The Bitcoin Migration

What Is Money - And Why Does It Matter?

Money is just a ledger of who owns what; a ledger of stored economic energy. It has three roles - Store of Value, Medium of Exchange and Unit of Account - and must ultimately facilitate investment, consumption and savings. It is a construct arrived at to better facilitate and coordinate human economic interaction for everyone in society; a solution organically arrived at to specifically address these problems vs. something that exists for its own sake.

Money is the most saleable good in society, a universal language of value that facilitates all economic activity as seamlessly as possible, ideally across both space and time. At its core it is pure information, though historically this information has manifested in physical form - sea shells, colored beads, precious metals, paper proxies for precious metals, and now nothing more than government-imposed paper. Historically, money was bound to nature, which could not easily be cheated. "Modern" fiat money has no such binds.

Money is always a means to an end, never an end in itself. And money is always a shared recognition, never a shared belief or shared illusion. Any money used in society is not so much a leap of faith but a calculation - not only of what you value as the best money, but more importantly of what others interpret, recognize and value as the best money.

Money is one half of every trade in the world. This means it has a big role, big as in >$300 trillion big. People talk about notions of 'intrinsic value' or 'backed by' but a good money is simply an honest ledger, and the best money just achieves that job better than any competing solution. There can be multiple monies, but ultimately most societies gravitate toward a single one, emergent through shared recognition over time.

Money is a conservative concept by definition - it's to everyone's interest that money is stable, reliable, resolute, predictable, ideally even boring. It is not, nor should be, a speculative asset. It can be better understood as the default home for one's economic energy, available for investment or consumption, but only as the need or calculation arises. Its default role, as store of value, should be steadfast and uncompromising. Money is not meant to be 'innovative', but should become the most predictable thing, like the sun rising in the east - an ideal foundation upon which human economic calculation, endeavor and civilization itself, can unfold and prosper.

The Gold Standard - And Its Undoing

Gold was the best money in human civilization for thousands of years; this significant amount of time brings a measure of credibility and confidence, a "Lindy effect," an important characteristic of a money. It had most of the attributes of an ideal money - divisible, recognizable, indestructible - and most importantly was more credibly scarce than any competing money. Throughout the ages we have seen different monies emerge - salt, feathers, sea shells, beads - and the ultimate undoing of their scarcity, through a supply response, was the cause of their demise. Precious metals fared far better because their relative scarcity was credible, and largely remains so.

However, gold became centralized out of necessity. Held at banks for security and practicality, 'paper' gold - an IOU or claim on centrally-held gold, became more widely used because of its versatility, but ultimately that was its undoing. The US government soft-defaulted on the convertibility of USD to gold in 1971 and arguably had done so even earlier, for example in 1934 when Executive Order 6102 made private holdings of gold illegal. Such a rule was easily enforced precisely because of gold's centralization at third parties and the difficulty of moving it abroad.

Gold's shortcomings - its impracticality as a bearer instrument over distance, its tendency toward centralization, and its poor divisibility, made it fail as a global money standard. The reasons for that failure remain unaddressable in any arguments for reinstating a future gold standard. Human nature, combined with government expediency and the appearance of supposed 'emergencies', will continue to manifest ad infinitum, ensuring any commitment to any gold standard can fall apart on a human whim; the future is no different from the past in this respect. If one looks at gold dispassionately in a "jobs-to-be-done" framework, the fixation on a corporeal solution to the problem of money is somewhat primitive and antiquated.

A related idea is the half-life of money, popularized by Saylor. Gold has a stock-to-flow of ~62, with an associated half-life of ~35 years, meaning one can expect the supply of gold to double every ~35 years. While scarce, it's not absolutely scarce - the asset class 'leaks', albeit slowly.

This is not to say gold has no role over the coming decade. Central banks like Russia, China and India take it very seriously and continue to accumulate. And as Larry Lepard has pointed out, the staggering amount of rehypothecation of paper gold in play, and the fact that many claimed physical holdings have never been publicly audited, suggest that if and when there is a run on paper gold to switch to physical, the physical price can appreciate significantly.

But gold has already been tried and found wanting. We need something better.

The Ideal Money

Moving from the basic premise of what money is, it's worth calling out the key components that could move a money from just good to ideal. Many of these points are intertwined, but each is worth making separately. It's also worth noting that no money we have ever had meets all these criteria. Until now.

