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Bitcoin Is Honest Money. Prove Me Wrong.

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Essay · Money · Philosophy

Bitcoin Is Honest Money.
Prove Me Wrong.

By Axel Hoogland

Every serious objection to Bitcoin has already been thought through — and answered. This is a challenge to critics to find one that hasn’t.

2026  ·  A challenge to skeptics  ·  Not financial advice

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto, 2009

What Is Honest Money?

Money, at its core, is a technology for storing and transferring value across time and space. For thousands of years humans have searched for a form of money that couldn’t be corrupted — that couldn’t be debased by kings, inflated away by central banks, or confiscated by governments with printing presses and good intentions.

Gold came closest. Fixed supply. Scarce. No one could create more by decree. But gold has real problems — it’s heavy, hard to divide, difficult to verify, and nearly impossible to transmit across borders without trusting intermediaries. The very institutions gold was meant to protect us from ended up holding it for us. And once they held it, they printed paper on top of it. And once they printed paper, they removed the gold backing entirely.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is history. It happened in 1971. The dollar has lost over 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.

Bitcoin is the first monetary technology in human history that combines the scarcity of gold with the transmissibility of the internet — and does so without requiring trust in any institution, government, or person. That is what makes it honest money. The rules are in the code. The code is public. No one can change the supply schedule. No one can freeze your coins without your keys. No one can print more.

Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Predictable issuance schedule. Decentralized — no single point of control or failure. Permissionless — no one can deny you access. Censorship resistant — no one can stop a valid transaction. Verifiable — anyone can audit the entire system.

Bitcoin as Money: The State of Adoption Argument

Critics love to point out that Bitcoin fails the three classical tests of money: store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. They’re not entirely wrong — yet. But this critique completely ignores that every monetary technology in history went through an adoption curve where these properties emerged gradually.

The dollar wasn’t always trusted. Gold wasn’t always liquid. The internet wasn’t always fast. Pointing at Bitcoin’s current limitations as though they’re permanent is like critiquing the iPhone in 2007 for not having an app store.

The sequence of monetary adoption is predictable and Bitcoin is following it precisely:

Stage 1 — Collectible / Speculation

Early adopters buy it because they believe others will value it later. This is where Bitcoin spent most of its early years. It still has some of this character today but has largely moved beyond it.

Stage 2 — Store of Value

Institutions, sovereigns, and sophisticated investors hold it as a hedge against currency debasement. This is where Bitcoin is now. BlackRock’s ETF alone holds over $86 billion. Strategy holds over 762,000 coins — more than 3% of the entire supply. Nation states are building reserves.

Stage 3 — Medium of Exchange

As volatility dampens with deeper liquidity and wider adoption, transacting in Bitcoin becomes practical. Layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network are already enabling this. As the price stabilizes at higher levels, the incentive to spend rather than hold increases.

Stage 4 — Unit of Account

Prices denominated in satoshis. This is the final stage and the most distant — but not implausible in a world where Bitcoin has achieved reserve asset status globally.

21M Maximum Supply. Ever.
3-4M Estimated Lost Forever
762K Coins Held by Strategy
$170B US Spot ETF Assets

Bitcoin as Philosophy

Bitcoin is not just a financial instrument. It is a philosophical statement — arguably the most important one made in the field of money since Bretton Woods.

Distrust of institutions is not paranoia. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that the institutions entrusted with the monetary system could be catastrophically wrong, spectacularly rewarded for failure, and bailed out with money created from nothing. The genesis block was not subtle about this. Satoshi embedded a newspaper headline about bank bailouts directly into Bitcoin’s first block.

Sovereignty over your own wealth is a human right. The ability to hold value that cannot be confiscated, frozen, or inflated away without your consent is not a radical idea. It is the natural extension of property rights. Bitcoin makes that right technologically enforceable for the first time in history.

Scarcity is not the enemy of prosperity. The dominant monetary philosophy of the 20th century held that money supply should be managed. Bitcoin rejects this entirely. Its scarcity is not a bug but the central feature. Scarcity is what gives money its meaning as a store of value across time.

Rules over rulers. Perhaps the deepest philosophical claim Bitcoin makes is that mathematical rules enforced by cryptography are more trustworthy than any human institution. Not because humans are evil — but because humans are fallible, corruptible, and mortal. Code, once deployed and sufficiently decentralized, is not.

The Environmental Argument — Already Answered

Bitcoin uses an enormous amount of energy. This is true. What critics leave out is what kind of energy, and what Bitcoin does with it.

Bitcoin miners are uniquely flexible electricity consumers — they can be switched on and off instantly, making them ideal buyers of stranded and curtailed renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted. Wind farms and solar arrays frequently produce more power than grids can absorb. Bitcoin absorbs the excess, making previously uneconomic renewable projects viable.

More compellingly: Bitcoin miners are increasingly deployed to combust methane — the gas vented from oil wells and landfills that would otherwise enter the atmosphere directly. Methane is roughly 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period. Using it to mine Bitcoin converts it to CO2, dramatically reducing net emissions. This is not spin. It is chemistry and thermodynamics.

The environmental argument against Bitcoin is a legacy talking point that has not kept pace with how mining has actually evolved. The narrative persists not because it is accurate but because it is politically useful to those with incentives to undermine Bitcoin’s legitimacy.

