it. The fiat standard is only four times older than Bitcoin and twice as old as the first web browser. In the grand sweep of monetary history, this experiment just started… and the results are already catastrophic.

Look at the dollar. From 1792 to 1913, before the Federal Reserve existed, its purchasing power was remarkably stable. You could hold dollars for a century and they’d buy roughly the same stuff. Then the Fed came along, and the dollar has done nothing but bleed value ever since. What cost $100 in 1792 now requires over $3,000.[4]

That’s not a currency. That’s a melting ice cube.

And the dollar is the BEST fiat currency. It’s the world’s reserve currency, the so-called safe haven. If this is the best-case scenario, imagine the rest.

Billions of people alive today have experienced hyperinflation within the past generation.[5] Not in some distant historical footnote. Within their lifetimes. Argentina, Venezuela, Lebanon, Turkey, Zimbabwe… the graveyard of fiat currencies grows longer every decade. The average fiat currency lasts about 0 years before it collapses.[6]

We’re 50 years into an experiment with a 27-year average lifespan.

Even the establishment knows. Ray Dalio, the world’s largest hedge fund manager, a man who has made billions navigating this system, came out and said it plainly: “The world has gone mad and the system is broken.”[7]

The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.

— Satoshi Nakamoto [8]

Full of breaches. Not occasional lapses. Full. Every time. Without exception.

Your Savings Are Being Destroyed

There’s a simple test for whether your money is working. Put a dollar in a drawer. Come back in ten years. If it buys more stuff, you have sound money. If it buys less… you’ve been robbed.

Under the fiat system, you’ve been robbed. Every single year. Without exception.

The dollar has lost over 0% of its purchasing power since 1971.[9] That’s not a feature of any particular administration or policy failure. That’s the system working exactly as designed. Inflation isn’t a bug. It’s the engine.

And it has destroyed the capacity of ordinary people to save.

The personal savings rate in America tells a story that should make you sick. In the 1960s and 70s, it averaged 11.7%. It peaked at 17.3% in 1975.[10] People saved. They could afford to. A dollar held its value well enough that putting it aside for tomorrow actually made sense.

Then fiat went to work. By 2005, the savings rate hit an all-time low of 1.4%.[11] One point four percent. In the richest country in human history, people were saving essentially nothing. And the COVID spike to 33% in 2020? That wasn’t a cultural awakening. That was forced non-spending because the world shut down. The moment lockdowns ended, people went right back to spending, because the system demands it.[12]

Here’s the mechanism. When interest rates are held below the rate of inflation, which they have been for most of the last two decades, holding cash is a guaranteed loss. Your savings aren’t just sitting there doing nothing. They’re actively shrinking. Every day. Like ice on a hot sidewalk.

The European Central Bank actually studied this. Their own research found that at very low and negative interest rates, the savings response may “reverse sign,” meaning people save even less because the returns are so pathetic it’s not worth the effort.[13] The central bank literally studied why its own policies destroy savings behavior. And then continued the policies.

So what do people do? They speculate. They throw money into stocks, real estate, crypto, anything that might outrun the inflation treadmill. Not because they’re greedy. Because the system gives them no other option. As Jeff Booth put it, the fiat system encourages “short-sighted consumption over saving.”[14]

We monetize everything for lack of good money. Art. Home equity. Stock portfolios. Vintage cars. Pokemon cards. None of these things should need to function as savings vehicles. But when money itself can’t hold value, everything else gets drafted into service.

And the damage runs even deeper. US saving and investment has fallen from over 10% of GDP in the 1980s to less than 4% today.[15] Net domestic savings barely covers government deficits. The financial sector’s share of GDP has risen while the productive sector shrank, capital flowing to paper instead of factories.[16]

Allen Farrington called this the “capital strip mine.” Sound money, he argued, is like a farmer, someone who sees the land as future production, a living system to be nurtured across generations. Fiat money is the strip miner, someone who sees the same land as a resource to be plundered for immediate gain.[17]

“In our ignorance, impatience, and arrogance,” Farrington wrote, “step by step we are turning the farm into a strip mine.”[18]

An Iowa banker in the 1920s, watching the early effects of easy credit, said it simply: “$5,000 was a big loan… now a $40,000 loan is commonplace, and having mortgage after mortgage is an accepted thing.”[19] That was a hundred years ago. The pattern was already visible.

Saifedean Ammous put it starkly: “Hard money encourages saving and long-term thinking; easy money engenders a ‘YOLO’ culture.”[20]

A capitalist society needs a base layer of savings. Not to be built on a house of cards.

The Wealth Gap Is a Feature, Not a Bug

If you’ve ever wondered why the economy keeps growing but your life doesn’t feel any richer, here’s the answer in one statistic: since 1979, American worker productivity has risen 80.9%. Compensation has risen 29.4%.[21]

Read that again. Workers became nearly three times more productive. They were paid for barely a third of the improvement. The rest went… somewhere else.

It went up.

The top 0.1% of American households gained $39.5 million each between 1989 and 2022. The bottom 20%? Less than $8,500. Not per year. Total. Over 33 years.[22]

The top 1% now holds a record $0 trillion in wealth, roughly 30-31% of all household net worth in the country.[23] Bottom 90% wages grew 36% over four decades. Top 1% wages grew 162%. Top 0.1%? A staggering 301%.[24]

This isn’t an accident. This isn’t a policy failure someone forgot to fix. This is the monetary system doing exactly what it was built to do.

The mechanism is simple. Central banks inflate asset prices. That’s the explicit, stated goal of monetary policy, they call it the “wealth effect.” Push asset prices up, people feel richer, they spend more. But here’s who actually benefits: the people who own the assets.

The bottom half of Americans own real estate and essentially no stocks. The top 10% own roughly 85% of all stocks.[25] So when the Federal Reserve pumps trillions into the financial system and asset prices soar, it’s not a rising tide lifting all boats. It’s a rising tide lifting yachts while the rowboats take on water.

Home price-to-income ratios tell the story in numbers that hit home. In the 1960s, the median home cost about 2 times the median income. By 2022, that ratio had ballooned to 5.6×.[26] In San Jose it’s 12×. In LA it’s 10.8×. Median home prices rose 48% between 2019 and 2024 while income rose only 22%.[27] The gap isn’t closing. It’s accelerating.

Thomas Piketty proved it mathematically with his famous inequality r > g: when the return on capital (4-5% historically) exceeds the rate of economic growth (1-2%), wealth concentration is not just likely but mathematically inevitable.[28] It’s not a market failure. It’s arithmetic.

And stock buybacks complete the picture. Before 1982, buybacks were treated as market manipulation, because they are. Now they exceed $5 trillion per decade.[29] S&P 500 companies spent nearly their entire profits on buybacks, transferring every dollar directly to shareholders, overwhelmingly the already wealthy.[30]

Nat Brunell summed it up with a metaphor that stings: “The government cripples you and hands you a crutch and says, ‘aren’t you happy I was here to hand you this crutch?’”[31]

The wealth gap isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the feature. Inflating asset prices IS the monetary policy. And the people at the bottom keep voting for politicians who promise to fix inequality by spending more printed money, which inflates asset prices further, which makes inequality worse.

The loop is the point.

The Cost of Capital Is Broken

If capitalism were a machine, the interest rate would be its operating system. Every investment, every business plan, every loan, every stock valuation, every mortgage… all of them derive from one foundational input: the cost of capital.

Cost of capital is a company’s calculation of the minimum return needed to justify a project.[32] If a factory costs $100 million to build, and the cost of capital is 8%, that factory needs to generate at least $8 million a year or it’s not worth building. Simple. Elegant. The entire market economy runs on this number.

And central banks have broken it.

When the Federal Reserve artificially suppresses interest rates, it doesn’t just make borrowing cheaper. It corrupts the base variable that prices everything else in the economy. Stock valuations? Derived from future earnings discounted by the interest rate… lower the rate, synthetically inflate the stock price.[33] Real estate? Same math. Bonds? Same math. Every asset, every project, every financial decision in the entire economy is running on a rigged input.

Nat Brunell described it perfectly: “Our economy is like an airplane flying without an altimeter, because we have no price signals based on real interest rates.”[34]

No altimeter. Think about that. You’re flying blind, with every instrument in the cockpit lying to you, and the pilot keeps telling passengers everything is fine because the plane hasn’t crashed yet.

Ludwig von Mises saw this coming over a century ago. In 1912, he laid out what became the Austrian Business Cycle Theory: artificially low interest rates create a borrowing boom. Capital floods into projects that only work under cheap credit. These projects look profitable on paper, but they’re an illusion, only viable because the cost of capital has been rigged below its natural rate.[35] Mises called it malinvestment. Not overinvestment. Malinvestment. The wrong things being built in the wrong places for the wrong reasons.