No Issuer

This is one of the most critical benefits of a commodity money - it ensures no nexus of power or control over the money, and in particular no path to government expediency during so-called 'emergency' times. A critical test of a money is not how it behaves under normal circumstances but if and how it may be perverted under the most extreme circumstances that affect state interests.

Consider: at the outbreak of WW1 in 1914, Germany, Britain and France promptly went off their gold standard to pay for the war, essentially stealing their citizens' private property, indirectly, to wield that economic energy toward state interests without any explicit agreement from the population. Nixon's soft-default in 1971 brought the USD firmly off gold, despite dishonestly characterizing the move as 'temporary.' Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102 in 1934 was possible because gold was centralized at custodians (banks), offering the government a convenient path to direct private property confiscation.

An ideal money would be a bearer instrument, practical for self-custody, where there would be no trend toward centralization but instead toward decentralization and distribution, making it far more difficult for the state to expropriate. It would be practical and viable for exchange across distance, for international trade. Such a thing has never existed before in human civilization, until now.

No Risk of Debasement

A good money is not just 'a ledger' but an honest ledger, unimpeachable by anyone, immutable and unchanging, beyond the control or even influence of anyone, including and especially the government. Seigniorage is an extraordinary privilege the state takes because it can essentially pay for things by printing money that it otherwise could not afford; in doing so, the state steals from existing holders of the money - the people it supposedly represents.

We have now reached a stage where the very concept of saving no longer exists because any real interest rate yield is less than the rate of inflation. People are forced to either consume or invest in order to avoid government-imposed monetary inflation. The ideal money should not be just information, but accurate, reliable, incorruptible information that never 'leaks' - is never stolen from us.

Apart from the theft, debasement makes real economic calculation impossible, especially far into the future, because the money-as-information is always incorrect, even better described as disinformation. The ideal money should always be structurally correct, beyond the risk of dilution by any privileged actor. This is not just correct, but ethical; frankly, anyone who argues otherwise reveals a great deal about the kind of person they are.

Consider how the government seemingly bequeaths money on the fiat standard - conjured out of thin air, then indirectly paid by everyone through dilution of their holdings and earnings. Imagine if the government no longer had this magic wand; everyone would be immune from this indirect, hidden tax, forever.

Absolute Scarcity

This is the idea that there should be a fixed supply of money, a closed system. Simple in concept, but in practice it has proven virtually impossible. Any commodity money suffers from supply response: any increase in price creates incentive to produce more. Gold is relatively scarce, but not absolutely so.

One could argue that such a money would be the first money, and all previous versions better described as fundamentally flawed approximations toward this ideal (the idea of bitcoin as the 'first money' was originally suggested by @Wealth_Theory).

We go beyond commodity money to a new concept: an absolute scarce commodity - a scarcity, as Saylor has framed it. This concept, the first closed system, is now operating in the real world. Absolute scarcity has never been manifested in reality in human civilization, until now.

Digital

Not everyone thinks an ideal money should be digital. Some have romantic notions of something physical and corporeal. However, the idea that something physical can be a new global monetary standard is stillborn because it cannot offer settlement - a bearer instrument - over distance. The need for a viable, practical bearer instrument for global trade, in real time, necessitates that the money for the modern world must be digital, native to the internet.

The conundrum is that the idea of digital conflicts with the primary requirement for scarcity, because historically anything digital can be replicated essentially for free. A dream money would be digitally conservative - one that could be teleported anywhere in the world but not copied or 'double-spent'. Importantly, though digital, it should also be tied to the real world through the energy required in its production. Such a concept has never existed before, until now.

Irreversible

If a transaction can be reversed it means money is not really changing hands; promises are changing hands, and it's more akin to credit than actual money. Irreversibility brings consequences, making transactions more consequential, eliminating risk of fraud and chargebacks which are prohibitive for many merchant verticals, removing unnecessary costs from the system. Final settlement of a digital money over the internet is a game-changer that has never existed before.

Neutral and Non-Sovereign

Commodity monies like gold are examples of neutral or non-sovereign money - no nation state has any particular privilege over them. Fiat significantly fails here. The U.S. freezing ~$300 billion of Russia's deposits in Germany in 2022 was a stark example of how fiat can be weaponized. An ideal money should have no such risk; in fact an ideal money should be recognized and valued by your enemies - otherwise it's better described as a contrived nation-state plaything, or obedience token.