The Objections — And Why They’ve Been Answered

What follows is an honest accounting of the most serious objections to Bitcoin, and the responses that Bitcoin thinkers have developed over 17 years of adversarial scrutiny. These are the actual strongest arguments — tested against people who have spent careers trying to find the fatal flaw.

Objection: Quantum Computing Will Break Bitcoin’s Cryptography

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically derive private keys from public keys, compromising holdings.

Quantum computing is an existential threat to every cryptographic system on earth — every bank, every government database, every secure communication. Bitcoin is actually among the more adaptable systems since it can hard fork to quantum-resistant algorithms, which already exist and are being standardized. This objection proves too much — if quantum breaks Bitcoin, it breaks everything.
Objection: Transaction Fees Can’t Sustain Miner Security After Halvings

Block rewards halve every four years until ~2140. At zero issuance, miners must be compensated by fees alone. If fees are insufficient, hash rate drops and the network becomes vulnerable.

This objection ignores the difficulty adjustment — one of Bitcoin’s most elegant mechanisms. If hash rate drops, difficulty adjusts down, making mining profitable again at a new equilibrium. At $1 million per coin, even tiny fees in BTC terms are substantial in dollar terms. The security budget concern disappears at scale.
Objection: A Superior Competitor Will Replace Bitcoin

Technology has network effects that shift. Something better could emerge and Bitcoin could become MySpace.

This analogy fundamentally misunderstands monetary network effects. MySpace lost to Facebook because Facebook was more useful in ways users could immediately feel. Monetary network effects are far stickier — the value of money IS the network. Gold held its monetary premium for 5,000 years. Bitcoin may have crossed a similar threshold.
Objection: Governments Will Ban It

Sovereign monetary authorities will not permit a parallel monetary system to challenge their control.

China has “banned” Bitcoin multiple times. It still trades in China. Bans on information and mathematics don’t work. More importantly, the US regulatory posture has reversed dramatically. Spot ETFs are approved. SAB 121 has been rescinded. Institutional banks can now custody digital assets. The world’s largest capital market is opening, not closing.
Objection: Bitcoin Is Too Volatile To Be Money

Something that drops 70% in a year cannot function as a reliable store of value.

Volatility is a function of market depth and adoption, not an intrinsic property of Bitcoin. Every asset becomes less volatile as liquidity deepens. Gold was volatile when its market was thin. Bitcoin’s volatility has been declining measurably each cycle as institutional participation deepens. This objection describes the present state and projects it as permanent — a logical error.

The Real Challenge

After seventeen years of adversarial scrutiny by some of the sharpest minds in cryptography, economics, and computer science — every major objection to Bitcoin has been examined and answered.

The honest answer to “what could derail Bitcoin?” is the unknown unknown — the thing no one has thought of yet. That’s intellectually serious. That’s the right answer.

The challenge to skeptics is simple: find a serious objection that the Bitcoin community hasn’t already examined in depth and answered.

Even Fidelity — one of the world’s largest asset managers — has concluded that ignoring Bitcoin is no longer a prudent approach. The burden of proof has shifted. It is no longer on Bitcoin advocates to justify owning it — it is on skeptics to justify owning zero.

Most people who try to find a fatal flaw end up owning Bitcoin instead.

The Structural Buying Pressure Nobody Is Talking About

Beyond the philosophical and technical case, there is a mechanical reality forming in markets that deserves attention. Fidelity’s 2026 research finds that Bitcoin has delivered the highest risk-adjusted returns of any asset class over both five and ten year horizons — and that even a 1-3% allocation has historically produced meaningful portfolio improvements.

Companies like Strategy have pioneered a model where corporate balance sheets treat Bitcoin as a primary treasury reserve asset, funding ongoing purchases through equity and non-margin debt instruments. Strategy alone holds over 762,000 coins — more than 3.6% of the total supply — and has structured its balance sheet specifically to avoid any forced liquidation scenario. This is a one-way accumulation machine.

This is happening simultaneously with the halving-driven supply reduction — the programmatic 50% reduction in new Bitcoin issuance that occurs every four years. Less new supply entering the market. More institutional demand absorbing existing supply. ETFs holding billions on behalf of pension funds, endowments, and retail investors who will never touch a private key.

These forces compound. They do not reverse without a fundamental change in the thesis — and the thesis has only gotten stronger with time.

The Honest Remaining Risks

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what is genuinely uncertain.

The unknown unknown. Bitcoin could fail in ways no one has conceived. This is true of any system. It is taken seriously precisely because it cannot be dismissed — but also cannot be acted upon. You cannot hedge against what you cannot imagine.

A catastrophic BIP. The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process is the mechanism by which protocol changes are proposed and adopted. Conservative governance makes bad changes unlikely — but not impossible. The community’s demonstrated ability to resist even well-intentioned changes (the block size wars) suggests this risk is managed, not eliminated.

Partial success. The most likely “disappointing” outcome is not failure but incomplete success — Bitcoin becomes a globally recognized store of value held by institutions and sovereigns, reaching prices that would have seemed absurd a decade ago, but never fully displacing fiat as the unit of account for everyday life. This would be an extraordinary outcome for holders while representing a partial failure of the original vision.