And here’s where it gets brutal.

When reality finally catches up, when rates rise or the credit dries up, those fake projects collapse. Resources that were locked up in doomed ventures need to be liquidated and reallocated to where they actually belong. That process of liquidation is what we call a recession.[36]

The recession is not the disease. The recession IS the cure.

Murray Rothbard put it as plainly as anyone ever has: “The depression is the ‘recovery’ process, and the end of the depression heralds the return to normal, and to optimum efficiency.”[37] The boom was when the damage was done. The bust is when the economy tries to repair itself.

But here’s what governments do every single time. They panic. They stimulate. They print more money, drop rates further, bail out the very projects that should have been liquidated. And in doing so, they don’t prevent the recession… they postpone it. And compound it. Each cycle worse than the last. Each intervention creating a new layer of malinvestment on top of the old one.

“The greater the credit expansion and the longer it lasts,” Rothbard warned, “the longer and more severe will be the necessary depression readjustment.”[38]

Thomas Woods laid it out: the boom is when the damage is done, the bust is when the economy repairs, and bailouts freeze resources in unproductive lines of production.[39] You cannot cure a hangover with more alcohol. But that’s exactly what stimulus is… another round of drinks to delay the inevitable headache.

You can see the evidence piling up. Zombie firms, companies that can’t even cover their interest payments, kept alive only by cheap credit, rose from about 4% of listed firms in the mid-1980s to over 7.5% today.[40] And they don’t just sit there harmlessly. For every one-percentage-point rise in the zombie share, healthy firms cut their capital expenditure by a full percentage point.[41] The undead are crowding out the living.

Roger Garrison drove the final nail into the Keynesian coffin when he corrected Paul Krugman’s mischaracterization of Austrian theory. Krugman claimed it was an “overinvestment” theory, too much investment causing the bust. Garrison showed it’s a malinvestment theory… not too much investment, but investment in the wrong things, directed by false price signals.[42] The problem isn’t the quantity of money. It’s the structure of production it creates.

Friedrich Hayek used exactly this framework to predict the crash of 1929, one of the only economists who saw the Great Depression coming, months before it happened.[43] The Austrians have been right about every major crisis. And ignored every time.

Recessions are not failures of capitalism. They are the market’s audit process. The pain is the revelation of prior distortion. And stimulus is nothing more than an attempt to falsify the audit.

“If we can fix the money,” Brunell said, “we can actually create a free and open market, and a free and open cost of capital, and we can actually get efficient productivity happening in the world, where we get real prices and not manipulated prices.”[44]

Money Is Debt

Here’s a fact that, once you understand it, changes everything about how you see the economy.

Every dollar in existence is someone’s debt.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s how the system actually works. When a bank makes a loan, it doesn’t lend out somebody else’s savings. It creates new money out of nothing, typing numbers into a screen, willing a deposit into existence that is simultaneously the borrower’s asset and the bank’s liability. The Bank of England confirmed this: it is more accurate to say that loans create deposits than deposits create loans.[45]

Marriner Eccles, the chairman of the Federal Reserve itself, said it plainly: “If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.”[46]

Let that sink in. The chairman of the Fed told you that money IS debt. That if every debt were paid off, every dollar would vanish. That the entire monetary system is built on an obligation that can never be fully discharged, because discharging it would destroy the money supply.

This is the difference between money and currency. Currency is a liability of an institution, a promise, an IOU. Money is an asset that is NOT someone else’s liability.[47] Gold is money. Bitcoin is money. The dollar is a promissory note issued by an institution that has never been fully audited and has broken its promises repeatedly for over a century.

And the system requires perpetual growth just to service the existing debt. Because the debt carries interest. And the money to pay that interest… was never created. It has to come from somewhere. Which means more lending. More debt. More money created to service the money that was created to service the money before it.

Jeff Booth quantified the absurdity: “$185 trillion of debt to produce $46 trillion of GDP growth.”[48] Four dollars of debt for every one dollar of growth. And the ratio keeps getting worse.

Gigi captured it with characteristic clarity: “The lingo is fancy, the repercussions are simple: an essential tool of our civilization is bent and distorted.”[49] Quantitative easing. Reverse repurchase agreements. Bailing out too-big-to-fail. “Doing everything to prolong the inevitable collapse, to kick the proverbial can even further down the road.”[50]

COVID pulled the curtain back for anyone paying attention. In a matter of days, we went from printing billions to printing trillions, to proposals for minting trillion-dollar platinum coins, to unlimited QE and “infinite cash.”[51] The escalation revealed the absurdity. Billions were already insane. Trillions were a confession. Unlimited was a surrender.

Allen Farrington went even deeper: “It is not possible to save outside of financialization. The only way to save is to accumulate the residual of credit that has already been issued completely outside your consent.”[52] Your savings aren’t really savings. They’re the leftover echoes of loans somebody else took out. “Your credit might exist because the bank made a loan, but it is not in that loan; it is in the never-ending recycling of one loan into another into another.”[53]

And the backing? What stands behind this whole shimmering edifice? Farrington again: “The dollar is backed by self-referentially mispriced toxic loans and stabilized by a military and commodity cartelization pact with Saudi Arabia.”[54]

That’s the foundation. Toxic loans and a military alliance.

Bitcoin is not based on debt. It’s equity. Created debt-free. No yield owed to bankers. No interest that requires perpetual expansion to service. No system that collapses when the growth stops.[55]

“Our debt-based system of money is inherently broken,” Gigi wrote. “Bitcoin fixes this.”[56]

The Federal Reserve

November 1910. A group of the most powerful bankers in the United States boarded a private train car at a New Jersey rail station, traveling under assumed names to a private island off the coast of Georgia. The cover story? A duck hunting trip.[57]

What they were actually doing was designing the Federal Reserve System. In secret. On Jekyll Island. Six men, representing an estimated one-quarter of the world’s wealth at the time, drafting the architecture for a central bank that would control the money supply of the most powerful nation on earth.

The meeting was hidden from the public for over twenty years.

And the institution they created? It is not a government agency. The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks are owned by their member commercial banks. The banks that the Fed is supposed to regulate literally own the regulator. Member banks receive a 6% annual dividend on their stock, guaranteed returns, funded by the money-printing authority they granted to themselves.[58]

Alan Greenspan, the Fed’s own chairman, said it out loud: “The Federal Reserve is an independent agency… there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take.”[59]

No oversight. No accountability. No democratic control. FOMC meeting transcripts are released on a five-year lag… you find out what they decided half a decade after the consequences have already hit your wallet.[60]

And when the 2008 crisis hit? A GAO audit revealed that the Federal Reserve provided $0 trillion in secret emergency loans.[61] Sixteen trillion dollars. Handed out to banks and financial institutions around the world in loans that nobody knew about, nobody voted on, and nobody was allowed to see until Congress forced a partial audit.

Money printing is a form of theft. If you or I created fiat currency from thin air, we’d go to prison. When bankers do it, they get bonuses. They print enough money to buy, own, and operate the politicians… both parties, both sides, every election cycle.

Central banking is an organized crime syndicate. A cartel.

And Bitcoin? No banker can print any amount of Bitcoin from thin air. No one can inflate the supply. No one can bail out their friends with money that doesn’t exist. The ledger is audited every ten minutes by nodes across the globe, which is infinitely more accountability than the Federal Reserve has ever submitted to.[62]

“Bitcoin says, ‘Fuck you’ to the banking criminals and their creepy, fraudulent system of theft.”

The Intellectual Cover

Every con needs an intellectual framework. Something that makes the scam sound reasonable, inevitable, even virtuous. For the fiat system, that framework is Keynesian economics.

John Maynard Keynes gave governments exactly what they wanted to hear: spending is good, saving is dangerous, and the economy needs constant expert management by wise technocrats with access to the money printer. His “paradox of thrift” argued that if everyone saves, the economy shrinks, therefore individual saving is collectively harmful.[63] Friedrich Hayek rebutted this in 1929, pointing out that savings fund capital formation and productivity gains, that saving IS investing because someone else borrows and deploys that capital.[64]

Hayek lost the political argument. Because Keynes told politicians they could spend without limits, and Hayek told them they couldn’t. Guess who got invited back.

Milton Friedman once said “We are all Keynesians now,” but Time magazine truncated his qualifier.[65] What he actually said was that the statement was true only in one narrow technical sense, not as an endorsement. Didn’t matter. The quote took on a life of its own. And when Richard Nixon declared “I am now a Keynesian in economics” in 1971… the same year he closed the gold window… the coincidence was too perfect to be accidental.[66]

The intellectual cover evolved. Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, pushed the envelope even further. Stephanie Kelton’s formulation: “Budget deficits are not evidence of overspending; inflation is evidence of overspending.”[67] Translation: we can print as much as we want until prices visibly rise. And when prices do rise? We’ll blame something else.

