Bitcoin isn’t a solution looking for a problem. It’s the answer to some of the most dangerous and deeply rooted problems plaguing civilization. To understand why bitcoin matters, you first need to understand what’s broken.
And a lot is broken.
The Money is Broken
Everyone shits on capitalism when what they really mean is fiat capitalism — capitalism by decree, where a central bank controls the price of the most important commodity in the entire economy: money itself.
If your country has a central bank controlling the price of money, you’re already 50% socialist. What we call “capitalism” isn’t a free market at all. It’s top-down planning disguised as a free market: consumption-driven spending, growth obsession, central banking, bailouts, rent-seeking, debt slavery, regulatory capture, corporate welfare, and bloated bureaucracy — all funded by inflation.
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.
— Satoshi Nakamoto
The dollar is broken, and I think a lot of people generally understand something is wrong, but don’t realize it yet. It’s important we have an alternative set up — one that isn’t captured — when that reality starts to set in.
Inflation is Theft
Bitcoin solves the problem of debasement — a wealth confiscation dilemma as old as civilization itself. Literally thousands of years old. As long as there have been people “making” money, there have been people making money for themselves.
The global elites steal our TIME by stealing our money through inflation. The hours we work create value, and that economic energy is siphoned off. The “concentrated benefits, dispersed costs” of inflation make everyone pretty much blind to it. Printed money leaks slowly through the economy and causes the prices of everything to go up — but only long after it has been loaned into existence to prop up the global financial system.
This is the Cantillon Effect — true trickle-down economics. The Fed gives new money to banks. Those banks invest it or lend it to other financial institutions who invest it. By the time it gets into the hands of the average person, that money has exchanged hands several times. The ones who get the money first benefit from the new dollars. The people who get it last do not.
The cost of living should be massively declining. Think about all the technology advances, automation, free trade, and efficiency gains since 1971. The price of computing power has dropped exponentially. That phenomenon is happening with everything — it’s just not visible because the dollar has depreciated in value even faster.
This is massive wealth inequality created by the system. Housing prices have skyrocketed. Home ownership is down. Assets have concentrated into the hands of the well-connected and wealthy. Politicians have racked up trillions of dollars of debt, and guess who’s going to have to pay for it? The taxpayers. The middle and lower classes.
CBDCs: Surveillance Disguised as Money
If inflation and debasement aren’t terrifying enough, here comes the next evolution: Central Bank Digital Currencies.
CBDCs are surveillance disguised as money.
CBDCs aim to replace paper money with electronic credits that can be easily surveilled, confiscated, auto-taxed, and debased via negative interest rates. They pave the way for social engineering, pinpoint censorship and deplatforming, and even expiration dates on money.
If you control the money, you control the purchasing power. Which in turn allows you to control most other things. You can decide who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions. In China, millions of individuals and businesses — blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores — have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate, or travelling by air or train.
The power to freeze someone’s life savings, to stop a donation to a protest movement, or prevent someone from buying food — that’s the power to control all of society, forever. This isn’t science fiction. They are actively working on and testing these technologies.
As Joe Rogan put it: “A centralized digital currency connected to a social credit score system is absolutely fucking terrifying.”
Without bitcoin, without a truly invincible decentralized alternative, there is no escape.
The Debt Spiral
We are in the largest economic experiment in the history of mankind. The global economy is extremely complex, and risk happens fast. Governments have taken actions to prevent markets from properly clearing — moral hazard from bailouts leads to a buildup of underbrush. Think of it like a forest that’s never allowed to have small fires. Eventually, the big one comes.
Bitcoin was born out of the great financial crisis of 2008 — an economic collapse caused by big banks and financial institutions. The genesis block of Bitcoin contains a message etched into it permanently: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” This was Satoshi’s statement of purpose.
We live in a world where all of the banks, governments, and corporations are buried in mountains of debt. The price of money is completely arbitrary. There’s no end in sight to the fiscal irresponsibility. Our society is structurally built on a house of cards.
At the end of the day, you either believe central banks will be forced to continuously expand the money supply or that they won’t. If that is the inevitable fate of this debt-driven, overly-financialized world — then all bitcoin needs to do is respond to that monetary expansion better than any other asset. And that is what bitcoin does better than any other asset known to man.
Bitcoin is long volatility and short credit. It’s insurance against the failure of the legacy financial system. It’s Noah’s ark — a parallel economic system that could absorb all of the wealth on the planet if the current system collapses.
For the Billions, Not the Billionaires
Check your financial privilege. Most people reading this have a bank account, property rights protected by law, and a relatively stable currency. Billions of people don’t.
Bitcoin helps developing nations plagued by corruption and poor stewardship of their economies. It provides property rights and justice arbitration through technology — a trusted system free of human corruption.
How do the rich get richer? Through special access to capital. Most money-making instruments require a lot of money to access. Bitcoin can be bought by anyone, anywhere, no exceptions, for less than a penny.
In Nigeria, peer-to-peer bitcoin trading volumes topped $1.1 billion between 2021 and 2022 — making it the largest market on Paxful globally. Why? A 33% unemployment rate, 38 million unbanked adults, a young entrepreneurial population, and a currency in freefall. The CBDC experiment was a total failure there — Nigerians rejected the eNaira in favor of an “illegal” bitcoin.
In Lebanon, when the banks froze accounts and the currency collapsed, people turned to bitcoin to receive payments from abroad, buy groceries, and survive. As one Lebanese architect explained: “I would lose around half the value through wire transfers. That’s why I was looking at bitcoin — it was a good way to get money from abroad.”
Bitcoin enables billions of people to enter the global economy. The potential for human flourishing — for people to bypass their local government currencies and participate in the global economy — is unprecedented.
Monetary Colonialism
Today, France still controls 14 African nations through monetary authority. It issues a currency called the CFA Franc that these nations must use. The CFA Franc can only be issued by the French central bank and has been devalued on a whim more than once. This arrangement allows the French to continue looting African nations as they have for centuries. Whenever these nations have appointed a leader who promised to restore monetary independence, they have been assassinated.
The IMF and World Bank have impoverished and endangered millions of people, enriched dictators and kleptocrats, and cast human rights aside to generate a multi-trillion-dollar flow of food, natural resources, and cheap labor from poor countries to rich ones.
Rich countries exploit the global south through structural adjustment loans — also known as debt colonialism. This is the most sinister application of broken money: economic imperialism that keeps entire continents in poverty.
Bitcoin ends this. On a bitcoin standard, there won’t be a need for 0 fiat currencies backed by absolutely nothing. No more enslaving entire nations in debt they can never repay. No more draining nations of their precious resources. Remove the money printer, and you remove the power.
Bitcoin is a Wrecking Ball
Bitcoin threatens the status quo in myriad ways, and the powers that be can’t stand it. They would very much like to keep things as they are. They have and will continue to fight bitcoin with everything they’ve got.
But bitcoin gives zero fucks. It just keeps working. Tick tock, next block.
When the world transitions to a bitcoin standard, a lot of things change forever: the existing financial system, the IMF and World Bank, the Cantillon Effect, the sovereign debt bubble, fractional reserve banking, consumerism, endless wars, the housing bubble, and monetary colonialism.
Bitcoin is a wrecking ball to the powers that be because it destroys corruption and restores freedom and sovereignty to the people. It’s money of the people, by the people, and for the people.
And there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.