Conclusion: The Game Theory of Honest Money

You don’t have to believe Bitcoin will succeed to understand why it might.

A small number of people who deeply understand the monetary system, the history of currency debasement, and the technical properties of Bitcoin will continue to accumulate. Their accumulation drives price. Rising price attracts attention. Attention drives adoption. Adoption deepens liquidity. Deeper liquidity dampens volatility. Dampened volatility enables broader use as money. Broader use as money drives further adoption.

The masses don’t need to understand sound money theory for this to play out. They never do. They didn’t understand TCP/IP to use the internet. They didn’t understand double-entry bookkeeping to trust banks. They will not need to understand elliptic curve cryptography to hold Bitcoin.

History doesn’t require universal understanding to move in a direction. It requires enough people who understand to make it inevitable for everyone else.

The question is not whether Bitcoin is perfect. No monetary system is. The question is whether it is more honest than what we have — and whether honest money, once available, can ultimately lose to dishonest money in a world where information moves freely.

If you’ve found a flaw the Bitcoin community hasn’t already answered, the world is listening.

This essay represents the author’s analysis and philosophical perspective. It is not financial advice. Bitcoin is a volatile asset. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Do your own research. Hold your own keys.

By Axel Hoogland

MyWheelLife.com

Bitcoin Is Honest Money · 2026  ·  Not your keys · Not your coins

bitcoin_honest_money_wordpress (2).html

Bitcoin Maps and a Simple Observation

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I opened the Bitcoin map inside Cash App today.

Then I opened https://btcmap.org.

Both maps showed the same thing.

A large number of businesses.

Restaurants, shops, and local services spread across the city.

For a long time, the common assumption has been that Bitcoin is mostly held, not used.

But when you look at these maps, that assumption becomes harder to maintain.

These are not theoretical use cases.

They are physical businesses that have made the decision to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment.

What Happens When a Business Accepts Bitcoin

When a business enables Bitcoin payments, something else happens at the same time.

It gets listed.

On Cash App, it appears on the local Bitcoin map.
On BTC Map, it becomes part of a global directory.

In both cases, the business becomes easier to find.

A Different Type of Customer

Most marketing is broad.

Businesses advertise and hope the right customer eventually sees it.

These maps work differently.

Someone opening a Bitcoin map is already looking for a place to spend.

That is a narrower and more specific type of demand.

The business is not trying to attract attention.

It is being surfaced directly to someone who is already interested.

A Small but Growing Effect

Each individual business making this decision is not a major event.

But the pattern is noticeable.

A few businesses appear.
Then a cluster forms.
Then an area becomes dense.

That pattern shows up on both maps.

Larger Businesses Are Starting to Participate

This is not limited to small or experimental businesses.

Steak ‘n Shake now accepts Bitcoin.

That does not mean universal adoption is imminent.

But it does suggest that accepting Bitcoin is moving from the edge toward something more normal.

Why Early Adoption Matters

There is a practical advantage to being early.

When fewer businesses are listed:

  • Each one is more visible
  • Each one stands out more clearly

As more businesses adopt, that visibility becomes more diluted.

This is true for most discovery platforms.

A Simple Takeaway

Bitcoin adoption is often discussed in abstract terms.

But these maps show something more concrete.

Businesses are choosing to accept it.
And when they do, they become easier to find.

That is a small change at the individual level.

But repeated many times, it starts to look like a system forming.

Final Thought

You do not need to assume that Bitcoin will replace existing systems to notice what is happening.

You can simply open a map and observe:

Businesses are adopting it.

And the ones that do it earlier are easier to see.

$200K vs $1.2M: A SATA + STRC Thought Experiment on Reaching F.I.R.E.

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For years, the standard framework for retirement income has been the 4% rule.

The idea is simple: if you want $48,500 per year of spending, you would typically need roughly:

$48,500 × 25 = $1,212,500

In other words, about $1.2 million invested in a diversified portfolio to sustainably withdraw that income.

But recently I came across an interesting thought experiment involving two relatively new preferred securities.

Before diving into the math, it’s important to note that these securities ultimately sit within financial structures connected to Bitcoin, so they carry some exposure to the long-term success of Bitcoin itself. More on that later.

Two High-Yield Preferred Securities

Two securities caught my attention:

  • Strategy Series C Preferred (STRC) – currently yielding about 11.5%
  • Strive Asset Management Preferred (SATA) – currently yielding about 12.75%

Both are preferred securities issued by companies building financial products around Bitcoin treasury strategies.

An interesting feature is their dividend timing.

  • STRC has an ex-dividend date around the 15th of the month
  • SATA has an ex-dividend date around the 28th of the month

The actual cash payment arrives roughly 15 days later, but what matters for dividend eligibility is simply holding the shares on the ex-dividend date.

After that date passes, an investor can sell the shares and still receive the dividend.

The Rotation Idea

Because the ex-dividend dates occur at different times of the month, a strategy some investors discuss is rotating between the two securities:

  1. Hold STRC through its ex-dividend date (~15th)
  2. After the ex-date passes, sell and move into SATA
  3. Hold SATA through its ex-dividend date (~28th)
  4. Then rotate back to STRC and repeat

In theory, this rotation attempts to capture both dividend streams each month.