Warren Mosler, one of MMT’s architects, explained the underlying coercion with an analogy that should make your blood run cold. Imagine you’re at a conference. Someone stands up and says, “Does anybody want to buy one of these business cards for $100?” Nobody moves. “Will anyone stay after hours and clean the room?” Silence. “Oh, by the way… my guy is out there with a 9mm, and you can’t get out of the room without one of these cards.”[68]

Can you feel the pressure now? You’re now unemployed. In terms of his cards.

That’s what fiat money is. That’s how your currency gets its value… not from utility, not from scarcity, not from anything you’d voluntarily agree to. From a tax obligation backed by force. As Mosler himself put it: “The difference between money and litter is whether there’s a tax man.”[69]

And here’s the core divide between the two schools that nobody teaches you in school, because the academy has been captured. By 2007, only 5-10% of American economists identified as heterodox.[70] Cambridge University systematically displaced its heterodox faculty.[71] The debate isn’t suppressed because one side won on the evidence. It’s suppressed because one side has the funding.

The Keynesian story says: demand falls, which causes layoffs, which causes less demand, which spirals into depression. The solution? Government spends to replace the missing demand. Stimulus. Bailouts. Print and inject.

The Austrian story says something very different. Demand falls because capital was misallocated during the boom. Resources need to shift. The temporary contraction IS the realignment.[72] The deflation loop isn’t spontaneous… it’s the market recognizing errors. And stimulus doesn’t cure it. It re-inflates the distortion.[73]

Roger Garrison put the distinction precisely: the problem is WHERE capital flows, not merely HOW MUCH money exists.[74] You can flood the system with liquidity, but if the structure of production is broken, more water doesn’t fix the plumbing. It just makes a bigger flood.

Keynes called gold a “barbarous relic” because gold constrained government spending, and the entire Keynesian project depends on removing that constraint.[75]

Bitcoin is the barbarous relic they can’t confiscate.

Unsound Money Destroys Democracy

Here’s the most dangerous thing about unsound money, and it has nothing to do with economics. It destroys democracy. Not by suppressing votes or rigging elections… by something far more insidious. It eradicates the very concept of trade-offs from public life.

Saifedean Ammous described it with devastating precision: democracy becomes “a mass delusion of people attempting to override the rules of economics by voting themselves a free lunch.”[76]

When a government can create money out of nothing, it can buy allegiance without presenting the bill. It can fund any program, build any project, fight any war, and the true cost isn’t felt for years… not until inflation erodes purchasing power and somebody else gets blamed. Foreigners. Bankers. Local ethnic minorities. Previous governments.[77] Anyone except the money printer.

In this system, voters are unlikely to favor candidates who are upfront about real costs and real trade-offs. They go with the scoundrels who promise a free lunch and blame the bill on predecessors or nefarious conspiracies.[78]

Democracy becomes a contest of competing fantasies. Who can promise the most while acknowledging the least? Poverty reduction, healthcare, education, infrastructure… “most modern citizens live in a delusional dreamland where none of these have actual costs.”[79] All that’s needed is “political will” and “strong leadership.” As if wanting something hard enough makes it free.

But these things are NOT free. “They all need to be provided by real people, people who need to wake up in the morning and spend days and years toiling and giving you what you want.”[80]

No politician has ever been elected by acknowledging this reality.

“The ballot box cannot overturn the fundamental scarcity of human time.”[81]

That single line might be the most important sentence in this entire chapter. Because it gets to the root of what unsound money actually destroys. Not just purchasing power. Not just savings. The capacity for a society to think clearly about what things cost. The ability to have an honest conversation about priorities. The basic democratic function of citizens choosing how their resources are allocated.

You can’t have real democracy when the money is fake. Because fake money removes the feedback loop. It lets governments promise everything and deliver the bill to the future, to your children and their children, in a currency that won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

The Leviathan

“All of the problems in the country, and in the world, are due to state intervention.”[82]

That might sound extreme. But think about it. The massive bureaucracy. The massive debt. The wars. The unfunded liabilities and ponzi scheme programs. The corporate welfare. The social welfare. The regulatory apparatus that grows every year regardless of who wins the election.[83]

How does the state pay for all of this? It votes itself more money.

Without the money printer, the government would have to directly tax its citizens for every dollar it spends. And direct taxation is politically painful… people notice when their paycheck shrinks. They ask questions. They demand accountability. They vote differently.

But inflation? Inflation is invisible theft. It taxes your purchasing power without ever appearing on a line item. You never see the deduction. You just notice, slowly, that everything costs more, that life feels harder, that the math doesn’t add up anymore. And by the time you figure out who’s responsible, the next election cycle has already started.

“The only way for a democratic government to become powerful is through the power of debt.”[84] Without the ability to borrow against the future, without the ability to create money to service that borrowing, governments would be limited to what they could persuade citizens to voluntarily fund through taxation.

And that’s a much smaller government.

The control doesn’t stop at fiscal policy. Spending and demand-driven socioeconomic policies keep people from saving their money, encourage them to take on loads of debt, force them to be spinning endlessly on the hamster wheel, subservient to the state.[85] Employment, education, housing, personal freedom… the tendrils reach into everything.

Under Bitcoin? “Without the ability to create money out of thin air, governments will instead have to tax its citizens directly.”[86] And when you have to tax directly, when you have to look your citizens in the eye and tell them how much you’re taking and what it’s for, the state shrinks to match the pain threshold of direct taxation.

Creating money out of thin air is not a workable business model. Not for individuals. Not for businesses. And not for governments. No matter how many economists tell you otherwise.

Fiat Ruins Everything

Jimmy Song put it with heartbreaking simplicity: “All these things and more get ruined by fiat money. We want nice things, but we can’t have them.”[87]

Start with the most basic corruption. Fiat money creates a buyer with unlimited purchasing power, the government and its connected institutions. When there’s a buyer who can never run out of money, every market gets distorted. Merit gets replaced by politics. The best stuff doesn’t necessarily win. The most connected stuff wins.[88]

Rent seekers multiply like bacteria in a petri dish. People and institutions that “don’t add any benefit but still get paid,” and most modern jobs have some element of rent-seeking built in.[89] Not because people are lazy or corrupt. Because the incentive structure rewards capturing money flows instead of creating value.

Look at what happened to finance. In the 1980s, the financial sector captured about 10% of all corporate profits. By the 2000s, it was 40%.[90] Forty percent of all corporate profits going to an industry that represents about 5% of total employment.[91] Finance went, as Rana Foroohar described it, “from servant to master.”[92]

And the brain drain that follows is devastating. Between 30 and 50 percent of graduates from elite universities now flock to finance instead of engineering, research, medicine, or anything that actually builds things.[93] Jimmy Song captured it with a line that should make you want to throw something: “The nuclear engineers of yesteryear are working on React.js apps and scammy Web3 products.”[94]

The smartest people in the country aren’t curing cancer. They’re building trading algorithms. Not because they don’t want to cure cancer. Because the incentive structure of fiat capitalism pays them ten times more to shuffle paper.

Global derivatives now exceed one quadrillion dollars, more than ten times the entire world’s GDP.[95] That’s not an economy. That’s a paper casino.

Stock buybacks complete the picture. Before 1982, buybacks were treated as market manipulation. Then the SEC quietly changed the rules, and corporations discovered they could boost their own stock price by buying their own shares instead of investing in their business.[96] Buybacks now exceed $5 trillion per decade. William Lazonick showed that S&P 500 companies were spending approximately their entire profits on buybacks, every dollar going to shareholders, almost nothing going to workers, R&D, or capital investment.[97]

The airlines are the perfect case study. They spent billions on buybacks during the good years, enriching shareholders and executives. When COVID hit and revenue disappeared? They needed taxpayer bailouts to survive.[98] Privatized gains. Socialized losses. Every time.

Farrington’s strip mine metaphor cuts deepest here. Fiat money doesn’t just redirect incentives… it transforms the entire economy from a farm into a mine. From nurturing long-term productive capacity to extracting short-term financial returns.[99] The money supply is literally defined as a type of capital. Failing to distinguish money creation from capital creation is the central error of fiat economics.[100]

Fiat devaluation creates demand for alternative stores of value, which creates demand for synthetic yield instruments, which creates rehypothecation, which creates a self-reinforcing financialization loop that feeds on itself until there’s nothing underneath but paper.[101]

“The killer app for Bitcoin,” Farrington wrote, is “pricing capital.”[102]

Song took the long view: “We peaked as a civilization in 1969 when we landed a man on the moon. Everything since then hasn’t pushed humanity forward.”[103] Dishwashers take three times longer than they did fifty years ago. Flying from New York to London is slower than it was a half-century back. The technology exists to do better. The incentive to deploy it doesn’t.[104]

“The zombies soon start outnumbering the normal people,” Song warned, “and everything goes downhill.”[105]

Regulatory Capture

Here’s a game. Name the Treasury Secretary or Fed Chair who didn’t come from Goldman Sachs. It’s harder than you think.

Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO, was Treasury Secretary during the 2008 bailout. Mario Draghi, Goldman Sachs International, ran the European Central Bank. Over four dozen former Goldman employees have held top government positions across multiple administrations.[106]

This isn’t a revolving door. It’s a pipeline. The industry that the government is supposed to regulate has colonized the regulators. And they’ve paid handsomely for the privilege… financial, insurance, and real estate lobbying hit $3.7 billion in 2024 alone.[107]

Song captured the result: “Fiat money is more like organized crime, which makes everything seem voluntary.”[108] You think you’re participating in a market. But the rules were written by the people who profit from them.

The consolidation is staggering. Community banks, the backbone of local lending for a century, have been decimated. In 1984, there were about 14,500 community banks in America. By 2021, fewer than 4,100.[109] The top five US banks now control over 50% of all banking assets.[110] Too big to fail became too big to challenge.

And it’s not just banks. Startup formation is now half of what it was in the 1970s.[111] Not because people have fewer ideas. Because the barrier to entry keeps rising. When incumbents can borrow at near-zero rates and challengers can’t, competition dies.

Matt Stoller documented the pattern: Fed policies systematically favor “low-cost capital to dominant players while limiting smaller firms and ordinary people.”[112] Facebook didn’t become a monopoly through a better product. It became a monopoly by buying Instagram and WhatsApp, acquisitions funded by near-zero rate borrowing.[113] That’s not competition. That’s monopoly via cheap credit.

Song again: “Surviving companies in a fiat money economy are very politically savvy. It’s no wonder so many seem to be led by politicians rather than entrepreneurs.”[114]

Even institutions that weathered centuries of upheaval couldn’t survive fiat. Kongō Gumi was the oldest company in the world, run by fifty generations of the same Japanese family, surviving wars, famines, regime changes, and natural disasters for over 1,400 years. In 2006, it was sold to a conglomerate after “succumbing to excess debt.”[115] Leverage killed what fourteen centuries of sound money preserved.

Bitcoin resists this capture. In 2017, during the Blocksize War, the most powerful corporations and mining operations in Bitcoin tried to force a protocol change that would have benefited large players at the expense of ordinary users. They had the money, the hash power, and the institutional backing. They lost. Because Bitcoin’s governance doesn’t respond to lobbying budgets… it responds to code and consensus.[116]

Privatized Gains, Socialized Losses

There’s a term from political economy that describes the modern financial system so perfectly it almost feels like it was invented for it.

Lemon socialism.

The concept is simple: companies keep the profits when things go well. When things go badly, the losses shift to taxpayers.[117] Heads they win. Tails you lose.

The 2008 financial crisis was the masterclass. Central banks provided unprecedented trillions in bailouts… the US government alone purchased $2.5 trillion in government debt and private assets in Q4 of 2008.[118] Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received a bailout exceeding $300 billion, after years of what even their own observers called “privatized profits and socialized risks.”[119]

And no one went to prison.

The moral hazard is baked in. When financial institutions know, or believe, that the government will backstop their losses, they have every incentive to take maximum risk. Why wouldn’t they? The downside has been removed. The implicit guarantee IS the business model.[120]

Airlines spent billions on stock buybacks during the boom years, enriching shareholders and executives. When COVID hit and revenue evaporated, they lined up for taxpayer bailouts.[121] Banks, automakers, airlines… the same pattern repeats across every sector. Billions in profits during the good times. Taxpayer rescue when the bets go sideways. Golden parachutes for the people who crashed the system.

And this isn’t a libertarian fringe critique. The United Nations Chronicle published a piece titled “Flaws in the Financial System: Socializing Risk, Privatizing Profit.”[122] The UN. Not the Mises Institute. The United Nations looked at this system and said: this is structurally broken.

Market discipline requires that failure costs something. That’s the entire point. If bad bets have no consequences, you get more bad bets. The money printer IS the backstop… without infinite QE, bailouts are impossible and risk-takers face consequences.

Under Bitcoin, there is no lender of last resort. No bailout mechanism. No printing press to socialize losses. If you make a bad bet, you lose. Market discipline enforced by protocol, not by the discretion of a regulator who used to work at the same bank.

The Death of Cathedral Thinking

In the Middle Ages, communities began building cathedrals that would take generations to complete. The craftsmen who laid the foundation stones knew they would never see the finished spires. They built anyway. Because they believed in something that extended beyond their own lifetimes.[123]

Under hard money, money that held its value across decades and centuries, this kind of thinking was natural. The gold standard era produced massive infrastructure, great universities, enduring philanthropy, institutions that still stand today.[124] When your savings hold their value, you build for the future. When your savings melt away, you build for next quarter.

78% of CFOs in a survey said they would sacrifice long-term value to meet quarterly earnings targets.[125]

Seventy-eight percent. Not a few rogue executives gaming the system. The vast majority. Voluntarily admitting that they would undermine their company’s future to hit a short-term number. And not because they’re stupid or shortsighted. Because the incentive structure of fiat capitalism punishes patience and rewards extraction.

Ammous named it precisely: “Hard money encourages saving and long-term thinking; easy money engenders a ‘YOLO’ culture.”[126]

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer-poet, drew the distinction between two kinds of minds. “The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care.”[127] That IS the cathedral-thinking versus quarterly-earnings distinction. The nurturer builds something that will outlast them. The exploiter strips it for parts.

And the consequences go beyond economics into something existential.

73% of the global population now lives in countries below replacement fertility, the 2.1 births per woman needed to sustain a population.[128] Civilizations are shrinking. And while the causes are complex, the data draws a direct line to asset inflation. A 10% increase in house prices leads to measurably fewer births… the effect on fertility is comparable to the effect of additional education.[129]

Children have become luxury goods. When housing is unaffordable, when the cost of raising a family has been inflated beyond reach, when dual-income is no longer a choice but a requirement just to keep up with the mortgage, family formation gets delayed. And delayed. And eventually abandoned.[130]

The causal chain is devastating: monetary debasement… asset inflation… unaffordable housing… delayed family formation… demographic decline… civilizational fragility.[131]

Farrington showed how the doom loop closes. Spiraling inequality, driven by asset inflation, generates anti-capitalist sentiment. That sentiment demands compensatory money printing, more stimulus, more programs, more “help.” The money printing further degrades the capital stock. The degraded capital stock produces more inequality. And the cycle repeats, tightening with each turn.[132]

“If you break money, you break capital,” Farrington wrote. “And if you break capital, you break money.”[133]

And at the zero lower bound, when interest rates hit zero or go negative, it gets even worse. Farrington: “You can spend it on an investment project that loses money, and still make money yourself… Imposing negative interest rates is strip-mining the capital stock. It is eating the seeds rather than planting them.”[134]

Song cut through the abstraction: “We should have nuclear powered everything right now, but that technology is completely stifled by regulation”… regulation funded by fiat.[135]

The death of cathedral thinking isn’t a moral failing. It’s the rational response to a system that punishes patience. Under fiat, the farmers are gone. There are only strip miners left.

The Debt Spiral

In 1980, the United States federal debt was $908 billion. Today it’s over $0 trillion.[136] That’s a 37× increase. Not a 37% increase. Thirty-seven times.

Debt-to-GDP has gone from roughly 30% to approximately 120%, with projections pushing past 200% within decades.[137]

And here’s the number that should terrify you: interest payments on the federal debt in fiscal year 2023 hit approximately $0 billion.[138] That’s more than the entire defense budget. More than Medicare. Nearly a trillion dollars a year just servicing the debt… not paying it down, not reducing it, just keeping current on the interest.

America used to be the world’s biggest creditor nation. We made stuff. Now we’re the world’s biggest debtor nation. We hardly make anything except debt.[139]

Jeff Booth put the math in terms nobody can ignore: “$185 trillion of debt to produce $46 trillion of GDP growth.”[140] Four dollars of debt for every one dollar of growth. And the ratio is getting worse every year, because new debt generates diminishing returns while the interest compounds.

Japan provides the preview of where this ends. Japanese government debt exceeds 260% of GDP. The Bank of Japan is buying the majority of new government bond issuances… the government essentially funding itself by printing money to buy its own debt.[141] If that sounds like a perpetual motion machine, that’s because it is. And perpetual motion machines don’t exist.

