Podcast Episode: Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I’ve Never Said) -The Long Case for Bitco

Posted on August 1, 2026 by hooglanda

Pip: MyWheelLife.com — where the rubber meets the road, and apparently also where it meets the blockchain.

Mara: Today we're working through a piece from hooglanda that makes a long, careful case for where Bitcoin is headed — and more importantly, what it actually means to hold it responsibly.

Pip: The title alone deserves credit for honesty. Let's start with the argument itself.

Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I've Never Said)

Mara: The setup here is a correction — a pushback against a caricature. The post opens with a friend who keeps saying "Bitcoin only goes up," and the whole piece is about what the actual position looks like instead.

Pip: And the actual position leads with the downside, which is not what most people expect from a Bitcoin advocate. The post lays it out plainly: "Invest only what you can afford to lose. Assume it's going to zero. Expect it to drop 50% tomorrow. If you wouldn't be fine with that, don't invest in Bitcoin."

Mara: So the upside case is built on a foundation of assuming the worst. What this means in practice is that sizing comes before conviction — you plan for the crash first, and only then do you look at the ceiling.

Pip: And the ceiling is specific. Not a vibe, not a moon target — a number derived from an actual mechanism.

Mara: Right. The post puts it at thirteen million dollars per coin in today's dollars, and explains where that figure comes from: Bitcoin absorbing a share of the monetary premium currently held in gold, bonds, real estate, and cash — assets people hold not to spend, but to store value across time. That pool is finite, which means the upside is bounded by arithmetic, not sentiment.

Pip: A capped upside framed as a feature. That's a genuinely unusual sales pitch.

Mara: The timeline is the soft part — the post acknowledges it could take fifteen or twenty years. But the argument is that most people are already waiting that long for retirement anyway, so the opportunity cost of patience is low given the asymmetry.

Pip: Meanwhile, today's price is a different animal entirely. Sentiment and speculation drive it up and down, but underneath that sits what the post calls an adoption price — set by steady, price-insensitive buyers who dollar-cost-average regardless of where the market is.

Mara: The post is careful not to oversell that floor. The 2022 bear market pierced the two-hundred-week moving average by roughly twenty-five percent for a few months. It's described as a gravity zone, not a law of physics.

Pip: The endpoint the post imagines is, by design, boring — volatility compresses as the monetary premium fills in, speculators leave, and what remains is a savings technology you hold the way earlier generations held land or gold.

Mara: And the closing idea is worth sitting with. The people who understand it early are rewarded twice — once in their own return, and once in how much sooner the whole transition arrives. Early understanding and early adoption are the same act.

Pip: The long game, it turns out, is just the game.

Mara: The through-line here is patience — sizing for the downside, understanding the mechanism, and letting time do the work.

Pip: Assume the worst, do the math, and let the boring endpoint arrive. Not bad advice for money, or really for anything else. More next time.

Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I’ve Never Said) -The Long Case for Bitcoin’s Endpoint

Posted on August 1, 2026 by hooglanda

Podcast Episode: Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I’ve Never Said) -The Long Case for Bitcoin – An experimential auto generated podcast based on this post. Just trying things!

I have a friend who likes to needle me. Every time Bitcoin comes up, he says: “Bitcoin only goes up.”

I have never said that. Not once. What I actually say sounds nothing like it.

Only invest what you can leave invested for at least five years.

That one isn’t even Bitcoin advice. It’s how I think about any position I take. Money you might need in two years has no business in an asset that can move 40% in a quarter. That has nothing to do with Bitcoin specifically — it’s just the difference between investing and gambling with a deadline attached.

Invest only what you can afford to lose. Assume it’s going to zero.

Expect it to drop 50% tomorrow. If you wouldn’t be fine with that, don’t invest in Bitcoin.

Read those again and notice what they have in common. Every single one leads with the downside. Assume zero. Assume the crash. Assume you might need the money before it works. That is the opposite of “only goes up.” My friend is mocking a position I’ve never held. The naive bull says the price can’t fall. I say plan for it to fall, size accordingly, and only then talk about the upside.

So let’s talk about the upside — because there is one, and it’s the whole point.

I expect Bitcoin to reach $13 million per coin, in today’s dollars, which means you don’t need to risk much to get an outsized return.

This is where people assume I’ve quietly rejoined the “number go up” crowd. I haven’t. That figure is not a moon target. It’s the output of an assumption, and it has a ceiling.

The upside is capped — and that’s a feature

Bitcoin’s price isn’t set by hope. Over a long enough horizon it’s set by how much monetary premium it pulls away from other assets — the portion of gold, bonds, real estate, and cash that people hold not to use, but simply to store value across time.

That pool is enormous, but it is finite. There is only so much store-of-value wealth in existence to migrate. Divide the share you think Bitcoin absorbs by a supply that is fixed at 21 million coins, and you get a price. At $13 million per coin, the whole network is worth on the order of $270 trillion in today’s dollars — a large fraction of global store-of-value wealth, but a fraction. Change your assumption about how much premium migrates and the number moves. What the number cannot do is run away to infinity.

Bitcoin cannot be worth a quadrillion dollars per coin in today’s dollars. There isn’t that much monetary premium on Earth to absorb. So the upside is bounded — not by sentiment, but by arithmetic. That’s what makes it a bet worth sizing carefully rather than a lottery ticket: capped, known downside on one side; a large but calculable ceiling on the other.

I’ll admit the timeline is the soft part. It might take 15 or 20 years to get there. But here’s the thing most people miss — they already have that long. They’re saving for retirement anyway. They’re going to wait thirty years regardless. If you’re already waiting, waiting a little longer in an asset with this asymmetry costs you almost nothing and could change the outcome entirely.

Where the price comes from right now

None of that describes today’s price. Today’s price is driven by sentiment and speculation. It’s reflexive — it goes up because it’s going up, and down because it’s going down. That’s not a flaw I’m hiding; it’s just what the price is in this phase.

Underneath the speculation is a floor, and the floor is driven by adoption. The people who buy every week regardless of price — the DCA crowd, people like me — don’t chase the euphoric spikes. We can’t set the top. But steady, price-insensitive buying does set a base. Historically that base has tracked something like the 200-week moving average: far below the manic highs, and Bitcoin has spent very little of its life beneath it. I won’t call it a guaranteed floor — the 2022 bear market pierced it by roughly 25% for a few months, so it’s a gravity zone, not a law of physics — but the mechanism is real. Persistent buyers put a bid under an asset that speculators periodically abandon.

So the two prices live at once: the euphoric price sentiment prints on the way up, and the adoption price the steady buyers can actually defend. The gap between them is the volatility everyone’s afraid of.

The part nobody wants to hear

Most people never engage with any of this, and I understand why. They have more immediate concerns — rent, childcare, the next paycheck. Monetary theory feels like a luxury when you’re focused on this month.

But here’s what I’d gently point out: a lot of the immediate concerns are downstream of the money itself. Asset prices outrunning wages, so a house costs more years of labor than it did for your parents. Savings that quietly lose ground every year you hold them. A whole economy pulled toward the short term because holding cash is a slow leak.

That last one has a name: time preference — how much you value having something now versus later. When your money holds its value, when a dollar saved today still buys as much in twenty years, the rational move is to defer, save, and build things that pay off slowly. Good money lowers your time preference; it makes patience pay. Debased money does the reverse. When every dollar you hold is quietly bleeding out, saving becomes a mistake and spending now becomes the smart play. That raises time preference across an entire society — and a high-time-preference society stops building for a future it no longer trusts its money to reach. Shorter horizons, thinner savings, more debt, less patience, less long-term anything. You can watch it happen without ever naming the cause.

People point at these problems and blame a dozen other things. Many of them trace back to a money that can be expanded at will. Most people never make the connection, because the tax is invisible — it doesn’t show up as a line item, it shows up as a life that costs more than it should.

You don’t have to accept the whole worldview to notice the mechanism. That’s all I’m asking anyone to do: notice it.

The long-term vision

Here’s where I think this goes.

Bitcoin is in a monetization phase. An asset that starts with no monetary value and slowly acquires it doesn’t move in a straight line — it moves in violent, speculative waves, because the market is arguing, in real time, about what it’s worth. That argument is the volatility. Every cycle, a little more of the monetary premium gets absorbed and becomes permanent. The floor rises. The speculative froth on top gets smaller relative to the base underneath it.

The endpoint isn’t a number screaming upward forever. The endpoint is boring. As the market cap grows and the premium fills in, the swings compress. The thing that today feels like a rollercoaster settles into a savings technology — something you hold the way earlier generations held land or gold, without checking the price every morning. The speculators leave because there’s no longer a fast trade in it. What’s left is money that holds its value across decades because no one can print more.

When that happens, the adoption price and the market price finally converge. There’s no more gap for volatility to live in. Bitcoin stops being a bet and becomes what it was always trying to be: a place to put the economic energy you earned this year and get it back, intact, in twenty.

And there’s a symmetry worth sitting with. The people who understand this early are the ones who get the outsized return — but they’re also the ones building the floor. Every steady buyer accumulating through the fear is being paid for being early and pulling the endpoint closer. The adoption that eventually makes Bitcoin boring is the same adoption that makes it valuable now. So early understanding is rewarded twice: once in your own return, and once in how much sooner the whole thing arrives. You’re not just front-running the monetization — you’re part of it.

And when it arrives, the question itself changes. Today everyone asks what one Bitcoin is worth in dollars, because dollars are the measuring stick. The endpoint is where the stick flips. You stop asking how many dollars your Bitcoin is worth and start asking what it buys — and under a money that can’t be printed, that answer grows every year instead of shrinking. As the world gets more productive, things get cheaper measured against a fixed supply. Your savings don’t just hold their ground; they quietly buy more of the world each year you leave them alone.

That’s the actual invitation. Not get rich in dollars and cash out — help build the thing that makes “cash out” a strange idea, because the money is finally worth keeping. Every person who understands it early pulls that day closer for everyone else.

That’s the whole thesis. Not “it only goes up.” It goes up and down violently, for now, for a reason — and the reason ends. Plan for the down. Size for the zero. And understand that the volatility scaring everyone off is simply the price of being early to something that intends to become boring.

I’ve never said Bitcoin only goes up. What I say is less comforting and more useful: assume the worst, size for it, and let the math do the rest. But once the downside is handled, you’re free to look past the price at what’s being built — a money that can’t be debased, savings that buy more each year instead of less, a future that arrives a little sooner every time one more person understands it. That’s the part worth joining. Not the trade — the thing on the other side of it. It’s early, and there’s room. Come help build it.

Michael Saylor’s Recommended Reading

Posted on August 1, 2026 by hooglanda

One problem I find with X (or Facebook etc) is that it’s VERY hard to find posts after the fact. Even if you refresh you may never find a post again.

X has an “articles” tab as of today which may or may go away in the future, but it can still be hard to find stuff. I wanted to preserve this reading list recommendation by Michael Saylor for myself and others in the event it is lost to the algorithm

Below is a link to the original post. Again, none of this is mine but I want to preserve it’s searchability!

Upgrade the World – A Civilizational Curriculum for Leaders – By Michael Saylor

I. Civilizational Memory

Will and Ariel Durant

The historical backbone of this curriculum is Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, together with their concise synthesis, The Lessons of History.

The eleven-volume series begins with the civilizations of Asia and the ancient Near East, then proceeds through Greece, Rome, medieval civilization, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon.

The Durants show civilization as a dynamic system. Religion, family, commerce, banking, war, philosophy, technology, law, art, institutions, and exceptional individuals interact across centuries.

Ideas become institutions. Institutions accumulate power. Prosperity generates complexity. Success creates capability, but also complacency.