An ideal money should be apolitical, impossible to weaponize, universal and global - a universal language of value where everyone can communicate economically, with everyone else, everywhere in the world, on equal terms, with no more pointlessly expensive friction of foreign exchange rate 'translation.'

No Gatekeepers or Intermediaries

One of the most obvious ethical characteristics of an ideal money is that everyone engages with the monetary network identically, with no one having any privilege, and all interactions peer-to-peer. There is something almost magical about true peer-to-peer transactions - not only does it mean no potential for intervention, censorship or denial of service, but it brings closer, more human relationships between buyer and seller, especially across national borders, in real time.

A related idea is decentralization, though I view that as more of a means to an end - the 'end' being that all actors on the monetary network engage with it in the same way, with no variation in status or privilege, no one able to change the rules, and no one able to destroy, harm or even influence the network. An important byproduct is inclusivity: gatekeepers like banks have government-mandated requirements - Know-Your-Customer, anti-money-laundering - that needlessly limit participation by the lower echelons of society, preventing them from even creating a bank account. An ideal money would enable frictionless economic participation by the full global population.

Another critical idea here is open-source. Not only should a money be open to all, but its very design and architecture should be fully transparent. The open-source ethos is a secret weapon of truth and integrity. When a fiat bureaucrat criticizes open-source, they are showing their hand, underscoring their need for control in general, and silent debasement in particular.

People criticize bitcoin because it is boring, but the ideal money should be the most boring thing in the world. Limited, focused on its function, inert, unchanging and reliable - that's what makes it so useful. The whole point is that people can focus on providing value in the world without ever having to think about how the value they create can be stored and used, with whose permission, for how long.

100% Monetary Premium

Monies throughout history have had purposes beyond their monetary properties - gold is used in electronics, serves ornamental and ceremonial functions. While some might see these as a bonus, they distort the pure monetary value and bring unnecessary variability. The ideal money is 100% monetary premium, with no alternative values or uses, only information content, and yet also a bearer instrument. Pure money. Such a thing has never existed in human civilization, until now.

When I say that these features have never existed "until now" - the until now is of course talking about Bitcoin. One does not need to understand all the characteristics of bitcoin to recognize its value any more than one needs to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car. But for anyone who does choose to deploy their full intellectual capacity to scrutinize bitcoin as a money, it survives any such scrutiny with flying colors.

Why Fiat Money Is Broken

The fact that all fiat money is broken is one of the most important secrets hiding in plain sight. Fiat money fails all of the criteria of an ideal money, catastrophically.

The Two-Step Debasement

How the money became broken is best understood as a two-step process. First, gold as a bearer instrument was replaced by paper gold as a proxy. This was at first an enhancement - allowing gold to be freely traded more easily, with high divisibility and portability - albeit with systemic risk of rehypothecation and fractional reserve. People just got on with their lives not properly recognizing that risk.

The second step was where the state abandoned the notes' convertibility to physical gold - essentially a soft default. The U.S. did this in 1971, and because most other national currencies were backed indirectly by gold through USD, their currencies suffered similarly. From there, the state could print money and debase with impunity, which it has done.

If fiat had been imposed immediately as an alternative to physical gold in one step, it likely would have been repudiated by the public en masse, as an obvious daylight robbery. But because paper IOUs for gold were already normalized, it was a seemingly far smaller step to just remove the USD redeemability 'claim' on gold, that few individuals ever considered redeeming anyway. It was a slight of hand. And it worked.

Inflation: The Core Failure

At its core the solution to money is the solution to inflation. Inflation is simply the increase in prices of the goods, services and assets you want to buy - not just what you have to buy like food and shelter, but also the things you aspire to acquire (e.g. a house, a ferrari, a fine wine), which means everyone's actual inflation is different.

Monetary inflation is the rise in prices due to the state increasing the money supply. People might draw a distinction between failed monies like Venezuela's and something relatively strong like the USD, but there is no structural difference between them - the only difference is the size and speed of the 'leak.'

The idea that some financial repression is acceptable or legitimate because the state is doing it is a poor reflection on how hoodwinked and apathetic the public has become.

Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a state-published figure biased to the downside, selectively ignoring the goods and services that are increasing in price. The real rate of inflation is typically much higher. The half-life of the USD is now approximately six years, where it used to be ~10 years, and almost all other countries are worse. The implications are stark: there is no ability to save, because the purchasing power of those savings is eroded over time.

Inflation is probably the most significant argument for why fiat money is broken. It expropriates the time and labor of the poorest in society, the asset-poor specifically, in a silent, gradual way, unbeknownst to the innocent victims - like people aging, grass growing or paint drying. It's the systematic economic destruction of people's lives by the state, from which only the asset-rich are insulated.

In the "jobs-to-be-done" framework popularized by Clay Christensen, fiat has been hired (with no choice) for a few decades but it's clearly flunking in its job. An increasing number of people now continue to 'fire' fiat and 'hire' bitcoin.

Arguably the most important question one can ask is: "what are you trying to achieve?" What is money supposed to accomplish for us? Surely the answer should be what individuals want to accomplish for themselves - storing the economic energy of their time, effort and skill - at their full discretion. Instead, it has been normalized that the state is entitled to take its 'pound of flesh' over time, at its discretion.

It may come as a surprise that "only gold" was instantiated in the U.S. Constitution as money, and that fiat USD is thereby arguably unconstitutional.

Political Capture and Weaponization

A good money is used by your enemies. The U.S. freezing ~$300 billion of Russia's deposits, and the Canadian government freezing bank accounts of people who donated to the truckers and shutting down an associated GoFundMe - irrespective of the circumstances, the very fact that such actions are possible highlights that the state has a kind of 'kill-switch' on all of our money. The idea of private property was deemed so important that it was originally in the US Declaration of Independence - "Life, liberty and pursuit of property" - before "happiness" replaced "property." Bitcoin is property the likes of which humanity has never seen, because it can be truly owned to an extent never before possible.

The Debt Spiral

The U.S. national debt has ballooned past $36 trillion and grows inexorably. Along with higher interest rates imposed by the Fed to fight inflation it caused, just the servicing of this burden now exceeds $1 trillion annually. This places the burden on an employed middle class that is shrinking, exacerbated by demographics as boomers retire.

Central Bank "Management"

The idea that money needs to be 'managed' by a central bank has been normalized, but it is fantastical. The main tools - how much money to print and what interest rates to set - are aimed at supposedly noble goals of low unemployment and "stable prices." Under a sound money standard, none of this manipulation is possible or necessary.

The central bank's attempts to manage volatility typically just ensure the volatility is postponed and pent-up for later, more magnified (and disasterous), release. The incentives are to kick the can down the road. Over time, the 'economic policy' tools become increasingly blunt, with longer latency, resulting in bigger swings and greater destruction as the central bank navigates through the rearview mirror.

Nation-State Fragmentation

Governments could never coordinate on truth or trust each other on something as important as a monetary standard, so each created their own versions. This framework led to a complete fragmentation of global monies, adding unnecessary friction and uncertainty to trade and investment. How can a company invest in a factory in another country when the exchange rate in three years is highly uncertain? A single, organically preferred, global money will always facilitate better coordination than any group of imposed nation-state monies.

Credit Expansion

The fiat system thrives on credit expansion, necessitating ever more credit to drive GDP, which is more of an MMT novelty metric than anything else. GDP "growth" is heralded while the associated credit expansion is swept under the rug. The fiat 'money' itself is much better described as credit than money; what you receive is never a bearer instrument but always an IOU. The government keeps interest rates low, which pulls forward demand, creating a mirage of present growth at the expense of future growth. Ever more 'growth' is needed to pay an ever larger debt burden, and the system can always be extended by kicking the can, but that only makes the eventual blow-up larger, as Jeff Booth has compellingly argued.

Why Bitcoin Is the Solution

One can describe Bitcoin as a monetary protocol, a rules-based money, an engineered monetary network. It is a technical solution to an expression of ideals in money - a technical solution that has never been achieved before.

The book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell shows how humans instinctively make shortcut judgment calls, and nine times out of ten those judgments are correct. I see this as a key reason most people instinctively dismiss bitcoin. One would be accused of hubris for suggesting an upstart open-source computer program could replace the world's money. It sounds like monopoly money. But it's important to recognize that for many in the developed world, Bitcoin appears to solve a problem they don't think they have - at least not yet.