Ludwig von Mises, writing nearly a century ago, described exactly this trajectory: “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”[142]

Sooner, as a manageable recession. Or later, as a total catastrophe.

We’ve been choosing later for fifty years.

The Pension Time Bomb

The fiat system’s most devastating lie may be the one told to retirees.

US public pension plans report unfunded liabilities of $1.48 trillion.[143] That’s the official number. The one they put in the actuarial reports. Stanford’s SIEPR and the Equable Institute, using more realistic return assumptions, put the real number at $5.1 trillion.[144]

The gap between those two numbers, $3.6 trillion, is the size of the lie.

How do you get a $3.6 trillion gap? By assuming 7-8% annual returns every year when bond yields sit at 2.5-3.6%.[145] Those assumed returns are mathematically impossible without taking on massive risk. And that’s exactly what pension funds have been doing, forced out of the safe assets they were designed to hold and into private equity, hedge funds, and alternative investments that carry exactly the kind of risk that retirement money should never touch.[146]

Conservative institutions designed to protect retirees are speculating. Not because pension managers are reckless, but because monetary repression has made safe returns disappear. When the government pushes interest rates below inflation for decades, every institution that depends on fixed-income returns is forced to gamble or die.

Forty percent of pension underfunding comes from overly optimistic return assumptions.[147] Plans have assumed average returns of 8.02% (2001) gradually falling to 6.87% (2024). Actual 24-year average? 6.62%.[148] They consistently miss, year after year, and paper over the gap with rosy projections.

A stress test found that another economic downturn could raise unfunded liabilities to $2.74 trillion by 2026… and that’s still using the conservative official methodology.[149]

The bottom line is simple and ugly. Future taxpayers are implicitly liable for promises that can’t be met. Intergenerational theft, papered over by actuarial fiction.[150] Your parents were promised a retirement. The money to fund it doesn’t exist. And someone, probably you, is going to be presented with the bill.

Under a Bitcoin standard? Real returns on savings. No need to chase speculative risk. Pension math that actually works, because the money holds its value instead of melting.

Growth at All Costs

Here’s something Robert Kennedy said in 1968, three months before he was killed:

“[GDP] measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”[151]

He was right. GDP counts napalm and nuclear warheads. It counts hospital bills, prison construction, and cleanup costs from oil spills. A car crash INCREASES GDP… the tow truck, the ambulance, the ER visit, the body shop, the rental car, the insurance paperwork. Every dollar of destruction becomes a dollar of “growth.”[152]

And the fiat system demands this growth. Not because growth is inherently good, but because a debt-based monetary system requires perpetual expansion to service the interest. Jason Hickel, writing from the degrowth perspective, identified the mechanism precisely: “positive interest on credit creation necessarily leads to more economic growth.”[153] The system isn’t pursuing growth because it’s healthy. It’s pursuing growth because it dies without it.

Farrington reframed the entire measurement fallacy: “The most egregious falsehood regarding economic health… is that we ought to measure it by the magnitude of goods and services consumed.”[154] Measuring an economy by consumption is “like measuring the health of a tree by its size. Small trees can be vibrant and large trees can be dead.”[155]

“The wealth of the farmer,” Farrington wrote, “is not the magnitude of the harvest, but the capacity of the land to produce harvests indefinitely.”[156]

And here’s where something unexpected happens. The degrowth movement, typically associated with the environmental left, arrives at the same conclusion as Bitcoin advocates. Hickel: “Money’s ‘nature’ itself has to be changed to avoid the growth imperative from destroying ecosystems.”[157] Degrowth says the monetary system must change. Bitcoin changes the monetary system. Strange bedfellows.

Keynes called gold a “barbarous relic” because it constrained government spending, and the entire growth-at-all-costs model depends on removing that constraint.[158] A deflationary money like Bitcoin inverts the logic. Technology creates abundance, prices fall, everyone benefits from productivity gains without needing the economy to “grow” on a debt-fueled treadmill.

“The absolutely only way to sustainably increase the economic output that is available for consumption,” Farrington wrote, “is to grow the capital stock above its natural rate of depreciation.”[159] Not to print more money. Not to stimulate more demand. To actually build and maintain productive capacity.

A Bitcoin economy could enable prosperity without growth. Where technology deflation distributes abundance, where saving is rewarded instead of punished, and where the relentless expansion of debt isn’t necessary to keep the lights on.

The Petrodollar Empire

In 1974, less than three years after Nixon killed the gold standard, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger struck a secret deal with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. The terms: Saudi Arabia would price its oil exclusively in US dollars and invest its surpluses into US Treasury securities. In exchange, the United States would guarantee the Saudi regime’s military security.[160]

This was the petrodollar. And it was the single most important geopolitical arrangement of the second half of the twentieth century.

With oil priced in dollars, every country on earth needed dollars to buy energy. That global demand for dollars replaced the gold backing that Nixon had just removed… oil became the new anchor. And the military became the enforcement mechanism.

The numbers are staggering. The United States has spent approximately $0 trillion securing the petrodollar order.[161] There are 750 to 800 US military bases worldwide, not to protect American soil, but to maintain the financial architecture.[162] Post-9/11 spending has reached $8 trillion in total costs.[163] The Pentagon can’t even account for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets, a partial audit that found more money unaccounted for than most countries’ entire GDP.[164]

In 2022, the United States committed over $100 billion in Ukraine aid without raising a single new tax. Just deficit spending. Print the money. Send the weapons. The public never feels the cost until inflation shows up at the grocery store years later.

This isn’t new. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Britain suspended gold convertibility to fight the Napoleonic Wars. The United States suspended it for the Civil War, and the period of gold resumption afterward, from 1879 to 1914, was the longest stretch of major power peace in modern Western history.[165] America avoided major foreign wars until 1917, when the newly created Federal Reserve finally gave the government the financing tool it needed for overseas conflict.

War and debasement are inseparable.

“Money printing funds wars without citizens feeling it.”[166] Under Bitcoin? Citizens would be unlikely to accept the tax increases necessary to fund non-defensive wars. When you have to pay directly for every missile, every base, every deployment, war becomes very expensive, very visible, and very unpopular.

Giscard d’Estaing, the French finance minister, called America’s dollar hegemony an “exorbitant privilege.”[167] De Gaulle went further, arguing in 1965 that the United States could “be indebted to foreign countries free of charge.”[168] And that was before the petrodollar. Before the military bases. Before the weaponization of SWIFT. Before the trillions in unaccountable spending.

The dollar’s reserve status transforms American inflation into international taxation.[169]

The Eurodollar Trap

Here’s the part most people, including most economists, don’t understand. The dollar isn’t just enforced by the military. It’s enforced by plumbing.

The real global dollar system isn’t run by the Federal Reserve at all. It’s run by private banks through offshore balance sheets, derivatives, and wholesale funding markets that operate beyond the reach of any single regulator.[170] Jeff Snider described it as “a global financing system regulated by no one, influenced by many, and directly or indirectly affecting every asset price globally.”[171]

This is the eurodollar system. And nobody knows how big it is.

The Bank for International Settlements reported $13.2 trillion in dollar credit to non-bank borrowers outside the United States as of Q4 2024.[172] But that’s only what’s visible. Estimates of the full eurodollar system range from tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars. “It is very difficult to estimate the exact size of the Eurodollar market,” the BIS acknowledged… which is a polite way of saying nobody has any idea.[173]

Foreign banks create dollars without Federal Reserve backing. The bounds on credit issuance are, as the Mises Institute documented, “unchecked by law.”[174] Shadow banking, the web of non-bank financial institutions operating outside traditional regulation, exceeds $100 trillion globally, dwarfing the regulated banking system it supposedly supplements.[175]

And sitting at the center of this invisible empire is SWIFT, the messaging system that processes approximately $150 trillion in cross-border payments annually, connecting over 11,000 financial institutions across 200+ countries.[176] The US dollar represents 50.2% of all SWIFT transaction value… even between countries that have nothing to do with America.[177]

Every cross-border transaction in this system is permissioned. SWIFT approval. Correspondent bank approval. Compliance checkpoints. If any node in the chain says no, the payment dies.

And SWIFT disconnection is a financial death sentence. Iran learned this in 2012. Russia learned it in 2022.[178] Cut off from SWIFT, a country is severed from the global economy as surely as if its borders had been sealed.

Nations are trapped. They must price exports in dollars, hold dollar reserves, service dollar-denominated debt, and opting out means losing access to the global trade system.[179] Since 2008, the eurodollar system has been broken, a chronic dollar shortage that the Federal Reserve cannot fix because the real dollar creation was happening offshore, beyond its control.

Correspondent banking is declining, concentrating power in fewer and fewer megabanks, shrinking the number of on-ramps to the global financial system.[180] The trap is tightening.