1. The Lessons of History

Estimated reading time: 3–5 hours

This is the overture and the coda.

The Durants compress a lifetime of historical study into a short examination of geography, biology, morality, religion, economics, government, war, and social change.

Read it once before beginning the larger series, as a map of the territory. Read it again after completing the curriculum, when each observation will carry the weight of examples.

2. Our Oriental Heritage

Estimated reading time: 31–38 hours

This volume establishes the Eastern and Near Eastern foundations of civilization, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, and Japan.

It corrects an excessively Western conception of history. Writing, law, mathematics, bureaucracy, religion, commerce, philosophy, and imperial administration developed across many civilizations over thousands of years.

The first lesson of civilizational history is humility: no culture invented civilization by itself.

3. The Life of Greece

Estimated reading time: 22–27 hours

This volume examines the Greek polis, philosophy, science, democracy, tragedy, sculpture, architecture, political rivalry, and war.

The Greek achievement was not merely a collection of great ideas. It was the creation of environments in which explanation, argument, criticism, and civic participation could flourish.

It also demonstrates how faction, rhetoric, envy, and strategic overreach can destroy a society rich in intelligence and culture.

4. Caesar and Christ

Estimated reading time: 22–27 hours

This volume traces the Roman Republic, Roman law, imperial administration, social order, military power, and the rise of Christianity within the empire.

Rome demonstrates that durable civilization requires more than conquest. It requires logistics, infrastructure, law, administration, legitimacy, and a shared conception of order.

Christianity’s emergence within the Roman system also shows how an initially marginal idea can eventually reorganize the moral structure of an empire.

5. The Age of Faith

Estimated reading time: 35–43 hours

This volume examines Christianity, Islam, Byzantium, feudalism, monasticism, universities, scholastic philosophy, and the institutions that preserved order through political fragmentation.

The period commonly described as the Dark Ages was also an age of institutional reconstruction. Religious orders preserved knowledge. Commercial networks reemerged. Universities formed. Law evolved. Competing authorities constrained one another.

Read it to understand how civilization survives when centralized political order weakens or collapses.

6. The Renaissance

Estimated reading time: 23–28 hours

This volume shows how cities, commerce, banking, patronage, humanism, and recovered antiquity released extraordinary creative energy.

The Renaissance was not merely an artistic movement. It was an economic and institutional phenomenon.

Capital, urban autonomy, competition, and patronage created environments in which talent could compound.

7. The Reformation

Estimated reading time: 30–37 hours

This volume explores conscience, printing, religious authority, political centralization, and the destruction of a unified Western Christendom.

The printing press radically reduced the cost of distributing ideas. Dissent became scalable. Competing interpretations of truth escaped centralized control.

The Reformation demonstrates both the liberating and destabilizing effects of information technology.

8. The Age of Reason Begins

Estimated reading time: 22–26 hours

This volume follows the transition from confessional conflict toward scientific inquiry, political realism, and the centralized state.

Civilization began to separate questions settled by authority from questions requiring observation, experimentation, and reason.

At the same time, the state acquired greater capacity to tax, administer, regulate, mobilize, and wage war.

9. The Age of Louis XIV

Estimated reading time: 24–29 hours

This volume studies absolutism, court culture, public finance, administration, warfare, and the European balance of power.

Louis XIV’s France demonstrates the power and danger of centralization.

The state became culturally and militarily formidable, but grandeur brought fiscal exhaustion and institutional brittleness.

10. The Age of Voltaire

Estimated reading time: 24–29 hours

This volume examines the Enlightenment critique of inherited authority, superstition, intolerance, and institutional privilege.

Authority increasingly had to justify itself through reason rather than tradition alone.

Read it to understand the intellectual foundations of liberalism, religious tolerance, scientific confidence, and the modern challenge to arbitrary power.

11. Rousseau and Revolution

Estimated reading time: 32–39 hours

This volume explores the collision among reason, sentiment, equality, legitimacy, and revolutionary pressure.

Rousseau redirected political thought toward authenticity, popular sovereignty, equality, and collective will.

Those ideas inspired liberation, but also supplied new justifications for coercion in the name of the people.

12. The Age of Napoleon

Estimated reading time: 26–31 hours

This volume shows how revolutionary energy became empire, codified law, administrative modernization, nationalism, and continental war.

Napoleon institutionalized many achievements of the Revolution while subordinating them to military ambition and personal power.

Read it as a study of leadership, state capacity, meritocracy, propaganda, strategic genius, and the tendency of concentrated power to outrun its limits.

The Durants should be read as architects of a grand synthesis, not as the final authority on every historical detail. Some scholarship and framing are dated. Their enduring value is scale: they teach the reader to see civilization as the interaction of religion, family, commerce, war, technology, art, institutions, and individuals over centuries.

II. Geography, Ecology, and Uneven Development

Jared Diamond

13. Guns, Germs, and Steel

Estimated reading time: 18–24 hours

Diamond asks a fundamental question: Why did wealth, military power, technology, and political organization develop unevenly across human societies?

His model emphasizes geography, climate, food production, domesticable plants and animals, disease exposure, population density, continental orientation, and the diffusion of technology.

This perspective matters because leaders routinely overestimate intention and underestimate inherited conditions.

A society does not choose its geography, natural resources, navigable rivers, disease environment, or initial inventory of domesticable species. These factors shape population, trade, military capacity, institutional development, and the rate at which knowledge can spread.

The book also supplies an important corrective to racial explanations of conquest. Differences in civilizational outcomes do not require differences in human intelligence or worth.

But Guns, Germs, and Steel should be treated as a model, not a complete causal theory.

Geography influences history. It does not write history by itself. Human agency, institutions, culture, leadership, ideology, trade, property rights, and deliberate acts of conquest remain consequential.

Some scholars have criticized Diamond for environmental determinism and for reducing the role of human decisions and Indigenous agency. That criticism should be included in the reading, not hidden from it. A persuasive grand theory is most educational when the reader also learns where it overreaches. (

Apple

)

III. War, Strategy, and Republican Power

War is one of civilization’s oldest and most destructive institutions.

It has created states, dissolved empires, accelerated technology, rearranged borders, destroyed capital, and transferred power across cultures.

A leader who does not understand war may start one believing it will be brief, rational, and controllable. History repeatedly demonstrates otherwise.

War is a machine that consumes lives, energy, capital, legitimacy, information, and time. It produces second-order effects its architects rarely anticipate.

The governing rule should be simple:

Do not start a war you cannot win, finance, control, and end on acceptable terms.

John Keegan

14. A History of Warfare

Estimated reading time: 17–21 hours

Keegan examines warfare from the Bronze Age through the nuclear era. He studies not only battles and generals, but also culture, psychology, metallurgy, fortification, horses, weaponry, logistics, military organization, ritual, and the warrior ethos.

His most provocative argument is that war cannot always be understood as a rational continuation of political policy. War predates the modern state and often expresses culture, identity, ritual, honor, religion, and institutional momentum.

That argument should not simply be accepted. Keegan is deliberately challenging Clausewitz, and his reading of Clausewitz has itself been challenged.

The value lies in the confrontation.

Clausewitz teaches us to connect military action to political objectives. Keegan reminds us that violence can escape rational control and become culturally self-perpetuating.

Read Keegan to understand why people fight, how technologies alter the scale of violence, how military institutions acquire independent interests, and why wars often continue after their original political logic has disintegrated. (

PenguinRandomhouse.com

)

Livy’s History of Rome

Livy originally wrote 142 books, of which 35 substantially survive. A practical English-language route is the four-volume sequence covering Books 1–10 and 21–45.

Rome remains one of civilization’s greatest laboratories of institutional development, military adaptation, civic identity, political ambition, strategic endurance, and moral decline.

15. The Early History of Rome, Books 1–5

Estimated reading time: 16–21 hours

These books cover Rome’s founding myths, monarchy, the establishment of the Republic, class conflict, civic religion, and early military struggles.

The distinction between myth and documented history is often uncertain. That uncertainty is itself useful.

Founding stories reveal what a civilization believes about itself, the virtues it rewards, the crimes it fears, and the legitimacy it claims for its institutions.

16. Rome and Italy, Books 6–10

Estimated reading time: 12–16 hours

These books examine institutional endurance, internal conflict, military adaptation, and Rome’s consolidation of Italy.

Rome’s strength did not arise from uninterrupted victory. It developed through defeat, adaptation, alliance-building, discipline, and the ability to absorb other communities into differentiated systems of citizenship and obligation.

Institutions can become stronger through adversity, provided failure produces adaptation rather than denial.

17. The War with Hannibal, Books 21–30

Estimated reading time: 23–30 hours

This is one of history’s great studies of strategy, leadership, logistics, resilience, and survival after repeated catastrophe.

Hannibal repeatedly defeated Roman armies and threatened the existence of the Republic. Rome survived because its political system, manpower, alliance structure, strategic depth, and willingness to absorb losses exceeded what tactical brilliance alone could overcome.

These books distinguish battlefield genius from civilizational capacity.

They should be required reading for anyone responsible for an institution that must survive extreme stress.

18. Rome and the Mediterranean, Books 31–45

Estimated reading time: 22–29 hours

These books examine diplomacy, territorial expansion, great-power rivalry, and Rome’s growing domination of the Mediterranean.

Victory creates its own dangers.

Foreign wealth, provincial administration, military prestige, and political ambition alter the incentives of republican institutions. A political system can be transformed by success long before its constitution formally changes.

Livy is not a neutral modern historian. He is a literary and moral historian who selected stories partly for their civic meaning. Read him both to reconstruct Rome’s development and to understand how Romans conceived virtue, legitimacy, ambition, corruption, duty, and decline.

IV. Uncertainty, Fragility, and Responsibility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Incerto

Taleb’s five-volume Incerto investigates luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making under incomplete knowledge.

The central lesson is not merely that prediction is difficult.

It is that exposure matters more than confidence.

When the future is uncertain, the intelligent response is not simply to construct a more elaborate forecast. It is to limit ruin, preserve optionality, decentralize experimentation, align incentives, and design systems capable of learning from variation.

19. Fooled by Randomness

Estimated reading time: 10–13 hours

This book teaches the reader to distinguish skill from luck.

Success produces stories. Survivors explain why they prevailed, while failures disappear from the sample. The resulting narratives systematically overstate foresight, talent, and control.

Read it to recognize survivorship bias, selection effects, narrative fallacy, and the human tendency to extract certainty from noisy outcomes.

20. The Black Swan

Estimated reading time: 14–17 hours

This book explains why rare, consequential events dominate history even though conventional models tend to ignore them.

After an extreme event, institutions and commentators construct explanations that make it appear predictable. Before it occurs, the same institutions frequently assign it negligible probability.

The absence of prior evidence is not evidence of impossibility.

Design systems around the consequences of being wrong, not merely the probability that your forecast is right.

21. The Bed of Procrustes

Estimated reading time: 5–8 hours

The title refers to the mythological figure who forced travelers to fit his bed by stretching or amputating them.

Taleb uses the metaphor for institutions that mutilate reality until it fits a theory, metric, model, mandate, or ideology.

The book is best read slowly. Its aphorisms become more useful as the reader acquires real-world experience.

22. Antifragile

Estimated reading time: 16–20 hours

Resilience means surviving disorder. Antifragility means improving because of it.

This book moves from prediction toward design. It examines systems that benefit from variation, redundancy, decentralization, stress, experimentation, and small failures.

Highly optimized systems often appear efficient until an unanticipated shock reveals that all of their resilience has been removed.

Efficiency without survivability is a form of hidden fragility.

23. Skin in the Game

Estimated reading time: 9–11 hours

Those who exercise authority, give advice, design policy, or impose risk should share exposure to the consequences.