Pull and Push

If bitcoin did not exist, fiat might be sheltered from its headwinds because while there would be push factors - the problems outlined above - there would be no viable alternative, no pull factors. Gold should continue to play a role at least in the medium term given its entrenched following, but it has limitations that disqualify it as a viable long-term solution.

Bitcoin is a viable alternative that can migrate all monetary energy from the broken fiat standard to a new, parallel, unbreakable, globally teleportable, sound money standard. Fiat maximalists tend to operate under the assumption that their monetary network is an exclusive, hemmed-off system where people have to suffer through the impositions of debasement. They assumed they were operating in a closed system, and they were right, but not any longer. We now have the first (and last) viable, open, borderless, parallel system, completely independent of the fiat system. That bitcoin is exogenous to the existing fiat system is a wonderful benefit; there are no dependencies or gatekeepers on bitcoin's adoption that reside in the fiat world.

Even the European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde has acknowledged that "if there is an 'escape' it will be used."

Governance Without Governors

Bitcoin's rules-based monetary network means there is no 'governance' required. The monetary policy was set in stone at the very inception of the protocol and can never change. "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime." - Satoshi Nakamoto. With bitcoin we never have to worry or even think about monetary policy ever again.

The bitcoin monetary network functions independently of any human intervention and cannot be structurally influenced by any individual, group or government. Constrained by the laws of math and physics, the network has unfair advantages compared to a fiat network that is unconstrained, subject to the whims of people with questionable motives and politically-captured goals.

One of the wonderful implications is that not only do we no longer need thousands of people working at central banks, but everyone is now compelled to focus on creating real value in the world. There is no more 'Fed-watching', no more 'hedging' against decisions made by a cartel of insiders behind closed doors, no ability to set interest rates, and no ability to debase the money. The unerring protocol of truth replaces the tapestry of politically-captured, short-sighted institutions and their agendas.

The First Money

A reasonable critique is that bitcoin hasn't been around for very long. However, over sixteen years is long enough for any bug or vulnerability to be exposed in its open-source code, with a 'bug bounty' vastly larger than any in history. Bitcoin is now on a path to ossification, where there will be no structural changes on layer 1. The most important role for bitcoin on its base layer is the Store of Value use case, which needs to be credible for a thousand years. This is the foundation - if you don't get this right, nothing else matters. Layer 2 - the Lightning Network in particular - is the playground for innovation, scaling the network globally for Medium of Exchange.

There is a fallacy that Bitcoin was the first attempt at an engineered money, and thereby can't be the last or the best. There were countless attempts before it - Ecash, E-gold, Hashcash - all fundamentally flawed because they required third-party intervention or lacked decentralization, creating single points of failure. Bitcoin was the only viable digital monetary network because it solved these problems.

Why There Can Never Be an Alternative

Sui Generis

This is a concept from Adam Back - something singular, 'of its own kind', where there can only be one. Imagine a world with a single global money: a universal language of value facilitating borderless human economic interaction, with the lowest trade friction in history, driving the highest prosperity in history on an equal playing field for all. Then imagine introducing a second money. On what basis would it coexist alongside bitcoin in the long term? What incremental 'jobs-to-be-done' would it facilitate, not already done by the single ideal money? None.

The concept of money is singular and converges on one. An ideal money is not complemented by any second money. Silver coexisted alongside gold because it brought a divisibility value proposition that gold could not easily satisfy. When one has a money that meets all the criteria of an ideal money, there is no role for even one extra money.

Gresham's Law

'Bad money forces out good money.' Historically anyone receiving money in payment would quickly pass on money that was marred and keep any pristine money. The idea holds just as well when applied to competing monetary networks. Any rational person in Argentina getting paid in pesos immediately spends them or converts to a stronger store of value. Bitcoin is no different; while it is not broadly understood, its value just has to be recognized over time by more and more people.

Schelling Point

In game theory, a Schelling point is a focal point solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication. As bitcoin's advantages become more apparent and adoption continues, that adoption drives more adoption. Any competition effort would either be imposed by authority - breaking foundational principles of an ideal money - or propose a technological improvement that could be adopted by a bitcoin soft fork. Any competing money would have a small group of actors seeking exclusive economic gain; a pre-mined contrivance that could never be as credible as a neutral, global commodity money that already solved the foundational problems of money.