And Farrington showed where the logic ends. When savers revolt against negative interest rates, as they inevitably must, the fiat system’s response is not to fix the rates. It’s to abolish cash. “This nuisance would be rather solved by simply banning cash,” Farrington wrote.[181] The CBDC push isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s the logical endpoint of fiat money. If your business model requires punishing savers, and savers can escape by holding physical cash, then physical cash has to go.

Bitcoin is permissionless. No SWIFT needed. No correspondent bank approval. No compliance chokepoints. No government can freeze it, block it, or shut it off. The protocol doesn’t ask for permission. And it doesn’t recognize borders.

The Mask Comes Off

On February 26, 2022, the United States and its allies froze Russia’s sovereign foreign exchange reserves. Over $630 billion.[182] A G-20 country, the largest economy ever targeted with this kind of financial weapon, had its savings seized overnight.

The dollar stopped pretending to be neutral.

“If currency reserves aren’t really money,” the Wall Street Journal asked, “the world is in for a shock.”[183]

Alex Gladstein put it more bluntly: “The weaponization of FX reserves and the sinking realization from big powers that they don’t actually control most of their savings will be seen as a turning point in history.”[184]

Global foreign exchange reserves had grown to $14.9 trillion by 2024. But 78% of that was held in foreign fiat currencies, assets that, as the WSJ pointed out, are “someone else’s liability, someone who can just decide they are worth nothing.”[185]

The precedent had been set on a smaller scale with Iran in 2012.[186] Russia was the proof of concept at full scale. And every country in the world was watching.

China holds over a trillion dollars in US Treasury securities. Saudi Arabia, which had been the cornerstone of the petrodollar system for fifty years, entered into a yuan-denominated swap arrangement with China in 2023.[187] BRICS began inviting oil-producing states with an explicit de-dollarization agenda.[188]

Credit Suisse published a note calling it the “end of the current monetary order,” what one analyst termed Bretton Woods III.[189] The moment the West demonstrated it could and would seize sovereign reserves, the entire premise of the dollar-based reserve system collapsed. Not the dollar itself… the trust in the dollar as neutral infrastructure.

Forbes ran an article noting that “events in Turkey, Ukraine, and Canada have highlighted the need for a currency that cannot be manipulated or confiscated.”[190]

And here’s the line that should haunt you: “If they can do this for an entire country, imagine what they can do to an individual.”[191]

Because that’s the escalation. From freezing the reserves of enemy states to freezing the bank accounts of domestic protesters, as Canada demonstrated during the trucker convoy, when banks were ordered to freeze accounts with no court order required. The tools of foreign policy become the tools of domestic control. The line between them was always thinner than we were told.

Gold and bitcoin are the only two assets on the planet that are not someone else’s liability.[192] Everything else, every dollar, every bond, every bank deposit, exists at the pleasure of an institution that can decide, on any given Tuesday, that your money isn’t yours anymore.

The mask didn’t fall off. It was ripped off. And it’s not going back on.

Debt Is a Weapon

“Debt is a weapon, and most people don’t understand.”[193]

That line sounds dramatic until you start tracing the mechanism. Because debt doesn’t just constrain countries and individuals through interest payments. It constrains them through dependency. Through leverage. Through the systematic destruction of alternatives.

Start personal. Student loans in America function as a generational tether. You borrow to get an education, and then you spend the next two decades mining fiat to pay it back.[194] The debt keeps you on the treadmill. It keeps you compliant. It keeps you working jobs you might otherwise leave, in systems you might otherwise question.

Now zoom out. China’s Belt and Road Initiative operates on the same principle at the scale of nations, lend developing countries money for infrastructure they can’t afford, and when they can’t repay, extract concessions.[195] It’s the same control mechanism that the Western financial system has been running on individuals for decades, just applied to sovereign states.

But the Western version is older and more sophisticated.

The IMF and World Bank occupy a unique position in global finance. If they refuse to lend to a country, the rest of the world follows, commercial banks, bilateral lenders, everyone.[196] Total leverage. And the conditions attached to their loans, “structural adjustment,” systematically force borrowing nations to export raw materials rather than develop their own economies, privatize public assets, and open their markets to foreign corporations.[197]

Alex Gladstein documented the “double loan” mechanism: a country borrows from the World Bank, but the money returns to Western companies through tied aid and procurement requirements. The Third World carries the debt. The First World keeps the cash.[198]

“These organizations have impoverished and endangered millions of people,” Gladstein wrote, “enriched dictators and kleptocrats, cast human rights aside… to generate a multi-trillion-dollar flow from poor countries to rich ones.”[199]

The numbers are staggering. Since 1982, the net flow has reversed… poor countries now pay more to rich countries than they receive.[200] For every $1 of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net outflows.[201] Jason Hickel calculated that $0 trillion was drained from the developing world between 1960 and 2017… equivalent to 620 Marshall Plans running in reverse.[202]

External debt for developing nations went from $46 billion in 1970 to $8.7 trillion today. Countries owe 189 times what they owed fifty years ago.[203]

Ammous captured the structural irony: “Rich countries got industrialized before they got fiat; poor countries got fiat before they got industrialized.”[204] The wealthy nations built their foundations on sound money and then imposed unsound money on everyone else. The developing world never got the chance.

And here’s the IMF’s own tell. The International Monetary Fund hoards 2,814 metric tons of gold, one of the largest gold reserves on the planet. Yet it forbids its member nations from using a gold standard.[205] The institution that controls the global lending system holds gold while insisting nobody else should.

Ammous asked the question that cuts through everything: “You, and whose bitcoins?”[206]

Because without a money printer, weaponized lending becomes impossible. You can’t lend money you don’t have. You can’t create debt traps with currency you can’t manufacture. Under Bitcoin, every loan requires actual savings. And the leverage disappears.

Zero Is the Destination

Every fiat currency in history has ended the same way.

Every. Single. One.

The Roman denarius started as pure silver. Over the centuries, emperors diluted it with base metals to fund wars and bread and circuses. By the third century, it was nearly worthless, and the empire that debased it collapsed along with it.[207]

Chinese dynasties invented paper money, and overissued it so many times that the Ming Dynasty abandoned paper entirely and returned to silver.[208]

The French assignats of the 1790s became the first modern hyperinflation. Prices rose 600× by 1795. The currency was backed by confiscated church lands, which didn’t prevent the government from printing far more than the land was worth.[209]

America’s own Continental dollar, the currency that funded the Revolution, was printed into oblivion. $241 million issued, purchasing power plummeted to zero, and the expression “not worth a Continental” entered the language as a synonym for worthless.[210]

Weimar Germany, 1923. The exchange rate went from 4 marks per dollar in 1918 to 4.2 trillion marks per dollar in November 1923… prices doubling every 3.7 days.[211] Workers were paid twice daily so they could run out and buy bread before their wages lost half their value by afternoon.

Zimbabwe, 2008. 89.7 sextillion percent inflation. They printed a 100 trillion dollar note that wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread.[212]

Venezuela, 2018. 130,000% inflation. Bitcoin and US dollars became lifelines for ordinary citizens trying to preserve any purchasing power at all.[213]

Lebanon lost over 98% of its currency’s value. Argentina has gone through five or more currencies in a single lifetime… citizens there have watched their money die, be reborn under a new name, and die again, multiple times.[214]

Even the mighty British pound, once the world’s reserve currency, has lost approximately 99% of its value against gold since Britain abandoned the gold standard.[215] Ninety-nine percent. The currency that once ruled the world is a penny of its former self.

The average fiat currency lasts about 27 years.[216] Some run longer. Some collapse faster. But the destination is always the same.

Lyn Alden: “Billions of people alive today have experienced hyperinflation within the past generation.”[217]

Gigi: “Hyperinflation is what happens when this tool finally breaks under constant pressure.”[218]

And the line that cuts through all the historical detail, attributed to Voltaire:

“Fiat returns to its intrinsic value… zero.”[219]

We’re 50 years into an experiment with a 27-year average lifespan. The terminal symptoms are visible. The question isn’t if. It’s when.

Separation of Money and State

“For the first time in human history, a technology has been created that once and for all divorces money from the state.”[220]

This is not an investment thesis. This is not about price. This is not about getting rich.