The Yield Math

Using approximate yields:

SATA: 12.75%
STRC: 11.5%

Combined:

12.75% + 11.5% = 24.25%

If an investor pays roughly 24% tax on the income:

24.25% × 0.76 ≈ 18.4% after tax

That’d give this investor $18,400 per a year income on $100k or $36,400 per a year on $200k.

The Early Retirement Thought Experiment

Suppose an early retired investor allocated $200,000 to this strategy.

At a 24.25% gross yield, the income would be:

$200,000 × 0.2425 = $48,500 per year

Under the traditional 4% rule, producing that same income would require:

$48,500 × 25 = $1,212,500

So the comparison looks like this:

StrategyCapital Required
Traditional 4% rule~$1.2 million
Preferred rotation idea~$200,000

That’s roughly a 6× difference in required capital.

Even More Interesting for Early Retirees

For some early retirees who structure their income carefully, qualified dividend income can fall within the 0% federal tax bracket.

In that scenario, the full 24.25% yield could theoretically flow through without federal income tax.

Using the same $200,000 example:

InvestmentYieldAnnual Income
$200,00024.25%$48,500

That level of income could cover a meaningful portion of living expenses for many households.

The Bitcoin Connection

It’s important to understand what ultimately sits underneath these securities.

Both STRC and SATA are part of financial structures built around companies holding significant amounts of Bitcoin on their balance sheets.

At the base of these preferred securities is therefore some degree of Bitcoin risk.

If Bitcoin were to fail as an asset class entirely, the underlying business models supporting these preferreds would likely fail as well.

However, if Bitcoin continues to grow and remain valuable over time, these structures should continue to function as designed.

It is also possible that as demand for these types of securities increases, the dividend yields could gradually decline. Markets tend to compress yields when large numbers of investors compete for the same income-producing assets.

So the yields discussed above should be viewed as the current state of the market, not necessarily a permanent condition.

Finally there is company risk. Strive (ASST) issues SATA and Strategy (MSTR) issues STRC. Either company could fail for some generic business reason and that woudl also be a risk, just like any business.

Final Thoughts

For decades, the 4% rule has been a useful guideline for thinking about retirement income.

But financial markets are constantly evolving, and new structures occasionally appear that change the math in interesting ways.

This rotation idea may or may not prove durable over the long run. But it highlights how emerging financial instruments—especially those tied to Bitcoin treasury strategies—are beginning to create entirely new types of income assets.

And sometimes, when you run the numbers, it’s worth pausing and asking:

Could the future of income investing look different than the past?

As of 3-16-2026 I started an account to do this specifically. I will share the results in a few months or at the end of the year to see how it’s gone and if anything has changed since I started this experiment.

All prices in the below table are per share. multiple the # shares x any price to get the total amount. I started with 10x $97.22 = $972.20 and a purchase of 10 shares of SATA.

Stock# sharesDate PurchasedDate SoldPurchase Price Sell Priceprice appreciationDividend DateDividend
SATA103-16-264-1-26$97.2297.89+$0.67

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice.

Calling MSTR a Ponzi Scheme Shows a Fundamental Misunderstanding of Finance

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Understanding Ponzi schemes, Bitcoin carry trades, and how new financial instruments are evolving

Recently there has been a wave of posts online claiming that MicroStrategy and securities like STRC are “Ponzi schemes.”

That claim misunderstands both what a Ponzi scheme actually is and how these instruments work.

Before labeling something a Ponzi scheme, it helps to start with a clear definition.

What Is a Ponzi Scheme?

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment structure where:

  1. Investors are promised returns
  2. Those returns are not generated by real economic activity
  3. Early investors are paid using money from new investors
  4. The scheme collapses once new inflows stop

The defining characteristics are:

  • No real underlying asset
  • No productive activity generating returns
  • Fabricated account statements or hidden losses
  • Mathematical collapse once new money stops coming in

The most famous example is Bernie Madoff, who fabricated account balances while paying existing investors with money from new clients.

If there is no real asset and no real economic activity, you may be looking at a Ponzi scheme.

An Interesting Contrast: Social Security

Ironically, one of the closest structures many Americans participate in that resembles a Ponzi-style payment system is **Social Security Administration’s Social Security program.

Social Security works by:

  • taxing current workers
  • using those taxes to pay current retirees

There is no large invested pool backing the system. Instead, it relies on a continuous stream of new contributors to fund previous participants.

Government projections show the trust funds are expected to become depleted within the next decade, after which benefits would have to be reduced or taxes increased to maintain payouts.

This is not fraud — it is a demographic funding system created by law — but it illustrates an important point:

Money flowing from new participants to previous participants does not automatically make something a Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme specifically requires deception and fake returns.

Now let’s look at MicroStrategy.

What MicroStrategy Actually Does

MicroStrategy is a publicly traded company that:

  • issues equity and debt securities
  • uses the proceeds to purchase Bitcoin
  • holds that Bitcoin on its balance sheet

The underlying asset is Bitcoin, which is publicly verifiable on the blockchain.

Investors buying MicroStrategy securities know exactly what they are purchasing.