This is not merely an ethical preference. It is an information mechanism.

People make different decisions when failure has personal consequences. Systems become dangerous when decision-makers capture the upside while transferring the downside to others.

The practical doctrine of the Incerto is straightforward:

Avoid ruin. Preserve optionality. Encourage experimentation. Permit small failures. Distrust unsupported certainty. Require decision-makers to share the consequences.

V. Human Action, Liberty, and Power

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard supplies the theoretical spine of the curriculum.

His work spans economic theory, political philosophy, intellectual history, monetary theory, and American history.

Together, these books ask how individuals act, how markets coordinate, how property and prices emerge, how intervention changes incentives, and how political power expands.

Rothbard should be read critically rather than devotionally. His framework is forceful and explicit. That is part of its value.

He compels the reader to distinguish voluntary exchange from coercion, economic coordination from political command, property from privilege, and market discovery from administrative imposition.

24. Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market

Estimated reading time: 65–80 hours

This is the theoretical foundation.

Rothbard begins with purposeful human action and develops a systematic account of value, exchange, prices, production, capital, interest, money, banking, monopoly, business cycles, and government intervention.

Power and Market extends the analysis to taxation, regulation, price controls, monopoly grants, subsidies, and other forms of political intervention.

The book teaches a central lesson: a rule does not abolish the incentives or scarcity it ignores. It redirects behavior into evasion, substitution, black markets, corruption, or failure.

25. The Ethics of Liberty

Estimated reading time: 16–20 hours

This book develops a normative framework around self-ownership, property, consent, natural law, coercion, punishment, and political authority.

Economic efficiency alone cannot determine whether an action is just.

The book forces readers to identify the moral assumptions hidden inside political and economic arguments.

26. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume I: Economic Thought Before Adam Smith

Estimated reading time: 21–27 hours

This volume examines ancient thought, medieval scholasticism, natural law, Spanish thinkers, French economics, and the development of ideas concerning value, exchange, property, money, and interest.

It challenges the conventional narrative that economics began in recognizable form with Adam Smith and British classical economics.

Read it as both intellectual history and revisionism.

27. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume II: Classical Economics

Estimated reading time: 20–26 hours

This volume examines British classical economics, French liberalism, Marxism, utilitarianism, monetary debates, and nineteenth-century political economy.

Rothbard is particularly critical of theoretical systems that replace subjective value and individual action with aggregate categories or mechanistic models.

For anyone interested in Bitcoin, the two volumes provide context for recurring debates over sound money, monetary sovereignty, banking privilege, inflation, and state power.

28. Conceived in Liberty, Volume I

Estimated reading time: 18–22 hours

The first volume examines colonial origins and competing systems of settlement, religion, property, political control, and local autonomy.

The colonies did not emerge from a single coherent project. They developed through conflicting commercial, religious, imperial, and local arrangements.

Initial rules governing property and authority can shape political culture for centuries.

29. Conceived in Liberty, Volume II

Estimated reading time: 10–13 hours

This volume examines colonial society during a period of relative imperial neglect.

Local institutions, commerce, and traditions of self-government developed partly because distant authority lacked the ability or incentive to exercise constant control.

Liberty often emerges not from centralized design, but from spaces in which centralized power is absent, divided, constrained, or inattentive.

30. Conceived in Liberty, Volume III

Estimated reading time: 12–16 hours

This volume covers the imperial crisis and the road to the American Revolution.

Taxes, trade restrictions, military occupation, constitutional arguments, and competing theories of sovereignty transformed administrative disputes into a struggle over first principles.

A conflict over policy becomes revolutionary when institutions lose the ability to settle disagreement without escalating coercion.

31. Conceived in Liberty, Volume IV

Estimated reading time: 16–21 hours

This volume examines revolution, war, independence, and the challenge of preserving liberty during a national emergency.

Wars for freedom often centralize the powers against which they are fought. Governments demand revenue, conscription, regulation, secrecy, and executive authority in the name of survival.

The tension between liberty and mobilization is permanent.

32. Conceived in Liberty, Volume V: The New Republic, 1784–1791

Estimated reading time: 11–14 hours

The fifth volume examines the postwar republic, the Constitution, centralization, and the Washington administration.

It raises a foundational political question:

How much centralized capacity is necessary to preserve order, and how much eventually threatens the liberty it was created to protect?

Rothbard’s strength is consistency. That is also where readers should apply the greatest scrutiny. Separate analysis from rhetoric, test historical interpretations against competing accounts, and expose the framework to the strongest opposing arguments.

VI. Capital, Enterprise, and Institutional Power

Ron Chernow

Economic theory can make capital appear abstract. Chernow restores the people, institutions, conflicts, and moral ambiguity behind it.

Titan and The House of Morgan examine two complementary forms of capitalism: industrial capital and financial capital.

Capital is not merely money.

It is accumulated trust, knowledge, competence, organization, relationships, reputation, information, and productive capacity.

33. Titan

Estimated reading time: 24–31 hours

Titan is Chernow’s biography of John D. Rockefeller and the development of Standard Oil.

It is a study of industrial scale, vertical integration, operational discipline, logistics, accounting, pricing, competition, monopoly, reputation, philanthropy, and public legitimacy.

Rockefeller did not merely accumulate assets. He constructed an integrated system capable of reducing costs, imposing standards, coordinating infrastructure, and outlasting competitors.

The discipline that produced extraordinary efficiency also generated extraordinary concentrations of economic power.

Read Titan neither as hagiography nor indictment. Read it as a case study in how enterprises scale and how private capability interacts with public authority.

34. The House of Morgan

Estimated reading time: 24–31 hours

This book traces the Morgan banking dynasty and the development of modern finance.

It examines relationships among banks, corporations, governments, markets, central banks, wars, regulation, and financial crises.

The House of Morgan operated near the boundary between private institution and public utility. Its influence rested not only on financial capital, but on trust, networks, information, discretion, and reputation accumulated across generations.

The lives are interesting. The institutions are more important.

VII. Energy, Knowledge, and Technological Transformation

A theory of civilization is incomplete if it ignores energy, knowledge, or technology.

Energy determines the physical capacity to act.

Knowledge determines which actions can be imagined.

Technology converts knowledge into scalable capability.

Markets and institutions determine whether that capability is deployed productively, suppressed, monopolized, or weaponized.

Daniel Yergin

35. The Prize

Estimated reading time: 27–36 hours

Yergin follows the history of oil and its relationship to industrialization, transportation, warfare, national power, corporate organization, and the world economy.

Modern civilization rests on energy abundance.

Agriculture, manufacturing, sanitation, transportation, communications, computation, defense, and urban life all depend on the ability to convert energy into useful work.

Oil transformed geography and geopolitics. It created new corporations, altered military strategy, elevated some states, weakened others, and became inseparable from national security.

Every financial, political, and digital system remains grounded in the physical world.

Money coordinates claims on resources. Energy makes those resources useful.

David Deutsch

36. The Beginning of Infinity

Estimated reading time: 16–22 hours

Deutsch examines explanation, criticism, fallibility, knowledge creation, and the conditions under which progress can continue.

Problems are inevitable. Solutions are not guaranteed, but they can continue to emerge wherever institutions permit conjecture, experimentation, criticism, and error correction.

Progress is neither automatic nor finite.

It depends on a culture in which bad explanations can be challenged and better ones can replace them.

Yergin explains the capacity to act. Deutsch explains the capacity to discover. Energy without knowledge is brute force. Knowledge without energy remains unrealized potential.

Michael Saylor

37. The Mobile Wave

Estimated reading time: 9–12 hours

I include my own book with some hesitation.

It belongs here for a specific reason: it is an applied exercise in science, technology, and society.

Written in 2012, The Mobile Wave attempted to reason from first principles about what would happen when computing became mobile, software dematerialized products and services, and billions of people gained continuous access to networked intelligence.

The book examines how a general-purpose technology can reorganize education, commerce, media, payments, healthcare, transportation, employment, and the structure of enterprises.

Do not read it as an authority.

Read it as an auditable forecast.

Ask which predictions were correct, which were incomplete, which second-order consequences were missed, and which analytical methods proved useful.

Technological forecasting is not primarily about predicting a particular device. It is about identifying a new capability, understanding its economic advantages, and tracing what happens when that capability scales through a competitive society.

The larger lesson is that a digital transformation rarely preserves the existing institution and merely makes it faster. It frequently dematerializes the institution, redistributes power, changes its economics, and creates an entirely different system. (

Apple

)

VIII. Sound Money and Bitcoin

Air, water, food, and energy sustain biological life.

Money coordinates economic life.

A civilization needs clean money: a monetary system capable of preserving the economic energy generated by labor, ingenuity, and capital across time and space.

Corrupt the monetary system, and every price, contract, investment, and long-term calculation is affected.

Saifedean Ammous

38. The Bitcoin Standard

Estimated reading time: 10–13 hours

The Bitcoin Standard places Bitcoin inside the history of monetary technologies.

It examines why societies adopted shells, stones, metals, coins, gold, paper claims, government currency, and eventually digital money. It asks what properties allow a good to transmit value across time and space and what happens when a monetary system can be expanded or manipulated by privileged institutions.

The book then presents Bitcoin as digital hard money: scarce, global, decentralized, and governed by a protocol rather than the discretion of a political authority.

Its greatest contribution is the monetary framework.

Some of its broader cultural conclusions should be treated as arguments rather than universal laws, but its central question is indispensable:

What form of money best preserves individual choice, capital, and economic energy across generations?

Read it after Rothbard, Yergin, Deutsch, and The Mobile Wave.

Rothbard explains money and political power.

Yergin explains energy.

Deutsch explains knowledge.

The Mobile Wave explains digital transformation.

The Bitcoin Standard brings those themes together around a monetary network.

Then read Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper. Commentary supplies context, but the engineer ultimately returns to the specification and the machine itself. (

Wiley-VCH

)

Read Adversarially

These books should not be read for ideological confirmation.

Durant should be tested against modern scholarship.

Diamond should be balanced against human agency, institutions, and culture.

Keegan should be read alongside Clausewitz.

Livy should be distinguished from modern historiography.

Rothbard should be confronted with the strongest arguments for constitutional government and public authority.

Taleb’s skepticism should itself be subjected to skepticism.

Chernow’s protagonists should be studied rather than worshipped.

Yergin’s history should not be mistaken for a prediction that the future must resemble the past.

Deutsch’s optimism should be understood as conditional on institutions capable of criticism and correction.

The Mobile Wave should be judged against the world that followed it.

The Bitcoin Standard should be tested against the white paper, the code, the network, monetary history, and competing theories of money.

No author should become a substitute for thought.

Read every work with three questions:

What does this framework reveal that others miss?
Where does it simplify reality too aggressively?
What decisions would change if it were correct?

The purpose of reading is not to memorize conclusions.

It is to improve the ability to perceive reality, identify causality, recognize incentives, distinguish signal from noise, and act responsibly.

Counterweights and Primary Sources

Several additional works naturally extend the core curriculum.

On War, by Carl von Clausewitz

Read at least the major sections on the nature of war, political purpose, friction, uncertainty, and the relationship between defense and offense.

Clausewitz is the necessary counterweight to Keegan. A leader must understand both war’s rational strategic purpose and its tendency to escape rational control.

The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

These essays present the strongest original arguments for the Constitution, federal power, institutional checks, representative government, and the management of faction.

They are the natural counterweight to Rothbard’s account of the Constitution and the early federal government.

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville

Tocqueville examines democratic equality, civil society, religion, local government, individualism, majority power, associations, and administrative centralization.

He explains both the productive strength of democratic society and the subtle pressures toward conformity and dependency.