A Problem Solved - First and Only

You only solve a foundational problem once. This is akin to the discovery of fire, the wheel, or the printing press - the idea itself is the salient part. The main discovery with Bitcoin is absolute scarcity, drawn from the solution to the double-spend problem, giving us the first viable digitally conservative network. Once discovered, the idea cannot be discovered again; it was a one-time thing. It was not just about discovering absolute scarcity, but doing so in an open way, where the asset had no monetary value for 1.5 years, where there was no pre-mine, and where the inventor disappeared. This emergence is a set of unique circumstances that are irreplicable and unrepeatable: a singularity. The ideal money is now solved, and it won't be solved again.

No Equilibrium with Fiat

It's sometimes said that USD can expect to thrive alongside bitcoin - bitcoin as the Store of Value layer, USD as the currency layer. While we may see some adoption using USD over digital rails (stablecoins), USD remains the 'best looking horse at the glue factory' of fiat, as Greg Foss has put it. USD has no structural advantage over bitcoin combined with the Lightning Network, while retaining significant structural impairments, primarily debasement and political capture. Gresham's Law and the Schelling point ratchet inexorably in one direction. There is no rational argument for holding USD vs. bitcoin over the long term other than speculation on the continued ignorance and apathy of the population, while the music still plays in the game of musical chairs. Bitcoiners are already sitting down, even as the music is still playing.

The Road Ahead

The Demonetization of Everything

One of the most profound secrets hiding in plain sight is the extent to which massive asset classes - real estate, bonds, collectibles, art, even equities - are 'monetized' because fiat money is broken. Because saving is no longer possible (any risk-free fiat yield is less than even the official rate of inflation), everyone is forced to either invest or consume. This drives up prices and forces people into risk they may have no appetite for. Some see this as benign 'stimulus' but it's more like a cattle-prod, driving everyone into mal-investment and mal-consumption.

What happens when this >$300 trillion in monetization of assets shifts to its true home, the future sound money? Everything currently monetized will eventually collapse into bitcoin. On what basis would any monetary energy persist in faulty Store of Value 'vessels' when the fit-for-purpose vessel exists alongside? All of these assets thereby revert to their use value - a house becomes valued at its use with virtually no investment component, as was the case historically under the gold standard.

CBDCs: The Dystopian Alternative

Central Bank Digital Currencies are making their way onto the scene. CBDCs herald more direct and targeted controls: money with expiry dates, total surveillance of purchases, 'climate' credits on purchase behavior, travel restrictions, and the ability to cancel people financially - dystopian, politically captured money taken to a completely new level.

Even under the most benign light, CBDCs can be thought of as multiple 'intranets' - the corporate, permissioned precursors to the internet, eventually overwhelmed by the obviously better idea of a single globally-connected, neutral, universal network.

It's uncanny and prescient that Satoshi not only created bitcoin in response to the waywardness of government spending after the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, but also ensured years of track record before the advent of CBDCs. Now we have not only an ethical innovation in money but one that is a bright, sharp contrast to the odious apparatus of state-controlled digital currencies. Bitcoin is an assurance of freedom and truth, while CBDCs are an assurance of tyranny and control.

Second-Order Effects

We have only covered bitcoin as money in this article, with no mention of second-order effects, which are likely to be dramatic. Micropayments in particular, and the ability to stream flows of money (vs. discrete payments), all in real time, are already starting to unlock use cases that were never feasible under any historical money. Bitcoin may become even more 'boring' but the second-order effects will be expansive and profound.

On Doubt and Conviction

There are critics who have positioned themselves as having evaluated Bitcoin and dismissed it for 'x' reason - interestingly, that reason is different for each critic, which is kind of hilarious. When one reason disappears, their critique lurches to something else. My only advice is to evaluate bitcoin yourself, from first principles. If anything, a traditional 'economics education' is a liability - I speak from experience. The short book "Economics in One Lesson" by Hazlitt is vastly more useful than any such degree.

Different people look at bitcoin through different lenses. If one's country is undergoing hyperinflation, one does not need to be sold on the benefit of a money that can't be debased. If one is facing tyranny, one does not need to be sold on censorship-resistance. Bitcoin is not just one thing but a large set of solutions to a large set of problems.