Nothing is hidden.
Nothing is fabricated.
The underlying asset exists and can be independently verified.

You may disagree with the strategy.

But it clearly does not meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

What STRC Actually Is

STRC is a preferred stock issued by MicroStrategy that pays a monthly dividend currently around 11.5% annually.

The capital raised from selling STRC is used to purchase additional Bitcoin.

Conceptually, the structure resembles a carry trade.

A Bitcoin Carry Trade

For decades global investors used the Yen carry trade.

The strategy worked like this:

  1. Borrow Japanese yen at extremely low interest rates
  2. Convert yen into higher-yielding assets (often U.S. dollars)
  3. Capture the yield difference

STRC works in a somewhat similar way — but with Bitcoin.

Instead of:

Yen → USD

The structure is effectively:

USD → Bitcoin

Investors provide capital and earn roughly 11.5% yield, while MicroStrategy accumulates Bitcoin.

What the Market Has Actually Shown

STRC began trading in July 2025.

Around August 2025, Bitcoin traded near $120,000.

Since then Bitcoin has experienced significant price volatility.

Yet STRC has generally continued trading near its $100 reference price.

That doesn’t prove the structure will work forever.

But it does show something important:

So far, the instrument has functioned roughly as designed.

Financial markets tend to expose broken structures quickly.

The Lindy Effect

There is a concept known as the Lindy effect.

The Lindy effect suggests:

The longer something survives, the longer it is likely to continue surviving.

We see this with technologies, institutions, and financial instruments.

Gold has survived thousands of years.
Stock markets have survived more than a century.
Bitcoin itself has now survived multiple boom-bust cycles.

Each month that STRC:

  • maintains its price near $100
  • pays its dividend
  • continues operating normally

…the probability that the structure works increases slightly.

What Are the Real Risks?

None of this means STRC or MicroStrategy are risk-free.

But the risks are often misunderstood.

The real risks are tail risks — low-probability but high-impact events.

For example:

1. Catastrophic failure of Bitcoin

If Bitcoin were somehow fundamentally broken — a critical cryptographic flaw, catastrophic protocol failure, or a coordinated global ban that destroyed liquidity — the entire thesis behind MicroStrategy’s balance sheet would be undermined.

2. Corporate catastrophe unrelated to Bitcoin

Another possibility would be some major event affecting the company itself:

  • fraud inside the company
  • regulatory disaster
  • management misconduct
  • or some unforeseen corporate collapse

These risks exist for every public company.

3. Extreme financial system disruption

In a severe financial crisis, credit markets can temporarily freeze. Any company that relies on capital markets — including MicroStrategy — could be affected.

Risk Is Not Fraud

The irony in many of these debates is that the word “Ponzi” often gets used as a general insult for anything people don’t understand.

Real Ponzi schemes involve deception, fake assets, and fabricated returns.

MicroStrategy and STRC involve transparent securities backed by a publicly verifiable asset.

Whether someone believes in Bitcoin or not, the structure is visible to everyone.

In fact, one of the broader trends of the past decade has been the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: systems where the underlying asset is more transparent than ever before.

Bitcoin’s supply is public.
Bitcoin’s transactions are public.
Bitcoin’s monetary policy is fixed.

Financial instruments like STRC are simply new ways that traditional capital markets are interacting with that asset.

You may think the strategy is aggressive.
You may think the trade will fail.

But the difference between risk and fraud still matters.

And confusing the two only makes it harder to understand what is actually happening in financial markets today.

Spain’s Silver, Japan’s Bonds, America’s Deficits: Why Easy Money Kills Real Work And Hollows Out The Middle Class

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(inspired by this episode of Bitcoin for Millennials)

Big idea: Spain found a mountain of silver in Bolivia, spent like crazy, stopped building real industries—and the bill came due. The same thing is happening today, just with money printers instead of mines.

1) The mountain

In 1545, Spanish explorers struck the richest silver deposit in history: Cerro Rico, “the rich mountain,” in what’s now Bolivia.
A city called Potosí exploded out of the rock. At its height, it was larger than London or Paris.
For two centuries, roughly two-thirds of the world’s silver came from that one mountain. Spain looked unstoppable.

2) Easy money, hard problems

So much silver poured into Europe that prices began rising year after year.
For nearly a thousand years, prices in Europe had been flat. Then suddenly, everything—from bread to rent—started costing more.
Historians call it the Price Revolution.

Spain thought it was getting richer. In reality, its silver was just buying less and less.

3) The addiction loop

Spain borrowed against future silver shipments, funded endless wars, and built palaces to show off its power.
Sound familiar? Borrowing against your future is exactly what modern governments do when they run deficits every single year—financing today’s comfort with tomorrow’s labor and taxes.
And those “endless wars”? Spain fought them across Europe. The U.S. fights them across the globe. Different century, same playbook.

4) “Free” silver, “free” money

The silver was basically free to Spain—mined with forced labor that cost almost nothing.
That “free” flow of money metal fueled reckless spending and inflation.

Today, printing money is even freer. No mines, no ships, no workers—just a digital entry at the central bank.
But the result is the same: more money chasing the same goods, rising prices, and wealth concentrating in financial assets instead of productive work.