What Has Government Done to Our Money?, by Murray Rothbard

This is the most accessible entry into Rothbard’s monetary thought.

It introduces the development of money, inflation, banking, monetary competition, and government control over currency.

The Mystery of Banking, by Murray Rothbard

This provides a more detailed account of commercial banking, central banking, reserves, credit expansion, and monetary intervention.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto

The white paper is not a substitute for understanding the functioning network, but it is the primary conceptual specification.

A technological system should ultimately be studied through its original design, implementation, operation, and incentives, not merely through commentary about it.

The Governing Idea

History without theory becomes anecdote.

Theory without history becomes ideology.

Technology without ethics becomes domination.

Rules that ignore incentives produce evasion, corruption, and failure.

Models without respect for uncertainty create fragility.

Capital without accountability becomes predation.

Power without limits becomes coercion.

Energy without knowledge is brute force.

Knowledge without energy remains potential.

Knowledge without liberty stagnates.

Liberty without order becomes chaos.

Order without liberty extinguishes initiative.

Money without integrity corrupts every long-term calculation.

Good intentions without competence produce unintended consequences.

The leaders of the future will operate machines of unprecedented scale: corporations, states, markets, energy grids, artificial intelligence systems, communication networks, and monetary protocols.

Their decisions will propagate farther and faster than those of any previous generation.

They need more than intelligence.

They need memory, judgment, humility, courage, discipline, and sound models.

My mission is the digital transformation of energy, matter, property, capital, commerce, and trust.

Bitcoin is central to that project because it sits at the intersection of many of the forces studied in this curriculum: money and power, energy and information, property and trust, fixed rules and free markets, individual sovereignty and institutional authority.

To understand Bitcoin fully, one must understand what it protects, what it replaces, what it consumes, what it coordinates, and which forms of power it constrains.

The natural allies in this mission are not merely technologists or investors.

They are leaders who understand civilization well enough to preserve what works, reject what fails, and build what comes next.

Read to remember.

Read to reason.

Read to build.

Upgrade the world.

Trump’s Character and Leadership: The Pattern of Self-Dealing, Broken Promises, and Pardons-for-Access

Posted on August 1, 2026 by hooglanda

There’s a habit in political writing of treating every Trump controversy as its own isolated storm — a scandal that flares, dominates a news cycle, and fades before the next one lands. Taken one at a time, each can be argued away: this one is exaggerated, that one is contested, the other is just how politics works. But step back far enough and the individual episodes stop looking like weather and start looking like climate. There’s a pattern, and the pattern is the point.

What follows is not a list of grievances. It’s an attempt to describe a consistent operating style — in his personal conduct, his promises, his relationship to accountability, and the way public power flows toward private benefit — and to ask what that style means for the quality of his leadership. Every factual claim below is sourced. Where the popular version of a story overstates the case, I’ve said so, because an argument that needs exaggeration isn’t worth making.

Character, on the record

Start with the one thing that isn’t a matter of interpretation: in 2024, a New York jury convicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records (People v. Trump). The underlying conduct was a scheme to bury a story before the 2016 election — hush money paid to adult-film performer Stormy Daniels over an alleged 2006 encounter, which took place shortly after his wife gave birth to their son. Trump denies the affair. He does not get to deny the conviction; it is the first felony conviction of a former or sitting U.S. president in American history.

The personal history rhymes with it. The affair with Marla Maples during his first marriage is well documented — she became the second wife. You don’t have to litigate every episode to notice the common thread: a pattern of treating other people — women, employees, voters — as instruments, and a confidence that the rules bend around him. Hold that thread. It runs through everything else — and nowhere more sharply than in the way he now positions himself as a protector of women.

Protecting women — from everyone but him

One of the load-bearing themes of Trump’s politics is the protection of women and girls. He has campaigned and governed on keeping transgender women out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports — framed explicitly as safeguarding the safety and privacy of women and girls in the places they undress and compete. Set that posture against the record of the man striking it.

This is the same man a Manhattan jury found liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll — in a department store dressing room, in 1996. A federal appeals court upheld that verdict, the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, and in July 2026 Carroll received the roughly $5.6 million she was awarded; a second jury added $83.3 million for his defamation of her, an award he is still appealing. He denies her account. But the finding stands: the literal setting of today’s women’s-safety panic — the changing room — is the exact setting in which a jury concluded he assaulted a woman.

It is also the same man heard on the 2005 Access Hollywood recording bragging about grabbing women by the genitals without consent, and heard on Howard Stern’s show boasting that as pageant owner he could walk into contestants’ dressing rooms while they changed — including at Miss Teen USA, where some contestants were minors. In upholding the Carroll verdict, the appeals court noted that jurors could reasonably infer from that tape and the testimony of other women — including Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff — a pattern of abrupt, nonconsensual physical advances.

And it is the same man whose name appears hundreds of times in the released Jeffrey Epstein files, who kept a years-long friendship with a man who trafficked more than a thousand girls and women, and at whose Mar-a-Lago club an Epstein accuser says she was recruited as a teenager. To be precise, because precision is what makes this stick: Trump maintains he cut ties with Epstein long ago, and he has not been accused of specific wrongdoing in the Epstein case; released emails in which Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls” are Epstein’s words, and Trump denies them. What is not deniable is that, having campaigned on releasing these files, he obstructed their release once in office — hardly the move of a man confident the record clears him.

Put it together and the “protecting women” posture reads less like conviction than costume. It casts a small and vulnerable minority as the threat to women in changing rooms, while the person striking the pose is himself a court-adjudicated abuser who bragged about walking into those very rooms. You can hold any view you like about transgender participation in sports and still notice that the messenger has disqualified himself as a credible steward of women’s safety. This isn’t concern for women. It’s a man using women as a shield — the same instrumental use of people that runs through everything else here.

Promises as tactics, not commitments

A promise tells you what someone wants you to believe. What they do afterward tells you what they meant.

The Epstein files. Trump campaigned on releasing the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. In office, his Justice Department spent 2025 narrowing and delaying disclosure. Only after a near-unanimous Congress forced his hand — the House voted 427–1 — did he sign the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025, a law that on its face forbids withholding records for “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.” Then his DOJ announced it would miss the deadline to release them all. Promise, obstruct, get cornered, slow-walk. The transparency was never the goal; it was the applause line.

The wars he wasn’t going to fight. Trump ran as the candidate who would keep America out of foreign wars and warned that his opponents would drag the country into catastrophe. Then he ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025 without congressional authorization, and by February 2026 the United States was in a full-scale war with Iran that is still killing American service members as of this writing. You can argue the strikes were justified. You cannot argue he did what he said he would do.

Contempt for the machinery of accountability

The most revealing minute of Trump’s first term wasn’t a speech. It was a phone call.

On January 2, 2021, he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressed him to “find 11,780 votes” — one more than he needed to reverse his loss in the state. It was recorded. You can read the full transcript and hear the audio the Washington Post obtained. This is a man who lost an election asking a state official to manufacture the exact margin of victory, then suggesting the official might be committing a crime by refusing. It formed the basis of a Georgia racketeering indictment. Leadership includes accepting outcomes you don’t like. This was the opposite instinct, on tape.

Where the money goes

Here is where character stops being a matter of private morality and becomes a matter of public cost.

Neither of Trump’s adult sons holds any government office. Yet since his second term began, Donald Jr. and Eric have become linked to at least ten companies with military applications that have collectively received about $3.7 billion in federal funds — three of which had no federal contracts at all before this term. Donald Jr. sits on the advisory board of a drone-parts maker with a multimillion-dollar personal stake while the Army awards that company contracts. ProPublica reported that the White House itself intervened to secure a $620 million deal for a company tied to Trump Jr. The only formal scrutiny so far comes from a letter by House Oversight Democrats — the minority party — asking the Defense Department’s own inspector general to investigate.

To be precise: no one has proven a crime here. Conflict of interest and the appearance of impropriety are not, by themselves, illegal. But notice what makes that “no crime” claim possible — the executive branch that would investigate is run by the family’s patriarch.

The double standard, in one comparison

The cleanest way to see the hypocrisy is to set the sons beside Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden’s signature business “scandal” was a board seat at a Ukrainian energy company in 2014 — a lucrative foreign directorship with no U.S. government contracts anywhere in it. Republicans made that seat the centerpiece of a years-long impeachment inquiry into his father. He was then prosecuted in two federal cases by a special counsel: convicted by a jury on three felony gun counts for lying on a purchase form about drug use, and he pleaded guilty to nine tax counts over roughly $1.4 million he had since repaid with penalties. He became the first child of a sitting president convicted of a crime — for a gun form and back taxes. His father pardoned him and was pilloried for it.

Now apply that same standard to the Trump sons: a family enrichment that is larger, contract-based, and running directly through the government their father controls — met with no prosecution, no serious investigation, and near-silence from the same people who called a no-contract board seat disqualifying corruption. The point isn’t that the sons are criminals. It’s that the accountability applied to one presidential son has simply evaporated for the others, and the deciding variable is who holds the pardon pen.

Justice for sale: the Walczak pardon

If you want a single episode that fuses the character and the corruption, it’s this one.

Paul Walczak owned South Florida nursing homes. According to the Justice Department, he withheld more than $7 million in taxes from his employees’ paychecks — their Social Security, their Medicare, their income tax — and spent it on a yacht, luxury cars, and shopping sprees at Cartier and Saks; with his unpaid personal taxes, the total topped $10 million. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and $4.4 million in restitution. Twelve days after that sentencing, Trump pardoned him. Less than three weeks before the pardon, Walczak’s mother — a major Republican donor — had attended a $1-million-per-person dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Walczak served no prison time and owes none of the restitution. The sentencing judge had said there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich. Twelve days later, one was issued.

He stole money withheld from nursing-home workers’ own paychecks. Hunter Biden filled out a gun form wrong. Guess which one never spent a night in a cell.

The honest counterweight

An argument is only as strong as its treatment of the other side, so here is the best case against everything above.

Trump’s defenders would say: he denies the Daniels affair, denies E. Jean Carroll’s account and is appealing the $83.3 million award, and has not been criminally charged in connection with Epstein. They would add that a person’s private conduct doesn’t invalidate a policy position, and that concern about single-sex spaces can be sincere regardless of who voices it. The Iran strikes are defensible as preempting a nuclear-armed adversary that international inspectors had found non-compliant. The Georgia case and the New York conviction are, in their telling, politicized prosecutions by opposing partisans. On the contracts, the sons hold no office, the president likely isn’t personally selecting winners, and some firms won competitive slots on the merits. Hunter Biden actually committed the crimes he was convicted of, whereas the Trump sons have not been shown to have broken any law. And pardons are a lawful, discretionary presidential power that every modern president has used for allies.

These are real points, and a fair reader should sit with them. But most of them defend the individual episodes, not the pattern — and the pattern is what should worry anyone regardless of party. Even granting every charitable interpretation, you are left with a leader who breaks his word when keeping it is inconvenient, who tried on tape to reverse an election he lost, whose family fortunes rise with the contracts his government awards, and who trades clemency to donors while a judge’s warning about justice-for-the-rich goes ignored.

What this says about leadership

Leadership is not charisma, and it is not winning. It’s the willingness to be bound — by your promises, by the law, by the outcomes you didn’t want, by a standard you’d apply to your opponents and your allies alike. The through-line of Trump’s record is a refusal to be bound by any of it. Rules are for other people; commitments are for the campaign; the machinery of accountability is an obstacle to be pressured, staffed, or pardoned around.