This is the separation of money and state. The largest shift in the relationship between citizens and power since the separation of church and state.[221]

Satoshi Nakamoto understood what he, or she, or they, was building. The anonymity wasn’t a bug. It was a feature. No target. No political associations attached to the protocol. No CEO to subpoena. No board to pressure. No face to put on a wanted poster.[222]

And the genesis block, the very first block of Bitcoin, mined on January 3, 2009, embedded a headline from the London Times: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”[223]

That was the message. That was the reason. Bitcoin rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the 2008 global financial catastrophe.[224]

Balaji Srinivasan captured the trajectory perfectly: “For decades, libertarians tried sweet reason. Rothbard, Hayek, Mises. Milton Friedman and Ron Paul. End the Fed, they said. Road to Serfdom, they said. But it all fell on deaf ears. Even as the printer brrred.”[225]

Why couldn’t they succeed? “The practicalities weren’t there. Why would central banks give up their money? Why would giant states give up their power?”[226]

Then came Satoshi. And Bitcoin. Which turned all that theory into practice.

“Now you didn’t have to fight the Fed. You could just opt out. And every money printer minted a Bitcoiner. Thank ye, Bernanke! Quantitative easing eased adoption.”[227]

Don’t blame the lifeboat. Blame the captain. Blame the Fed. Blame the state. And then thank Satoshi.[228]

Because Bitcoin’s rules are enforced by code, not by men. No one can inflate the supply. No one can bail out their friends. No one can print their way to power. The ledger is audited every ten minutes by nodes across the globe, which is infinitely more accountability than the Federal Reserve has ever submitted to.[229]

“Bitcoin literally feasts on corruption and manipulation,” as Preston Pysh put it. “And boy is the plate full.”[230]

Bitcoin is an escape hatch. A parallel economy that anyone can flee to “if they fuck up too much.”[231] Before Bitcoin, no asset on earth could function this way… liquid enough to move instantly, divisible enough to buy coffee, portable across borders, and utterly uncensorable.

But it’s more than an escape hatch. It’s a complete incentive restructuring, a restoration of the capital logic that fiat capitalism has spent five decades destroying.

Fixed supply means time preference falls. When your money gains value over time instead of losing it, you save. When you save, capital accumulates. When capital accumulates, productive investment replaces speculation.[232]

Market interest rates return to reality. Malinvestment gets liquidated, not subsidized. Zombie firms die. Real price signals replace the rigged ones. The market’s audit process runs in real time… bad bets fail, capital reallocates, and the corrections are smaller and more frequent rather than catastrophic and systemic.[233]

The state is forced to tax directly. And direct taxation restores democratic constraint… wars become unfundable, bailouts become impossible, and the leviathan shrinks to match the pain threshold of what citizens will actually pay.[234]

Finance shrinks. The productive sector expands. Brain drain reverses. The nuclear engineers go back to building reactors instead of trading algorithms.[235]

Asset inflation ends. Housing becomes affordable. Family formation becomes viable. The demographic collapse stalls. Cathedral thinking becomes possible again.[236]

Allen Farrington called Bitcoin “the killer app for pricing capital.”[237] Not for trading. Not for speculation. For restoring the foundational function of money… accurately reflecting the cost and value of productive investment.

I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government... all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop.

— Friedrich Hayek [238]

De Gaulle, in 1965, called for “an indisputable monetary base… that does not bear the mark of any particular country.”[239]

Bitcoin is the first truly global bubble whose size and scope is limited only by the desire of the world's citizenry to protect their savings from the vagaries of government economic mismanagement.

— Vijay Boyapati [240]

Gigi said it simplest: “We, as a society, need Bitcoin more than it needs us.”[241]

The building is burning. This is the exit.

---

Notes

[1] Jimmy Song, “Bitcoin Songsheet: How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization,” Bitcoin Magazine, November 17, 2022.

[2] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[3] Lyn Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?” lynalden.com, March 6, 2022.

[4] Federal Reserve historical data; cf. Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[5] Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[6] Average fiat currency lifespan data; cf. Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[7] Ray Dalio, quoted in Gigi (@dergigi), “Dear Family, Dear Friends,” dergigi.com, April 27, 2020.

[8] Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” 2008. Quoted in Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”

[9] Federal Reserve purchasing power data; cf. Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[10] US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Saving Rate (FRED); cf. research data from Claude WebSearch supplement.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. COVID savings spike was forced non-spending, not behavioral shift.

[13] European Central Bank research on negative interest rate savings response; cf. research gap analysis, Section XX.

[14] Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future (Stanley Press, 2020).

[15] US saving and investment as percentage of GDP, historical data; cf. research gap analysis, Section JJ.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Allen Farrington, “The Capital Strip Mine,” Medium, 2020.

[18] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[19] Iowa banker, 1920s, quoted in Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[20] Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (Wiley, 2018).

[21] Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity-Pay Gap,” updated 2024. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/.

[22] Oxfam America, “Richest 1% in the US grabbed at least 987 times more wealth per household than bottom 20% since 1989,” press release, 2023.

[23] Federal Reserve Board, “Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989.”

[24] Economic Policy Institute, “Productivity-Pay Gap.”

[25] Federal Reserve distributional data; cf. research Section QQ.

[26] Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, “Home Price-to-Income Ratio Reaches Record High.”

[27] Ibid.

[28] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014).

[29] William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2014; cf. research data on buyback history (SEC Rule 10b-18, 1982).

[30] Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity.”

[31] Natalie Brunell (@natbrunell), Fox Business appearance, November 12, 2021. https://x.com/natbrunell/status/1459263839212503041.

[32] “Cost of Capital,” Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/costofcapital.asp.

[33] Cf. Brunell, Fox Business appearance; see also Booth, Price of Tomorrow.

[34] Brunell, Fox Business appearance.

[35] Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, trans. H. E. Batson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953); see also Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), ch. XX.

[36] Mises, Human Action, ch. XX.

[37] Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 5th ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000).

[38] Rothbard, America’s Great Depression.

[39] Thomas E. Woods Jr., Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2009).

[40] Bank for International Settlements data on zombie firms; cf. research gap analysis, Section WW.

[41] OECD data on zombie firm crowding effects; cf. research gap analysis, Section WW.

[42] Roger W. Garrison, “The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle in the Light of Modern Macroeconomics,” Review of Austrian Economics 3, no. 1 (1989). See also Garrison, “Contra Krugman,” http://webhome.auburn.edu/~garriro/krugman.htm.

[43] Friedrich A. Hayek predicted the 1929 crash using Austrian capital theory; cf. Garrison, “Austrian Theory.”

[44] Brunell, Fox Business appearance.

[45] Bank of England, “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” Quarterly Bulletin Q1 (2014). Cited in Allen Farrington, “The Capital Strip Mine,” Medium, 2020.

[46] Marriner Eccles, testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1941. Cf. research gap analysis.

[47] Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[48] Booth, Price of Tomorrow.

[49] Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”

[50] Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”

[51] Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”

[52] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[53] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[54] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[55] Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”

[56] Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”

[57] G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve (American Media, 1994). Cf. research gap analysis, Section LL.

[58] Griffin, Creature from Jekyll Island; cf. research data on Fed ownership structure.

[59] Alan Greenspan, PBS interview. Cf. research gap analysis, Section LL.

[60] Federal Open Market Committee transcript release policy.

[61] Government Accountability Office (GAO), Federal Reserve audit, 2011.

[62] Bitcoin network audit frequency vs. Federal Reserve audit history.

[63] John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936).

[64] Friedrich A. Hayek, Prices and Production (London: Routledge, 1931).

[65] Milton Friedman, quoted in Time magazine, 1965. Full context discussed in research gap analysis, Section RR.

[66] Richard Nixon, “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” 1971; cf. research Section RR.

[67] Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (PublicAffairs, 2020).

[68] Warren Mosler, 2017 MMT Conference presentation.

[69] Mosler, MMT Conference; see also Mosler, 2013 MMT vs. Austrian Economics Debate.

[70] Research data on heterodox economics representation; cf. research gap analysis, Section RR.

[71] Cambridge University heterodox faculty displacement; cf. research Section RR.

[72] Mises, Human Action; Rothbard, America’s Great Depression.

[73] Garrison, “Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle.”

[74] Garrison, “Contra Krugman.”

[75] John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1923). Cf. research gap analysis.

[76] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[77] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[78] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[79] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[80] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[81] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[82] Author’s original note; cf. Fiat Capitalism source file.

[83] Author’s original note.

[84] Cf. Ammous, Bitcoin Standard; Szamosszegi, “Bitcoin: Breaking Up Money and State.”

[85] Author’s original note.

[86] Will Szamosszegi, “Bitcoin: Breaking Up Money and State,” CoinDesk, October 11, 2022.

[87] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[88] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[89] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[90] Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street (Crown Business, 2016). Cf. research gap analysis, Section FF.

[91] Foroohar, Makers and Takers.

[92] Foroohar, Makers and Takers.

[93] Research data on elite graduate career patterns; cf. research gap analysis, Section KK.

[94] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[95] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization”; cf. BIS derivatives data.

[96] SEC Rule 10b-18, adopted 1982; cf. Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity.”

[97] Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity.”