5) The wage spiral

When silver poured into Spain, mining and trade paid far more than farming or manufacturing.
Workers chased the high wages, and everyone else demanded raises to keep up.
That wage inflation pushed up local costs across the board.

It soon became cheaper to buy foreign goods than to make them at home.
English and Dutch craftsmen could undersell Spanish products even after shipping them across the sea.
Local factories and farms couldn’t compete. Spain’s economy drifted from production to consumption—spending instead of building.

You can see the same thing happening today.
Money printing and easy credit inflate salaries in finance, tech, and government while driving up housing, energy, and labor costs everywhere else.
Manufacturing can’t keep up, so we import the difference.
The result? A strong currency, cheap goods, and a shrinking middle class.

6) The next chapter — Japan

What if the next Spain isn’t America yet—but Japan?
As this interview with macro analyst Roberto Rios explains, Japan is further down the same path:
zero interest rates, quantitative easing, and government debt so large that the central bank must choose between saving its currency or saving its bond market.

For decades, Japan has printed money to prop up its financial system, even buying stocks outright to keep prices from falling.
That free liquidity created an illusion of stability—until inflation returned and the yen began collapsing.
Now Japan faces the impossible choice every over-leveraged empire eventually faces:
protect the currency and crash the system, or print the money and destroy the currency.

It’s the same dilemma America is approaching, just delayed by our global reserve-currency privilege.
The “free silver” of the 1500s became “free paper” in the 1900s and “free digital dollars” in the 2000s. The pattern never changed—only the technology did.

7) The simple lesson

Resources aren’t wealth. Printing money isn’t wealth. Making things is wealth.
When prosperity feels “free,” it’s usually borrowed from the future.

8) Today’s echo

Easy credit. Quantitative easing. Deficit spending.
Each promises painless prosperity—more liquidity, more growth, no trade-offs.
But it’s the same story Spain wrote 500 years ago: short-term abundance, long-term decay.

Spain’s “free” silver built an empire that rotted from within.
Japan’s “free” money is imploding quietly.
And America’s “free” dollar is next in line—just with better branding and digital ink instead of metal.

9) Bitcoin and the Dollar Endgame

What if Japan’s collapsing bond market isn’t just a regional crisis but a preview of America’s financial future?

In the Bitcoin for Millennials episode, host Bram talks with macro analyst Roberto Rios (“Peruvian Bool”), who has been tracking this “dollar endgame” for years.
While most people fixate on Bitcoin’s short-term price swings, Rios zooms out to the structural problem: every central bank is trapped between saving its currency or saving its bond market. Japan is simply the first to hit the wall.

He calls this dynamic financial gravity—the idea that once debt and money creation expand far enough, gravity pulls everything toward a neutral asset that can’t be printed.

Rios’s core argument:

  • The global monetary system has reached a point where debt can never shrink; it can only be monetized.
  • Central banks will print until confidence breaks.
  • When trust in both sides of the fiat balance sheet—bonds and currencies—collapses, capital will flee into something outside the system entirely.

That’s where Bitcoin enters the picture.

While central banks and institutions still view gold as the “neutral” reserve, Rios argues Bitcoin is the superior version of gold:

  • Fixed supply, instantly verifiable, infinitely divisible.
  • Borderless and digital—no vaults, shipping, or intermediaries.
  • Immune to political capture or forced demand (“fiat” in the literal let-there-be sense).

As he puts it, the Japanese bond crisis could actually trigger the biggest Bitcoin bull run ever.
Once Japan’s carry trade unwinds and the yen weakens further, global liquidity shocks will push central banks to print again—reviving the same inflation loop that began with Spain’s silver.
Each cycle of monetary rescue drives more people to seek an exit from the system itself.

From silver to paper to code:
Spain’s “free” silver created Europe’s first inflation.
Japan’s “free” money is collapsing under its own weight.
Bitcoin is the gravity well everything eventually falls into.

Bitcoin, Deflation, and the Myth of “Useless Money” – (People Won’t Spend Bitcoin Because it’s TOO Valuable????)

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A common fear I hear about Bitcoin goes something like this: “If it becomes so valuable in the future, people will never spend it. They’ll just hoard it forever — and that means it can’t work as money.”

But let’s pause. That argument assumes that money needs to lose value in order to be useful — that people will only spend if their savings are constantly melting. Does that really make sense?

People Already Save

In reality, people save no matter what. Even with inflationary dollars, households and businesses don’t spend every cent. They put money aside — but because the dollar steadily loses value, they are forced to search for other stores of value:

  • Stocks
  • Bonds
  • Real estate
  • Gold
  • Collectibles

This isn’t a feature. It’s a problem. The constant need to escape a leaky dollar creates bubbles, misallocates capital, and makes financial life complicated for everyone.

Take housing, for example. When money loses value, homes become more than shelter — they turn into financial assets. People don’t just buy houses to live in them; they buy them as inflation hedges. That means families looking for a roof over their heads end up competing with investors and savers desperate to preserve wealth. Prices get bid up far beyond the utility value of the home, making affordability worse and turning what should be a basic necessity into a speculative storehouse for capital.

Deflationary Money Doesn’t Paralyze Spending

Critics imagine that if money gains value over time, nobody will use it. But people already spend under deflationary conditions — technology proves this. Everyone knows next year’s phone or TV will be cheaper and better, yet they still buy today. Why? Because they value the use and enjoyment now, not just later.