You can admire the results, dislike the alternatives, or believe the coverage is unfair, and still recognize the shape of the thing. A country can survive a leader with flaws. What it cannot easily survive is the normalization of the idea that power exists to serve the people who hold it. That’s the real cost here — not any single scandal, but the pattern they add up to, and what we teach ourselves to accept by looking away from it.

Sources

The Patience Subsidy -Destin Sandlin’s Smarter Scrubber, “made in America,” and the fiat-money problem the video skips

Posted on July 27, 2026 by hooglanda

Destin Sandlin (Smarter Every Day) just put out a follow-up to his “can you make a grill scrubber entirely in America?” project, and it’s worth your time: Still Trying to Make it in America . It’s a great engineering story, and an unusually honest one about how hard reshoring actually is. What follows isn’t a rebuttal — it’s the two layers I think the video stops just short of.

Destin Sandlin’s second grill-scrubber video is a genuinely good piece of engineering storytelling. He walks through three real manufacturing problems — a knob, chain mail, a laser etcher — and solves each one on camera in America. Then he asks the question the whole project was built around: can you make a product in America and be competitive in the market? His answer is “unequivocally yes.”

I don’t think his own case proves that. It proves something narrower and more interesting, and getting the difference right matters more than the scrubber does.

The number he uses to brag is the number that gives it away

Late in the video, John mentions that a normal e-commerce product converts visitors to buyers at about 3%, and the Smarter Scrubber runs around 8%. He offers this as evidence the product is special. But he immediately explains why the number is high: people aren’t stumbling onto it, they’re arriving already sold. Somebody told them about it, or they watched the video, and they came to the site to buy the thing they’d already decided to buy.

That 8% isn’t a product metric. It’s a platform metric. It’s what happens when your customer acquisition cost is roughly zero because your marketing is a 4-million-subscriber YouTube channel that people watch for fun. The single hardest, most expensive problem in almost every real business — getting a stranger to find out you exist and trust you enough to pay — was solved for him years before the scrubber existed, and solved for free.

Strip that away and the picture changes completely. A normal founder trying to do exactly what Destin did has to buy every one of those customers, can’t charge a story-driven premium because there’s no story wrapped around the product, and can’t run at a loss through years of back orders and iteration. Destin could. He self-financed years of prototyping, bought out a retiring molder’s injection machine, bought two lasers, funded a custom 16-position robotic laser cell, ran a CNC lathe in his garage, and flew to Texas — and he never once tells us what all of that cost. It is comfortably into six figures of capital before you count the years of his own labor. The whole video is an argument that reshoring is viable, delivered by a man who never discloses the size of the subsidy that made his version of it viable.

And some of that subsidy wasn’t even money. When his metal-insert supplier wouldn’t tool up in time, Titans of CNC bailed him out at a live event, for free, as a favor between YouTubers. Mantle collaborated on the mold. Those doors open because of the platform too. A machinist in Ohio with the same problem and no audience gets a quote and a lead time, not a rescue.

So the honest version of his conclusion is: a person with a large pre-sold audience, patient capital, free customer acquisition, and access to favors can manufacture a premium product in America and be competitive. That’s true. It’s also survivorship bias with the survivor doing the narrating. We’re watching the one guy who had every tailwind, and we don’t see the thousand people without a channel who tried the same thing and quietly went under. Starting any business is brutal. Starting one while voluntarily banning yourself from the cheapest inputs on earth is harder still. He absorbed that penalty with an asset almost no one else has.

And then he stops one layer short

Here’s the part that, for a blog like this one, is the real omission. Destin builds a whole toy — the “profit prioritization Perambulator” — to explain why nearly every product you’ve ever loved decays into a crappier version of itself. He borrows Cory Doctorow’s word for it, softens it to “encrappification,” and lands on a diagnosis: short-term thinking, greed, “they’re not good people.” It’s an ethical explanation. Bad actors keep choosing extraction over quality.

But look at what he’s actually describing. This isn’t a few bad apples scattered randomly. It’s a near-universal directional pressure — almost every product drifts the same way, toward extraction, over time. A random distribution of good and bad people doesn’t produce a one-way ratchet. A one-way ratchet is the signature of an incentive gradient, and you have to ask what’s tilting the floor.

The tilt is monetary. Under a currency that loses value every year, time preference is structurally raised for everyone at once. A dollar of profit today is worth measurably more than a dollar five years from now, so the rational move is always to pull profit forward and defer investment — to strip the alloy, skip the QC, offshore the tooling, and not spend three years apprenticing the tool-and-die wizard whose knowledge dies with him (a loss Destin himself mourns, without connecting it to the incentive that caused it). Cheap, abundant credit compounds this: it makes financial engineering — the debt-load-and-extract playbook — more profitable than making good things. Quarterly return pressure on public companies is the same force wearing a suit. “Short-term thinking” isn’t a character flaw people keep freely choosing. It’s the equilibrium behavior that soft money selects for. It is what a rising discount rate looks like at the scale of a whole economy.

Which is exactly why sound money is the actual lever under everything he’s pointing at. When the unit of account holds its value, the penalty on the future disappears, time preference falls, and long-term thinking stops being a luxury and becomes the default rational strategy. You don’t have to moralize businesses into building durable products and training apprentices; you stop punishing them for it. Jeff Booth’s whole argument is that technology is relentlessly deflationary and honest money would let us keep those gains instead of inflating them away — the same mechanism, viewed from the price side.

An engineer already drove this road to the end

Let me put this the way one engineer would say it to another, since I’m one too, and since Destin keeps framing the whole saga as an engineering project that turned into an ethics project. If it’s really an ethics-and-systems problem, the move isn’t to invent a hand-drawn Perambulator from scratch — it’s to go read the engineer who already thought it all the way through. That’s Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller spent his life on Destin’s exact question: how to do more with less, how to design systems that serve people instead of extracting from them. And he didn’t stop at “be less greedy.” He went to the money. His diagnosis was that fiat currency had severed money from real wealth, and that wealth is energy — not gold, not paper, but the actual capacity to do work. In Critical Path he proposed a global energy-accounting system in which costing would be expressed in kilowatt-hours, watt-hours, and watt-seconds of work. Asked once how you’d end international conflict without violence, he answered that you’d wire the planet into one energy grid, and that our new economic basis wouldn’t be gold or dollars — it would be kilowatt-hours.

That’s the missing half of Destin’s video, delivered by a fellow engineer decades early. Fuller understood that if you want people to stop cheapening the alloy and skipping the QC, you don’t lecture them into virtue — you fix the measuring stick. Tie money to something real and conserved, and the short-term games stop paying.

Fuller never got to build it; the tools didn’t exist yet. They do now. Bitcoin is the first money actually anchored to energy — its proof-of-work spends real-world kilowatt-hours to settle the ledger, and its supply is fixed rather than something a central bank can conjure into existence. It’s the first working version of the thing he was reaching for: money you can’t fake, denominated in work you can’t skip. That is precisely the tool that would hand the machinist in Ohio the patience Destin’s audience handed him for free.

And notice how neatly this closes the loop. How did Destin get to think long-term when everyone else can’t? His platform gave him patient capital and free demand — a private pocket of hard-money-like patience carved out inside a soft-money world. His two blind spots are the same blind spot. He mistook a structural monetary problem for a personal ethical one, and he mistook his own audience-granted immunity from that structure for a strategy anyone could copy.

So here’s my challenge to him, engineer to engineer: you’ve already done the hard part, which is noticing that the system produces bad outcomes even when the people in it aren’t villains. That’s the exact intuition that leads to the root cause. Don’t stop at “encrappification” and “be less greedy” — that’s the symptom. Follow the incentive gradient down one more level, to the money itself, the way you followed the knob down to the tool-and-die knowledge chain. The tools you’d cross-examine here aren’t lathes; they’re arguments. Read Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard) on how sound money lowers time preference, Lyn Alden (Broken Money) on how the plumbing of the monetary system actually works and why it centralizes, and Robert Breedlove’s inverview series with Michael Saylor (MIT engineer) on treating money as an engineering and energy problem rather than a political one. It’s the same investigative instinct that made the scrubber videos great, pointed at the layer underneath all of it.

And if you ever want to talk it through with someone who’s an engineer too and has spent years chasing exactly this thread, I’m genuinely up for it. I think you’d take to this stuff fast — it’s an engineering problem wearing an economics costume.

To be clear, though

None of this is a knock on him for using what he built. He earned that audience over a decade of making excellent, honest videos, and there is nothing illegitimate about deploying an asset you built to do something you believe in. It’s genuinely good that he did it. There is now injection molding happening in Alabama that wasn’t happening before, jobs and knowledge in his community that didn’t exist, and a product that doesn’t send wire bristles into people’s food. He is doing things instead of just talking, and he’ll keep making neat things — that instinct is worth celebrating regardless of the platform question.

The point isn’t that he cheated. It’s that his case can’t carry the weight of the universal claim he hangs on it, and that the real lesson is hiding in the two things he doesn’t say: that his audience quietly subsidized the patience, and that the reason everyone else lacks that patience isn’t a shortage of ethics — it’s the money. Fix the money, and you don’t need four million subscribers to afford the long view.

Links & references

The video: Smarter Every Day — Still Trying to Make it in America
Cory Doctorow’s original “enshittification” essay: Tiktok’s enshittification (Pluralistic, Jan 2023)
The product itself, sold direct through JJ George: SmarterScrubber.com
Buckminster Fuller’s energy-money argument is laid out in Critical Path (1981) — the “kilowatt-hours as the basis of wealth” idea runs throughout.
Jeff Booth makes the deflation-alignment case in The Price of Tomorrow (2020).

Find Me 11,780 Votes (Election Fraud, Trump)

Posted on July 26, 2026 by hooglanda

Every republic runs on one fragile agreement: the loser accepts the count and goes home. Rome had that agreement, then lost it — and once it was gone, nothing else held it together.

For centuries the Roman Republic chose two consuls a year by vote. That annual, peaceful handoff was the Republic. What broke it wasn’t a single villain but a slow rot in that process. After Marius’s military reforms, soldiers came to depend on their generals for land and pay, so their loyalty shifted from the state to the man who led them. Once that was true, Sulla marched on Rome, and Caesar followed. Power stopped flowing from the ballot and started flowing from whoever controlled the legions. The votes still happened for a while. They just stopped mattering.

That’s the lens I’d use for the current moment. The most dangerous thing Donald Trump has done isn’t any single policy — policies get reversed. It’s the sustained effort to convince tens of millions of Americans that their elections are rigged and the count can’t be trusted. Once enough people believe the vote is fake, the vote stops being the thing that decides who governs. That is the exact door Rome walked through.

And here’s the part that should bother anyone: the loudest voice claiming the 2020 election was stolen is also the one caught on tape trying to steal it. On January 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state and asked him to “find 11,780 votes” — one more than he needed — and warned that officials could face criminal exposure if they didn’t. Every fraud claim he pushed on that call had already been investigated and debunked.

There’s an old pattern worth noticing here: the loudest accusations of cheating tend to come from whoever is actually doing it. “Rampant fraud” was never a description of the election. It was a description of the phone call.

A candidate who loses and calls it stolen — with no evidence, and a recording of himself asking an official to manufacture votes — isn’t defending the system. He’s exactly the thing the system was built to survive. Rome didn’t survive it. Whether we do is still up to us.

The Dollar’s Doom Loop: Why I Think the USD Is Finished

Posted on May 27, 2026 by hooglanda

MyWheelLife.com — May 27, 2026

I listened to 2 videos that made me want to write this

Every Bond Market In The World Is Breaking Andrei Jikh

Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics | Lex Fridman Podcast #303

I’m putting a date on this so there’s no revisionism later. Today is May 27, 2026.

The US dollar is in structural decline, and I believe we are closer to a crisis point than most people want to admit. Let me walk through the numbers — the numbers tell this story better than any opinion does.