[98] Cf. research data on airline buybacks and 2020 bailouts.

[99] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[100] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[101] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[102] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[103] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[104] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[105] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[106] Research data on Goldman Sachs government appointments; cf. research gap analysis, Section EE.

[107] OpenSecrets.org, FIRE sector lobbying data, 2024; cf. research Section EE.

[108] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[109] FDIC data on community bank consolidation; cf. Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

[110] Stoller, Goliath; cf. research Section II.

[111] Research data on startup formation rates; cf. research Section II.

[112] Stoller, Goliath.

[113] Stoller, Goliath; cf. research Section II.

[114] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[115] Kongō Gumi historical data; cf. research gap analysis.

[116] Jonathan Bier, The Blocksize War: The Battle for Control Over Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules (self-published, 2021). Cf. research Section EE.

[117] “Lemon socialism” concept; cf. research gap analysis, Section AAA.

[118] Government debt and asset purchase data, Q4 2008; cf. research Section AAA.

[119] Congressional Budget Office, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout estimate, 2011.

[120] Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Cf. moral hazard analysis, research Section AAA.

[121] Cf. airline buyback and bailout data, research Section AAA.

[122] United Nations Chronicle, “Flaws in the Financial System: Socializing Risk, Privatizing Profit.”

[123] Cathedral construction history; cf. Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[124] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[125] McKinsey Quarterly survey of CFOs; cf. research gap analysis, Section JJ.

[126] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[127] Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating” and related essays. Quoted in Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[128] United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects (2022 revision); cf. research gap analysis, Section YY.

[129] CEPR/NBER data on house prices and fertility, 1870-2012; cf. research Section YY.

[130] Cf. research Section YY on housing costs, dual-income necessity, and family formation delays.

[131] Cf. research Section YY, causal chain analysis.

[132] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[133] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[134] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[135] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[136] US Treasury Department, “Debt to the Penny” historical data.

[137] Congressional Budget Office, Long-Term Budget Outlook.

[138] US Treasury Department, Monthly Treasury Statement, FY2023; cf. research data.

[139] Brunell, Fox Business appearance.

[140] Booth, Price of Tomorrow.

[141] Bank of Japan government bond purchase data; cf. research data.

[142] Mises, Human Action.

[143] Equable Institute, “State of Pensions 2024.”

[144] Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), pension unfunded liability estimates; Equable Institute data.

[145] SIEPR, assumed return vs. bond yield analysis.

[146] Cf. research gap analysis, Section ZZ, on pension fund risk migration.

[147] SIEPR, contribution of optimistic assumptions to underfunding.

[148] National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA), assumed vs. actual returns data; cf. research Section ZZ.

[149] Equable Institute, pension stress test model, 2024.

[150] Cf. research Section ZZ on intergenerational liability.

[151] Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas speech, March 18, 1968.

[152] Cf. GDP accounting methodology critique; research Section OO.

[153] Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Windmill Books, 2020).

[154] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[155] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[156] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[157] Hickel, Less Is More.

[158] Keynes, Tract on Monetary Reform.

[159] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[160] Research data on 1974 Kissinger-Faisal petrodollar agreement; cf. research Section GG.

[161] Watson Institute, Brown University, “Costs of War,” https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/.

[162] David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (Metropolitan Books, 2015); cf. research Section NN.

[163] Watson Institute, “Costs of War.”

[164] Department of Defense Inspector General, financial audit results; cf. research Section NN.

[165] Ben S. Bernanke and Harold James, “The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis in the Great Depression: An International Comparison,” NBER Working Paper No. 3488.

[166] Watson Institute, “Costs of War.”

[167] Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, attributed; cf. Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[168] Charles de Gaulle, press conference, February 4, 1965.

[169] The Bitcoin Poet, “Bitcoin Fixes What, Exactly?” Substack, June 29, 2022.

[170] Jeffrey P. Snider, “Eurodollar System Overview,” MacroVoices Podcast Transcripts.

[171] Snider, “Eurodollar System Overview.”

[172] Bank for International Settlements, “Global Liquidity Indicators at End-June 2025,” BIS Statistical Release.

[173] BIS, “Global Liquidity Indicators.”

[174] Frank Shostak, “Eurodollars as a Fractional Reserve Market,” Mises Wire, Mises Institute.

[175] Financial Stability Board, shadow banking data; cf. research Section VV.

[176] SWIFT, “About Us — Organisation Governance,” https://www.swift.com/about-us/organisation-governance/swift-oversight.

[177] Bloomberg, “US Dollar’s Use in Global Transactions Tops 50%, Swift Says,” February 20, 2025.

[178] SWIFT disconnection of Iran (2012) and Russia (2022); cf. Gladstein, Twitter thread.

[179] Atlanta Federal Reserve, “The Offshore Dollar and US Policy,” Policy Hub, May 2024.

[180] Financial Stability Board, correspondent banking data; cf. research Section VV.

[181] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[182] Russia reserve freeze, February 2022; cf. Gladstein, Twitter, March 3, 2022.

[183] Jon Sindreu, “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2022.

[184] Alex Gladstein (@gladstein), Twitter, March 3, 2022.

[185] Sindreu, “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money.”

[186] Iran SWIFT disconnection, 2012; cf. Gladstein.

[187] Saudi-China yuan swap arrangement, 2023; cf. research Section GG.

[188] BRICS expansion and de-dollarization agenda; cf. research Section GG.

[189] Zoltan Pozsar, Credit Suisse, “Bretton Woods III” analysis, March 2022; cf. Gladstein thread.

[190] Rufas Kamau, “How Bitcoin Can Help Solve the World’s Income Inequality Problem,” Forbes, June 20, 2022.

[191] Author’s original note; cf. Gladstein analysis.

[192] Cf. Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”; Gladstein, Twitter thread.

[193] Author’s original note.

[194] Cf. Ammous, Bitcoin Standard; author’s original note on student loan tethering.

[195] Research data on Belt and Road debt diplomacy; cf. Gladstein, “Structural Adjustment.”

[196] Gladstein, “Structural Adjustment.”

[197] Gladstein, “Structural Adjustment.”

[198] Gladstein, “Structural Adjustment.”

[199] Gladstein, “Structural Adjustment.”

[200] Gladstein, “Structural Adjustment.”

[201] Hickel, Less Is More.

[202] Hickel, Less Is More.

[203] World Bank external debt data; cf. Gladstein, “Structural Adjustment.”

[204] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[205] IMF gold reserves data (2,814 metric tons); cf. Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[206] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard.

[207] Historical data on Roman denarius debasement; cf. research Section PP.

[208] Chinese paper money history; cf. research Section PP.

[209] French assignat hyperinflation, 1790-96; cf. research Section PP.

[210] Continental dollar history; cf. research Section PP.

[211] Weimar hyperinflation data; cf. research Section PP.

[212] Zimbabwe hyperinflation, 2008; cf. research Section PP.

[213] Venezuela hyperinflation, 2018; cf. research Section PP.

[214] Lebanon and Argentina currency collapses; cf. Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[215] British pound vs. gold, historical purchasing power; cf. research Section PP.

[216] Average fiat currency lifespan data; cf. Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[217] Alden, “What Is Money, Anyway?”

[218] Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”

[219] Attributed to Voltaire; cf. research Section PP.

[220] Szamosszegi, “Bitcoin: Breaking Up Money and State.”

[221] Szamosszegi, “Bitcoin: Breaking Up Money and State.”

[222] Boyapati, “The Bullish Case for Bitcoin,” Medium, March 2, 2018.

[223] Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin genesis block, January 3, 2009. The Times (London), “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” January 3, 2009.

[224] Boyapati, “Bullish Case for Bitcoin.”

[225] Balaji Srinivasan (@balaborhop), “OPT OUT” thread, Twitter, June 2023.

[226] Srinivasan, “OPT OUT.”

[227] Srinivasan, “OPT OUT.”

[228] Srinivasan, “OPT OUT.”

[229] Bitcoin network audit frequency vs. Federal Reserve audit history.

[230] Preston Pysh, quoted in Brunell, Fox Business appearance.

[231] Author’s original note.

[232] Ammous, Bitcoin Standard; cf. Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[233] Mises, Human Action; Rothbard, America’s Great Depression; Garrison, “Austrian Theory.”

[234] Szamosszegi, “Bitcoin: Breaking Up Money and State.”

[235] Song, “How Fiat Money Ruins Civilization.”

[236] Cf. research Section YY on demographic recovery under sound money.

[237] Farrington, “Capital Strip Mine.”

[238] Friedrich A. Hayek, interview, 1984.

[239] De Gaulle, press conference, February 4, 1965.

[240] Boyapati, “Bullish Case for Bitcoin.”

[241] Gigi, “Dear Family, Dear Friends.”