The same applies to Bitcoin. Once mature, it will likely appreciate at roughly the rate of productivity growth (similar to a low-yield bond). People will hold it to store value — and still spend it when a purchase is worth more than waiting.

Flipping the Narrative

Inflationary money forces people into risky, complex alternatives just to save. Hard money that holds or grows its value removes those distortions. Contrary to the fear, deflationary money won’t break the economy — it may actually fix many of the problems caused by inflationary systems.

And here’s the real irony: many critics already suspect Bitcoin could become extremely valuable — that’s why they worry no one will spend it. But at the same time, they refuse to buy any today. They recognize the upside, but fear keeps them paralyzed on the sidelines.

Conclusion

In a Bitcoin world, homes could go back to being homes, not savings accounts. People could save without speculation, spend without fear of losing purchasing power, and invest in businesses for growth rather than sheltering from inflation. That’s not “useless money.” That’s money finally doing its job.

Who Gets the Income? Who Pays the Taxes?

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Data gathered from this link – https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/

When we talk about taxes in America, the debate often gets sloppy. People use “income” and “wealth” almost interchangeably, but they’re very different things.

  • Income is the flow of money earned each year — wages from a job, dividends, or realized capital gains.
  • Wealth is the stock of assets someone already owns — businesses, real estate, stocks, Bitcoin, etc.

Our tax system is built mainly on income, not wealth. And when commentators conflate the two, it clouds the conversation about fairness and policy.

Income Snapshot

In 2022, the U.S. collected $2.1 trillion in federal income taxes on about $14.8 trillion in total income. That’s about 14.4% of taxable income.

Divide that income across all 153 million taxpayers, and the average income comes out to $95,915, or about $47.96 per hour assuming 2,000 hours of work per year. Of course, averages can mislead — the distribution is anything but equal.

The Top 1%

To qualify for the top 1% in 2022, you needed at least $663,164 of income. On average, these 1.5 million taxpayers earned $2.1 million each.

  • Share of income: 22.4%
  • Share of taxes paid: 40.4%
  • Effective tax rate: 26%

The Bottom 50%

The bottom half — about 76 million taxpayers — earned less than $50,339 per year. Their average income was just $21,000, totaling $1.7 trillion across the group.

  • Effective tax rate: ~4%
  • Many pay no federal income tax at all, often due to credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or child tax credits.

Wealth Snapshot

If we shift from income to wealth, the picture looks even starker. As of mid-2025, U.S. billionaires hold over $6.2 trillion in wealth, spread across only about 813–867 individuals.

But here’s the catch: the U.S. government is adding about $2 trillion in deficit spending every year. Even if you taxed billionaires at extremely high rates, it might cover only a year or two of deficits. After that, the wealth pool would shrink — and most billionaires would likely relocate to avoid such aggressive taxation.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate fairness, redistribution, or even wealth taxes. But it does mean we need to be realistic about the math.

Why This Matters

The key takeaway is that income and wealth are different conversations. Most tax debates focus on income flows, yet the loudest arguments are often about wealth concentration. If we mix those together, we miss the real tradeoffs.

I’m happy to debate how much each group should earn, or whether a wealth tax makes sense (though I personally think it doesn’t). But if we want an honest conversation, we have to separate what we’re actually measuring.

Because when we ask, “Who should pay more?” the first step is being clear: are we talking about annual income, or about the stock of wealth built up over decades?

Data – https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/

You will notice myd ata is slightly different than from the website. The website continually aggregates so their “top 5%” data includes all the income & people from the top 1% + the 2%-5%.
I have broken it down so you can see how much income is in each bucket. I think my method is much more useful.
It also allows you to see how much income, taxes, average income, is in each bucket.

When the data is aggregated it always is skewed due to the higher amount of income above it.

Analysis of – Geo-Strategy #3: How Empire is Destroying America

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You Were So Close: Where the Anti-Empire Analysis Misses Bitcoin’s Role as the Fix

A year old video titled Geo-Strategy #3: How Empire is Destroying America delivers a sharp, compelling critique of the United States’ transformation from a productive manufacturing economy into a hollowed-out empire addicted to easy money, foreign capital, and speculative finance. The lecturer nails several things before they happened:

  • Trump won
  • The U.S. dropped bombs on Iran (June 21, 2025).
  • Empire—not capitalism alone—is the real structural disease.

So far, so good.

But here’s where it falls short: when it comes to solutions, the analysis stops at nostalgia. It groups Bitcoin in with the broader financialized, speculative mindset of the current era—instead of recognizing it as the clearest path out of the collapsing fiat-imperial system.

What the Video Gets Right

1. The Shift to Financialization Was a Disaster
The U.S. economy went from 40% of profits coming from manufacturing to only 10%. Meanwhile, financial services ballooned to 40% of profits but employ only 5% of the workforce. It’s not a real economy anymore—it’s rent-seeking on a grand scale.

2. Empire Crowds Out Domestic Prosperity
As the video rightly says: the U.S. has 800+ overseas bases, trillions in defense spending, and a growing dependency on foreign goods. Meanwhile, infrastructure decays, wages stagnate, and people struggle to own homes.