First, Some Distinctions That Matter

People use debt and deficit interchangeably. They’re not the same thing.

The deficit is the annual gap between what the government spends and what it collects in taxes. Right now that’s running at roughly $2 trillion per year.

The debt is the total accumulation of every prior year’s deficit, never paid off. As of today that number is approximately $39 trillion — up $10 trillion in just five years.

Most of that debt was financed the normal way: the Treasury sold bonds to real outside buyers — foreign governments, pension funds, insurance companies, individual investors. Those buyers handed over real existing dollars and received a Treasury bond in return. That’s genuine borrowing. It’s not money creation, it’s not inflationary on its own — it’s just the government living beyond its means and handing an IOU to whoever would take it.

Monetizing the debt is something different and more serious. That’s when the Federal Reserve itself buys Treasury bonds by creating new dollars that didn’t previously exist — typing numbers into a computer. No real buyer, no real savings transferred. Just new money conjured to cover government spending the market wouldn’t otherwise finance. The Fed currently holds about $4.5 trillion in Treasury securities, down from a peak of $5.7 trillion after COVID. That portion — roughly 10–15% of total debt — was genuinely monetized. New dollars created from nothing.

The rest is real debt owed to real creditors who expect to be paid back in dollars that are worth something.

A Ponzi Scheme With a Printing Press

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about how that debt gets serviced.

The US government cannot cover its obligations from tax revenue alone — that’s what the $2 trillion annual deficit means. So it pays existing obligations by borrowing from new creditors. Those new creditors will eventually need to be paid back — with money borrowed from still newer creditors. The debt never gets paid down. It only gets rolled over and expanded.

If that structure sounds familiar, it should. A classic Ponzi scheme works exactly the same way: you can’t generate enough real returns to pay existing investors, so you pay them with money coming in from new investors. It works as long as new money keeps flowing in. The moment inflows slow or confidence cracks, the structure collapses.

The difference between Bernie Madoff and the US Treasury is that Madoff couldn’t print money. The US can. That’s the escape valve that makes this particular Ponzi uniquely resilient — and uniquely dangerous. Instead of collapsing suddenly when new creditors dry up, the US can instruct the Federal Reserve to monetize — creating new dollars to pay old obligations. That keeps the scheme going longer but debases the currency in the process. Existing creditors get paid back in dollars worth less than the ones they lent.

That’s a soft default. Technically honoring the debt while quietly stealing the real value back through inflation. The default doesn’t show up in a missed payment. It shows up in your grocery bill.

The Structural Math

As of April 2026, the average blended interest rate on the total national debt is 3.37%. That sounds manageable until you do the math on $39 trillion — and until you understand that five years ago that blended rate was 1.49%. The debt didn’t change its nature. The cost of carrying it more than doubled.

Interest payments on the national debt will cross $1 trillion this fiscal year for the first time in history. To put that in perspective: interest on the debt is now larger than what we spend on Medicare. Larger than what we spend on national defense. It is the second largest expenditure of the federal government, trailing only Social Security.

The Math That Should Terrify You

The United States is the largest economy on Earth at roughly $32 trillion in annual output. But the government doesn’t collect GDP — it collects taxes. Federal tax revenue runs roughly $5.6 trillion per year. That is the actual pool of money the government has to work with.

Interest payments now consume $1 trillion of that — nearly 20 cents of every tax dollar — before the government funds a single program, pays a single soldier, or builds a single road.

The squeeze isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening in every budget negotiation, every spending cut, every unfunded priority. The interest bill is eating the government alive from the inside.

The Doom Loop in Plain Dollars

The math is simple. The government spends $7.5 trillion per year and collects $5.6 trillion in taxes. The roughly $2 trillion gap gets borrowed. That borrowing adds to the debt. A larger debt generates a larger interest bill next year. A larger interest bill widens the gap further. There is no mechanism in place to break this cycle. It is self-reinforcing by design.

And it is accelerating. Five years ago the blended interest rate on the debt was 1.49%. Today it is 3.37% — more than double. The debt itself grew by $10 trillion in that same period. The interest bill has nearly tripled in five years, from around $345 billion in 2020 to over $1 trillion today.

The Doom Loop: 20-Year Projection (2026–2045)

The table below models two scenarios for how the blended interest rate on US debt evolves over the next 20 years. Scenario A assumes the rate rises 0.25% per year — gradual but relentless, reflecting ongoing refinancing at elevated market rates. Scenario B assumes a slower 0.125% annual rise. The highlighted Int/Tax columns show interest payments as a percentage of annual tax revenue — the most direct measure of fiscal pressure. Color coding: green = manageable, yellow = warning, orange = severe, red = critical.

The problem is both of these scenarios might not be agressive enough! While the Fed and Trump want to lower rates, the market is demaning higher rates NOW!

■ Under 25% — Manageable

■ 25–35% — Warning

■ 35–50% — Severe

■ 50%+ — Critical

SHARED INPUTS						SCENARIO A (+0.25%/yr)		SCENARIO B (+0.125%/yr)
Year	GDP ($T)	Tax ($T)	Spend ($T)	Deficit	Debt ($T)	Rate A	Int/Tax A	Rate B	Int/Tax B
2026 ◀	$32.4	$5.6	$7.5	-$1.9	$39.0	3.37%	23.5%	3.37%	23.5%
2027	$33.1	$5.8	$7.8	-$2.0	$40.9	3.62%	25.5%	3.50%	24.7%
2028	$33.9	$6.0	$8.1	-$2.1	$42.9	3.87%	27.7%	3.62%	25.9%
2029	$34.7	$6.2	$8.4	-$2.2	$45.0	4.12%	29.9%	3.75%	27.2%
2030	$35.5	$6.4	$8.8	-$2.3	$47.2	4.37%	32.1%	3.87%	28.5%
2031	$36.3	$6.7	$9.1	-$2.5	$49.6	4.62%	34.4%	4.00%	29.8%
2032	$37.1	$6.9	$9.5	-$2.6	$52.1	4.87%	36.8%	4.12%	31.2%
2033	$38.0	$7.1	$9.9	-$2.7	$54.7	5.12%	39.3%	4.25%	32.6%
2034	$38.9	$7.4	$10.3	-$2.9	$57.4	5.37%	41.8%	4.37%	34.0%
2035	$39.8	$7.6	$10.7	-$3.0	$60.3	5.62%	44.4%	4.50%	35.5%
2036	$40.7	$7.9	$11.1	-$3.2	$63.4	5.87%	47.1%	4.62%	37.1%
2037	$41.6	$8.2	$11.5	-$3.4	$66.6	6.12%	49.8%	4.75%	38.6%
2038	$42.6	$8.5	$12.0	-$3.5	$69.9	6.37%	52.6%	4.87%	40.2%
2039	$43.5	$8.8	$12.5	-$3.7	$73.5	6.62%	55.5%	5.00%	41.9%
2040	$44.5	$9.1	$13.0	-$3.9	$77.2	6.87%	58.5%	5.12%	43.6%
2041	$45.6	$9.4	$13.5	-$4.1	$81.1	7.12%	61.6%	5.25%	45.4%
2042	$46.6	$9.7	$14.0	-$4.3	$85.2	7.37%	64.7%	5.37%	47.1%
2043	$47.7	$10.1	$14.6	-$4.6	$89.6	7.62%	67.9%	5.50%	49.0%
2044	$48.8	$10.4	$15.2	-$4.8	$94.1	7.87%	71.2%	5.62%	50.9%
2045	$49.9	$10.8	$15.8	-$5.0	$98.9	8.12%	74.6%	5.75%	52.8%

ASSUMPTIONS & METHODOLOGY

Base debt (2026)	$39T	GDP growth	2.3%/year
Base tax revenue	$5.6T	Tax revenue growth	3.5%/year
Base spending	$7.5T	Spending growth	4.0%/year
Base blended rate	3.37%	Interest calc	Total debt × blended rate
Scenario A rate rise	+0.25%/year	Deficit	Spending minus tax revenue
Scenario B rate rise	+0.125%/year	Note	No Fed intervention modeled

MyWheelLife.com · For informational purposes only · Not financial advice

The Refinancing Wall Hitting Right Now

Here’s what this looks like in the immediate term. The US has approximately $9 trillion in debt maturing in 2026 alone — nearly a quarter of the entire national debt rolling over and needing to be refinanced at whatever rate the market demands today. Another $6 trillion matures by 2028. That’s $15 trillion refinanced in three years.

Today’s blended rate on the total debt is 3.37%. If that refinancing happens at 5% instead — which is not a crisis rate; the 30-year Treasury recently touched 5.2% — the additional interest cost on just the 2026 tranche alone is roughly $150 billion extra per year, every year going forward. By 2028, having refinanced the bulk of short-term debt at elevated rates, you’re looking at $1.3 to $1.5 trillion in annual interest — against roughly $5.6 trillion in tax revenue. That’s 25–27 cents of every tax dollar going to interest before the government does anything else.

This isn’t a projection of what might happen in some distant future. The refinancing is happening right now. The bills are coming due this year.

How the Loop Kills You

When investors begin to doubt your ability to service debt, they demand higher rates to compensate for the risk. Higher rates make the interest bill larger. A larger interest bill widens the deficit. A wider deficit means more borrowing. More borrowing at higher rates means investors demand still higher rates. The debt grows faster. The cycle accelerates.

This is the same mechanism that destroyed Greece, Argentina, and Turkey. The only thing protecting the US from this dynamic is that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency — meaning global demand for dollars is structurally baked in regardless of US fiscal behavior. Oil is priced in dollars. Global trade is settled in dollars. Foreign central banks hold dollars as reserves. This creates a captive buyer for US debt that no other country enjoys.

That protection is real. It is also eroding.

The Buyers Are Leaving

Two of America’s biggest foreign lenders are actively pulling back. China, which once held $1.3 trillion in US Treasuries, is now down to around $650 billion — a 17-year trend that is accelerating. Every bond China sells means one fewer buyer in the market, which means the US has to pay more to find a replacement.

Japan, the largest foreign holder at around $1.1 trillion, is being forced to sell for a different reason: it needs dollars to defend the yen and to buy oil. In Q1 2026 alone, Japan sold more US Treasuries than in the prior four years combined. The mechanism is vicious — selling Treasuries pushes US yields higher, a stronger dollar makes the yen weaker, which forces Japan to sell even more Treasuries to defend it. It’s a doom loop within the doom loop.

Beyond China and Japan, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, India, the UAE, Norway, and Singapore have all been reducing exposure. BRICS nations are actively building alternative settlement systems. The petrodollar arrangement that anchored dollar demand for fifty years is quietly unwinding — Saudi Arabia is now accepting payment for oil in other currencies. None of these individually are fatal. Together they represent a slow withdrawal of the structural demand that has allowed the US to run deficits that would have collapsed any other currency already.

The Trap

The Federal Reserve is sitting with an impossible choice.

If it cuts rates: bond investors, already nervous about inflation running at 3.8% with PPI at 6%, interpret the cut as the Fed prioritizing the economy over their purchasing power. They sell. Yields go up anyway. The thing the cut was supposed to prevent happens regardless.

If it raises rates: the interest bill on $39 trillion in debt gets larger immediately. Credit card delinquencies are already above 12%. Auto loan defaults are rising. Housing has significantly slowed. A rate increase into that environment risks breaking the economy.

Making this worse: the Fed under Kevin Worsh is reportedly moving away from standard core PCE inflation measurement toward something called trimmed mean PCE — which strips out extreme price movements. Convenient timing, given oil is up 60% since the Iran war started. On paper it produces a lower inflation reading, which might justify not raising rates. Draw your own conclusions about what that means for the integrity of the data.