The Heartbeat

As we speak, bitcoin has a heartbeat; a new block is found approximately every 10 minutes on average. Fiat and gold have no such heartbeat - they are in a sense dead. In some ways bitcoin is alive, kept alive by human incentives but applied to a network that automatically and dispassionately maintains integrity, devoid of human influence, immune from those who would wish it harm. All rent-seekers, statists and gatekeepers can do when they complain about Bitcoin is inadvertently reveal their intentions - to seek control and privilege over the money standard - and that's a good thing; they shine a bright light on their nefarious intent.

The 10x

In technology, a new paradigm is typically not just incrementally better but should be ‘10x’ better than anything that came before it. Bitcoin represents the first time technology has been applied to the concept of money, which is surprising. Applying this notion to money is certainly a big idea; the prospect that existing monies could be replaced, completely, with a single, new, global money, forever. The idea of an ideal money, the first money even, is a daunting one, with some seemingly disruptive implications, though many more hidden benefits.

The supposed ‘safety net’ of government spending and bailouts will eventually collapse, as money printing will be impossible. Zombie companies will no longer be kept alive as governments can no longer print money; their death should be welcomed by all as necessary creative destruction that is required for any healthy economy and civilization; bad ideas should die out, replaced by good ideas, arbitrated fully by the free market alone. Banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs that were bailed out in the Great Financial Crisis would not be bailed out in the new bitcoin-denominated world. These seemingly-scary consequences will be balanced by a new fertile ground of freedom, individual action and personal agency that we never had before; most people, globally, will now have those freedoms by default. “A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.” (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper:) This significant unshackling of the free market and the associated shrinking of government size is a big idea, but that doesn't make it any less true or less inevitable.

The Endgame

Adoption is the foundational next step, no different to adoption of the internet or mobile phone; we are likely still in the innovator stage, not even having ‘crossed the chasm’ to the early majority phase. The transition is underway, alongside Bitcoin’s unerring heartbeat, seemingly gradually, but perhaps eventually suddenly. The path to adoption will certainly be rugged and rocky but there are at least no structural unknowns or surprises in the network, something which can never be said of fiat, or any other would-be monetary networks. To the supposed latecomers, complaining about being late to a network that has <2% adoption so far is worth considering. If one is a late adopter to, say, the mobile phone, one bears no real cost for being late, other than the opportunity cost of enjoying the convenience and benefits of the network earlier. In contrast, if one is late to the new dominant global monetary standard, the opportunity cost is the sum total of your stored economic life force on Earth - not just your money, but all your supposed investments that will be demonetized.

While Bitcoin’s path most likely leads to global monetary hegemony, adopting bitcoin is not a binary decision for people or institutions, and much of the adoption will involve ‘getting off zero’. Just the curiosity acquired in getting off zero can lead to more understanding and more conviction. That said, ultimately Bitcoin is a binary phenomenon, in that it will not reach some equilibrium value, but absorb all monetary value; no other monetary asset can withstand and survive Bitcoin’s exclusive catalog of unfair advantages as The universal, global SoV. No other money will play second fiddle.

Bitcoin is not an investment opportunity to make a buck, but a foundational, profound paradigm shift in the very denominator of the new global economic language of value that will be the largest wealth transfer in human history. Generally, the best ideas win and Bitcoin is not just a good idea, or the best idea (as that might suggest a better one can come along) but the only idea; the inevitable idea. There is no alternative; the fiat can getting kicked down the road is approaching a wall and can go on no longer; the fiat ‘tools’ will no longer work.

A stark reminder about bitcoin is that it might never have been discovered or invented, and the contrast between the utopian aspects of the bitcoin-denominated world and the alternative, dystopian CBDC-world could not be more stark. Even more disturbingly, Bitcoin might have been discovered too late. But Bitcoin is here, now. It is not a work-in-progress, but a fully formed solution, operating flawlessly in the wild, in the most adverse conditions, antifragile - gaining in strength after each seeming obstacle it confronts and overcomes. It is something that no one saw coming.

Bitcoin’s path toward its role as The monetary network is unclear and will no doubt continue to be characterized as volatile, too volatile for some it would seem, but the destination is inevitable as adoption ratchets in one direction. The idea of separation of money and state may strike the uninformed as a fanciful libertarian idea, but it is now not just an idea, but a credible, emergent reality, open to anyone to participate in; it is the kind of idea whose time has come. With or without you, Bitcoin’s destiny is to become the last coin standing.