When Does Monetization Become Forced?

Right now the annual deficit is being financed mostly through real bond sales to real buyers. But the math eventually forces the Fed’s hand. If private buyers demand rates that make the deficit spiral unmanageable, the choice becomes: let rates spike to crisis levels, or have the Fed step in and monetize — creating new dollars to buy bonds the market won’t absorb at acceptable rates.

At that point inflation becomes structural, not episodic. The dollar’s real value gets eroded not through a single dramatic event but through a slow, sustained expansion of the money supply to cover obligations that can’t otherwise be met.

We have been here before. In 1970, the US faced the same impossible math — couldn’t raise taxes, couldn’t cut benefits. So the government chose the invisible option: inflation. The purchasing power of the US dollar dropped roughly 50% from 1970 to 1980. Half of the dollar’s value, gone in ten years. During that same decade, gold went from $35 an ounce to $850 an ounce. Bond investors who lived through that decade know exactly what this setup looks like.

The most likely path today isn’t a dramatic overnight collapse. It’s a slow bleed — inflation running persistently above what the Fed officially targets, the real value of dollar-denominated savings quietly destroyed over years, purchasing power hollowed out while nominal numbers keep going up.

Where I’m Putting My Money

I hold Bitcoin in part because of this analysis. A fixed-supply asset that exists outside any government’s balance sheet is a rational place to be when the world’s reserve currency is structurally compromised. You can’t run a Ponzi scheme on a 21 million coin limit. The math doesn’t care about politics.

And the demand signal is becoming concrete, not theoretical: Iran is now demanding Bitcoin as payment for oil. That’s a sovereign nation — one of the world’s major oil exporters — actively routing around the dollar system in real transactions. That’s not a fringe argument about crypto. That’s the petrodollar arrangement breaking down in real time.

Central banks around the world bought over a thousand tons of gold in 2024 alone — choosing gold over Treasury bonds. Banks that are not sensitive to interest rates the way ordinary investors are, and that generally know things ahead of time, are making a geopolitical diversification bet. That tells you something.

I could be early. The dollar has muddled through versions of this argument for decades. But muddling through and being structurally sound are not the same thing. At some point the compounding wins.

I’m writing this down today so the record exists. Written May 27, 2026. Published at MyWheelLife.com.

Cedar Falls City Council May 18th 2026 – Bitcoin/Crypto Zoning

Posted on May 22, 2026 by hooglanda

I attended the Monday May 18th, 2026 Cedar Falls City Council meeting to make a statement on bitcoin mining.

You can view the full video here. This is linked directly to the timestamp of my statement. You only get 5 mintues to make comments.

Below is the response to many false claims from the March and April Planning and Zoning committee meetings as well as some proposals about what we should focus on writing into a common sense city code for regulations for any business.

I ended up being quoted on the local news (without my knowledge!)

Local news Article

Simple mining Held an open house the 5-20-2026 where I also spoke to KCRG about zoning rules that would make sense for any business. .

Setting the Record Straight on Bitcoin Mining in Cedar Falls

I attended the April 22nd planning and zoning committee meeting and heard a number of claims about Bitcoin mining that deserve a factual response — and a more constructive conversation about what regulation should actually look like.

I am neither for nor against Simple Mining locating here. If Cedar Falls residents decide they don’t want miners in our city, we should not have them. But decisions should be made on accurate information. I’m a mechanical engineer and financial advisor , and I’ve given three public educational talks on Bitcoin at the Cedar Falls and Waterloo libraries. I’ve done extensive research on the grid through owning an electric car and following Bitcoin mining closely. I have no affiliation with Simple Mining or any cryptocurrency company. I’ve previously been involved in local charities including the Job Foundation, providing financial education to children, and Cedar Valley Gearheads, providing cars for people who can’t afford them. I mention this because Bitcoin is something I’ve determined is genuinely beneficial to the world — enough to speak up about in a public forum where it’s currently a minority view.

What follows is my attempt to correct the factual record — and then offer what I think a productive regulatory conversation actually looks like.

Part One: Claims That Don’t Hold Up

“Bitcoin mining causes extensive e-waste”

Annually, roughly 62 million metric tons of e-waste are generated globally. Bitcoin accounts for approximately 30,700 metric tons — about 0.05% of the total, or one two-thousandth of global e-waste. That’s a real number, but it needs to be kept in proportion. Global E-Waste Monitor 2024: https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/ — Bitcoin E-Waste Monitor: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/

“Bitcoin mining is making personal computers more expensive”

Bitcoin miners use ASICs — application-specific integrated circuits purpose-built for mining — not the general-purpose GPUs or chips found in consumer computers. There are roughly 5–6 million Bitcoin miners globally, a negligible share of annual chip production. The claim that they’re competing with your next laptop purchase doesn’t hold up. Source: https://research.grayscale.com/reports/the-power-of-bitcoin-mining

“Bitcoin miners will pollute our water”

The cooling solution referenced at the meeting was described as a biodegradable, corn-based liquid with no EPA reporting requirements for spills. That claim is worth verifying with the applicant — but that’s normal zoning due diligence, not evidence that Bitcoin mining is uniquely dangerous. City code can simply require EPA-approved coolants for any industrial operation without singling out mining.

“Bitcoin mining causes cancer and air pollution”

Bitcoin miners are computers. They run on electricity. They do not combust anything, produce exhaust, or emit particulate matter. There is no direct air pollution from the hardware itself. Iowa generates approximately 63% of its electricity from wind — the highest wind share of any state in the country. If you’re concerned about emissions from electricity generation, the argument belongs at the power plant, not at the mining computers. And if that concern is genuine, Iowa is actually one of the best places in the world to host a miner. Globally, 52.4% of Bitcoin mining already runs on sustainable energy sources, and coal’s share of Bitcoin mining has fallen from 36.6% to just 8.9% in recent years. Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2025/cambridge-study-sustainable-energy-rising-in-bitcoin-mining/

“A single Bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as six homes”

This is a misleading framing. Bitcoin doesn’t settle one transaction at a time — the energy secures the entire network and every transaction batched into each block. A better comparison is gold: the gold mining industry consumed 132 TWh of energy in 2023. Bitcoin’s estimated annual consumption is approximately 138 TWh — roughly equivalent — yet gold is never asked to justify its energy use on a per-transaction basis. Gold energy source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2405851324000254 — Bitcoin energy source: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2025/cambridge-study-sustainable-energy-rising-in-bitcoin-mining/

“Bitcoin mining strains local power supplies and raises electricity costs”

This is the opposite of how these arrangements typically work. Large miners operate on interruptible contracts — they’re required to curtail operations during peak demand periods, which actually relieves grid pressure when it matters most. A stable, predictable industrial baseload like a mining operation helps subsidize the grid infrastructure that all ratepayers benefit from — including the capacity to run peaker plants like the new CFU facility when they’re genuinely needed. CFU stated at the last meeting that flexible industrial loads like these can help lower average electricity costs by reducing purchases during expensive peak periods. As Cedar Falls purchases more power collectively, we also gain negotiating leverage that benefits everyone on the rate.

One more thing that rarely gets mentioned: Bitcoin can actually reduce emissions

Some Bitcoin mining operations are deployed specifically to capture methane from oil fields, landfills, and agricultural waste that would otherwise be flared or vented into the atmosphere. Methane is roughly 80 times more potent than CO₂ as a greenhouse gas over a 20-year period. By combusting that waste gas to power mining instead of letting it vent or burn off uncontrolled, these operations actively reduce overall warming impact. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy acknowledged in a 2022 report that certain crypto mining operations using vented methane may, in some cases, produce positive climate outcomes. Source: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/09-2022-Crypto-Assets-and-Climate-Report.pdf

“Bitcoin creates no value — it’s just gambling”

Whether you personally value Bitcoin as an asset is one question. Whether it creates real-world value is a different one — and the answer is clearly yes.

In Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo — Africa’s oldest national park — excess electricity from hydroelectric plants powers a Bitcoin mine. Revenue from that operation funds park infrastructure, conservation efforts, and staff salaries. Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/bitcoin-mine-power/

Gridless, a company operating across rural Africa, partners with small hydro and renewable mini-grids to subsidize local electrification by purchasing excess power when community demand is low — making those projects economically viable. Source: https://gridlesscompute.com/ — Additional reporting: https://crypto.news/how-a-shipping-container-and-bitcoin-saved-a-struggling-african-hydro-project/

The Human Rights Foundation, a nonpartisan organization supporting dissidents worldwide, has made Bitcoin central to its financial freedom work. In authoritarian regimes — Venezuela, Nigeria, Russia, China — Bitcoin provides a way for activists to receive donations, pay staff, and operate without funds being frozen or confiscated by governments. That is not a fringe argument. It is documented, peer-reviewed, and real. Source: https://hrf.org/program/financial-freedom/bitcoin-development-fund/

Part Two: What We Should Actually Regulate

Noise concerns are legitimate zoning concerns and should be evaluated seriously — but that’s a separate question from whether Bitcoin itself is uniquely harmful. Consider the “no engine brakes” signs posted around many cities. The goal isn’t to ban engine brakes — it’s to control the noise they produce. An engine brake can be made quiet. The law should target the outcome, not the technology. The same principle applies here. Write standards that any business must meet, make the consequences clear, and let engineering solve the rest.

Audible noise

Set a specific decibel limit measured at the property boundary or at a defined distance from the facility. Don’t write an impossible standard, but a reasonable and enforceable threshold applies equally to any future occupant of the site — not just miners.

Infrasound

Sound below 20 Hz isn’t captured by standard decibel meters but can be felt as vibration at high intensities. Large cooling fans can produce it. Standard noise ordinances don’t cover this — city code should specifically address infrasound limits if this is a concern, because it won’t be regulated otherwise.

Visual screening

Concerns about visual impact — equipment, shipping containers, signage — are normal zoning considerations addressable through screening requirements, setback rules, and landscaping buffers. Nothing unique to mining here.

Water and coolant use

Mining operations typically run closed-loop cooling systems with minimal water discharge. Code can require EPA-approved coolants for any industrial operation and mandate closed-loop systems. Ask the applicant for the exact product specification — that’s a standard engineering question, not a scandal.

Cedar Falls Planning & Zoning Commission: March 25, 2026 – Bitcoin Mining, Zoning, CFU Power Plant.

Posted on April 5, 2026 by hooglanda

Separating the Issues in the Cedar Falls Mining Debate

After reviewing the Planning & Zoning meeting from March 25th, 2026 where Bitcoin minnig, Zoning and a new CFU powerplant wer dicussed, it’s clear that several different issues were being discussed at the same time. When those get mixed together, it becomes difficult to evaluate the project clearly.

I think it helps to separate the discussion into four distinct categories.

1. Zoning & Land Use

This is the most important and most durable question.

Concerns about noise, building type (containers vs. permanent structures), water systems, and proximity to neighborhoods all fall into this category. These are not Bitcoin-specific issues — they apply to any industrial use.

If the concern is that this site should not be rezoned from light industrial to heavy industrial, that’s a legitimate argument. It sets precedent and affects long-term land use decisions for the city.

2. Power Plant

There are also concerns tied to the new power plant itself — environmental impact, scale, and whether it should be built at all.

That’s a separate policy decision.

If the concern is emissions or the role of a peaker plant, those questions should be addressed directly:

When does the plant run?
What is the cost of running it versus buying power from the grid?
How often is it expected to operate?

Those are important questions, but they are not inherently tied to Bitcoin mining.

3. Governance & Process

Some of the strongest concerns raised were about process and oversight.

The city, CFU, and the applicant are closely connected, which raises reasonable questions:

Is there sufficient independent review?
Has there been a third-party analysis of costs, noise, and environmental impact?

These are solvable issues:

Independent studies
Clear contract structures
Ongoing monitoring and transparency

4. Utility Economics (Where Bitcoin Actually Enters the Picture)

Only at this stage does Bitcoin mining itself become relevant.

CFU described miners as an interruptible load:

They consume electricity when it is cheap and abundant
They shut off when prices spike or the grid is stressed

This matters because utilities buy electricity at varying prices. If a flexible customer uses low-cost energy and avoids high-cost periods, it can reduce the utility’s average cost of power.

As one CFU representative explained, this dynamic lowers the average cost of power by reducing the need to purchase expensive electricity during peak periods.

That doesn’t guarantee lower bills, but it does suggest that mining — when structured correctly — is not inherently a cost burden and may improve system efficiency.

A Simple Test

One question that helps clarify the discussion:

If this facility were in a fully enclosed building, met all noise standards, and used a closed-loop system — would there still be strong opposition?

If the answer is yes, then the issue may not be the impacts themselves, but the perception of Bitcoin.

Closing Thought

There are legitimate concerns in this discussion, particularly around zoning, noise, and long-term planning. But many of the arguments raised in the meeting were not aligned with how the system was actually described.

If this decision is going to be made well, it should be grounded in:

land use
infrastructure planning
contract design
and measurable impacts

Not generalized assumptions about Bitcoin.

Link to the Cedar Falls Planning & Zoning Commission: March 25, 2026 where bitcoin mining, zoning and he new powerplant are discussed.

I also use the below link

YouVideoToText

to generate a transcript. You can then investigate the transcipt with ChatGPT or other LLM’s.

I have also already generated that PDF if you just want to download it yourself.

transcript Cedar Falls Planning &Zoning Commission March 25, 2026 Download

I Reached Out to the Iowa Environmental Council About Bitcoin Mining

Posted on April 5, 2026 by hooglanda

There’s a growing conversation happening right now—globally and locally—around Bitcoin mining, energy use, and its impact on communities.

In Iowa, that conversation is no longer theoretical. It’s showing up in public meetings, local zoning discussions, and policy conversations that will shape how towns like Cedar Falls think about energy, infrastructure, and economic development.

Recently, the Iowa Environmental Council published a fact sheet outlining concerns about crypto mining. Documents like this matter. They don’t just inform—they influence how people think, how decisions get made, and how communities respond.

That’s exactly why I decided to reach out.

Not to argue. Not to dismiss concerns. But to do something that feels increasingly rare: slow down, look at the actual data, and ask whether the full picture is being represented.

The IEC states that its work is informed by science and data—and that it listens, learns, and adapts. I take that seriously. So my goal with this email is simple:

To add context where it’s missing.
To challenge assumptions where they may be incomplete.
And to contribute real-world examples—especially from how utilities actually operate—that don’t always make it into high-level summaries.

This isn’t about defending Bitcoin uncritically. It’s about making sure the conversation around it is grounded in how the system actually works—not just how it’s often portrayed.

Below is the note I sent to these people who work there

iecmail@iaenvironment.org, daniel@iaenvironment.org, fowle@iaenvironment.org, green@iaenvironment.org, howe@iaenvironment.org, oster@iaenvironment.org

Hello

Dear Iowa Environmental Council,

I recently reviewed your 2024 crypto mining fact sheet and wanted to share a response to several of the points raised.

On your website, you note that your work is informed by science, data, and stories, and that sometimes you educate and lead; other times, you learn and follow. You also emphasize the importance of listening to others.

I appreciate that framing. My goal in writing is in that same spirit—to contribute additional data, context, and real-world examples that may help strengthen and refine the analysis.

Given the ongoing discussions around crypto mining—both globally and here in Iowa—it is especially important that widely shared materials like this are as accurate and complete as possible. Incomplete or incorrect assumptions can shape public understanding in ways that lead to misinformed conclusions or policy decisions.

This is a complex and evolving topic, and it benefits from incorporating how these systems function in practice, particularly at the utility level.

Below are a few specific responses to points raised in the fact sheet:

1. Electricity Consumption and Grid Strain
It is true that bitcoin mining is energy-intensive. However, the characterization of mining as a constant strain on the grid is incomplete.

Unlike most industrial loads, mining is highly interruptible. Operators can shut down within minutes during periods of high demand, allowing them to function as a flexible demand response resource rather than a fixed burden.

This dynamic was acknowledged at a recent Cedar Falls Utilities discussion, where a utility representative explained that flexible loads like bitcoin mining can lower the average cost of electricity procurement. By consuming power during low-cost periods (when supply is abundant) and curtailing during peak demand, miners can improve overall system efficiency and reduce costs for consumers.

In other words, when structured properly, mining does not simply add demand—it can help smooth demand and reduce price volatility.

2. Energy Sources and Emissions
The fact sheet suggests that increased electricity demand from mining leads to greater fossil fuel use and associated emissions. This reflects a simplified, static view of grid behavior.

Globally, bitcoin mining is estimated to have one of the highest shares of renewable energy usage of any major industry. For example:

The Bitcoin Mining Council has estimated the global mining industry’s sustainable energy mix at ~50–60% in recent reports
A 2023 analysis from the University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found a substantial and growing share of mining powered by renewables, particularly hydro, wind, and curtailed energy sources
Mining operations are frequently located where energy is stranded, excess, or otherwise underutilized, including wind-heavy regions like parts of the Midwest

Links for reference:

Additionally, mining is economically incentivized to seek out the lowest-cost electricity, which often corresponds to periods of excess renewable generation (e.g., high wind output in Iowa). During periods of high demand—when fossil generation is more likely to set the marginal price—miners can and do curtail usage.

This behavior contrasts with traditional industrial loads, which typically operate continuously regardless of grid conditions.

3. Air Pollution and Public Health
The fact sheet links mining activity to increased air pollution and health risks. However, this conclusion depends heavily on the assumption that mining drives additional fossil fuel generation.

If mining primarily consumes excess or curtailed renewable energy and reduces load during peak fossil generation periods, its net contribution to emissions can be materially different from the scenario described.

As a result, the environmental impact of mining is not uniform—it depends on how it interacts with the grid. Treating all mining load as equivalent to constant fossil-driven demand risks overstating its impact.

4. Noise Concerns
The concern around noise is valid and important at the local level.

However, noise is not unique to crypto mining and is commonly addressed through standard regulatory approaches such as setback requirements, sound limits, and site-specific mitigation measures. These tools are already used effectively for other industrial and agricultural operations.

5. Water Use
The fact sheet raises concerns about water consumption. While some mining facilities use water-based cooling, many modern operations rely on air cooling or closed-loop immersion systems that require minimal ongoing water use.

Water impact varies significantly depending on facility design and should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis rather than assumed to be uniformly high.

Additional Context: Grid Stability, Emissions, and Renewable Development

Because the fact sheet focuses primarily on potential harms, I believe it is also important to include emerging evidence on how bitcoin mining can interact positively with energy systems when deployed in certain ways.

Grid Stability
Bitcoin mining is one of the few large-scale loads that is both flexible and location-agnostic. It can absorb excess generation during periods of oversupply and curtail quickly when demand rises.

This flexibility directly addresses a known challenge with modern grids: balancing intermittent renewable generation with real-time demand. By acting as a controllable load, mining can help stabilize grid operations rather than simply adding to peak demand.

Duke University Nicholas Institute (flexible load and grid capacity):
https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rethinking-load-growth.pdf
Cedar Falls Utilities discussion (real-world example of cost reduction via flexible load):
https://youtu.be/JcxxYyh2FoI?t=7508

Emissions Reduction (Methane and Wasted Energy Use)
Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to capture and utilize energy that would otherwise be wasted.

In particular, methane venting and flaring from oil production and landfills represents a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Mining can convert this otherwise-released methane into electricity and then into economic value—reducing net emissions in the process.

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (acknowledging methane and crypto energy dynamics):
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/09-2022-Crypto-Assets-and-Climate-Report.pdf
Arcane Research (methane mitigation potential):
https://dergigi.com/assets/files/2022-09-03-arcane-research-how-bitcoin-mining-can-transform-the-energy-industry.pdf
Peer-reviewed landfill methane study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652624029652

Support for Renewable Energy Development
Renewable energy projects often face economic challenges due to intermittency, transmission constraints, and periods of oversupply.

Bitcoin mining can act as a “buyer of last resort” for excess or stranded energy—particularly in early project phases or in regions where transmission capacity is limited.

Research has shown that integrating mining into renewable projects can improve project economics, increase revenue, and help bring new solar, wind, and hydro capacity online that might not otherwise be financially viable.

Cornell / ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering study:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c05445
Example of negative pricing and excess energy challenges:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/theres-no-catch-bitcoin-mining-200335729.html

In summary, while the concerns raised in the fact sheet are important, several rely on assumptions that do not fully reflect how bitcoin mining operates in practice—particularly its ability to act as a flexible, price-responsive load that can align with periods of excess energy supply.

I appreciate your work on this topic and hope these additional perspectives are helpful in developing a more complete picture.

Sincerely,
Axel Hoogland

http://www.MyWheelLife.com

	Cedar Falls City Cou… on Bitcoin Is Good for the World—…
	hooglanda on Post Labor Econonomics Videos…
	markscotch on Let’s Win Iowa, Zach Wahls — A…
	Rob Jablonsky on Wealth Inequality: The Quiet A…
	Wealth Inequality: T… on Post Labor Econonomics Videos…

Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I've Never Said)

Podcast Episode: Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I’ve Never Said) -The Long Case for Bitcoin – An experimential auto generated podcast based on this post. Just trying things!

I have a friend who likes to needle me. Every time Bitcoin comes up, he says: “Bitcoin only goes up.”

The upside is capped — and that’s a feature

Where the price comes from right now

The part nobody wants to hear

The long-term vision

Recommended Reading Sequence

Phase One: Orientation

Phase Two: Foundations

Phase Three: The Ancient World and War

Phase Four: Ideas and Liberty

Phase Five: Capital, Energy, and Modernity

Phase Six: Digital Transformation and Sound Money

Phase Seven: Coda

The Curriculum at a Glance

I. Civilizational Memory

Will and Ariel Durant

II. Geography, Ecology, and Uneven Development

Jared Diamond

III. War, Strategy, and Republican Power

John Keegan

Livy’s History of Rome

IV. Uncertainty, Fragility, and Responsibility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Incerto

V. Human Action, Liberty, and Power

Murray Rothbard

VI. Capital, Enterprise, and Institutional Power

Ron Chernow

VII. Energy, Knowledge, and Technological Transformation

Daniel Yergin

David Deutsch

Michael Saylor

VIII. Sound Money and Bitcoin

Saifedean Ammous

Read Adversarially

Counterweights and Primary Sources

On War, by Carl von Clausewitz

The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville

What Has Government Done to Our Money?, by Murray Rothbard

The Mystery of Banking, by Murray Rothbard

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto

Recommended Reading Sequence

Phase One: Orientation

Phase Two: Foundations

Phase Three: The Ancient World and War

Phase Four: Ideas and Liberty

Phase Five: Capital, Energy, and Modernity

Phase Six: Digital Transformation and Sound Money

Phase Seven: Coda

The Governing Idea

Character, on the record

Protecting women — from everyone but him

Promises as tactics, not commitments

Contempt for the machinery of accountability

Where the money goes

The double standard, in one comparison

Justice for sale: the Walczak pardon

The honest counterweight

What this says about leadership

Sources

The number he uses to brag is the number that gives it away

And then he stops one layer short

An engineer already drove this road to the end

To be clear, though