3. Easy Money Has Warped the Psyche
He astutely observes that young people have a speculative mindset. They want to gamble their way to freedom because working hard for 40 years no longer gets you a house or family. The fiat system broke the ladder.

4. Empires Collapse from Hubris
Rome did it. So did Britain. The U.S. has reached a point where it can’t imagine losing, but is too bloated and fragile to truly win.

What the Video Misses Entirely

Bitcoin isn’t a symptom of decline. It’s the cure.

Here’s where the logic fails: Bitcoin gets lumped in with real estate speculation, meme stocks, and Wall Street grifting. That’s a category error.

Bitcoin is:

  • Not tied to Wall Street.
  • Not controlled by central banks.
  • Not created through debt.

It is, in fact, everything the empire cannot print, inflate, or manipulate.

If fiat money is what powers the empire’s global dominance and fiscal addiction, then Bitcoin is the tool that cuts the cord. It’s what lets young people store value, opt out of inflation, and build sovereign systems outside elite capture.

The Real Problem: Fiat, Not Just Empire

Let’s go one layer deeper:

  • Empire needs fiat to fund wars, bailouts, and pensions.
  • Fiat needs empire to enforce its global dominance (petrodollar system, SWIFT sanctions, military threats).

It’s a closed loop. And Bitcoin breaks it.

Bitcoin is the only monetary system with no central issuer, no forced trust, no inflationary mandate, and no border. It’s not speculative escapism. It’s the foundation for a post-imperial world.

Final Thought

The lecturer in Geo-Strategy #3 is brave and accurate in his breakdown of how empire is destroying America. But like many critics, he sees the collapse clearly yet misses the exit sign flashing in orange behind him:

Bitcoin isn’t the distraction. It’s the lifeboat.

💵 How Fiat Money Hollowed Out America’s Job Market and How to Fix it

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Intro – Why can’t Americans find good jobs anymore?

Because the U.S. dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency lets us import everything without producing anything.

Fiat money didn’t just change our economy—it hollowed it out.

This article explains how we got here—and why only a return to hard money, like Bitcoin, can bring us back.

There’s a sentence I keep coming back to:

Without fiat, we’d have to export goods to earn gold or foreign currency before we could import.

Quick note: “Fiat” money just means paper money that isn’t backed by anything tangible like gold or silver. Its value comes entirely from government decree (“fiat” is Latin for “let it be done”)—and trust.

That’s it. That’s the whole game.

Donald Trump spent years hammering America’s trade deficit, accusing China of taking advantage of us and blaming past politicians for “bad deals.” But the truth is deeper—and more systemic.

The trade deficit isn’t just a negotiating failure. It’s a structural requirement of the global dollar system.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. has run chronic trade deficits not because we’re dumb—but because we have to. That’s how the world gets its dollars. It’s the price of running the global reserve currency.

Fiat money—and specifically, the U.S. dollar’s role as global reserve—didn’t just change how we buy and sell. It rewired the entire global economy. It made it profitable to consume without producing, and to outsource labor while importing goods with nothing more than printed IOUs.

Let’s break that down.

📜 A Brief History of the Cheat Code

After World War II, the U.S. dollar became the centerpiece of the global financial system through the Bretton Woods Agreement. Other countries pegged their currencies to the dollar, and the dollar was pegged to gold at $35/oz. Global trust was strong—because dollars were redeemable for something real.

But by the late 1960s, the system was already cracking.

The U.S. was printing more dollars than it had gold to back, funding both the Vietnam War and LBJ’s Great Society programs. Foreign nations started to notice. The promise of gold convertibility was still on paper, but the gold simply wasn’t there to cover all the dollars in circulation.

Then came the bluff-calling moment: France sent a warship to New York Harbor in 1971 to collect its gold. The U.S. honored the request—but it was a wake-up call. If one country could demand gold, others would follow—and the U.S. didn’t have enough gold left to fulfill those redemptions.

Rather than continue the outflow—and risk total collapse of the system—President Nixon closed the gold window, ending the dollar’s convertibility to gold and defaulting on the original Bretton Woods promise. He called it “temporary,” but we’re still living with the consequences.

The U.S. had just rugged the global economy—but there was no better option available. All other currencies were fiat too.

And so, by default—not by merit—the dollar remained the foundation of global trade.

🛢️ The Petrodollar Patch

To maintain global demand for the dollar, the U.S. struck a 1974 deal with Saudi Arabia:

  • The Saudis would price oil only in dollars,
  • And the U.S. would provide military protection.

This created the petrodollar system, locking in global demand for dollars—because energy runs the world. Every country that wanted oil had to first acquire dollars.

That meant: even without gold, the dollar was still backed—by oil, debt, and military force.

This gave the U.S. a unique superpower:

  • Print money (or sell Treasuries),
  • Ship it overseas,
  • And receive real goods, labor, and resources in return.

No other nation could do this. And no other empire in history ever got away with it for so long.

🏭 The Fallout: Jobs Go Offshore, But Dollars Still Flow

Because the world kept accepting dollars, American companies could:

  • Shut down U.S. factories,
  • Hire cheaper labor abroad,
  • Import those same goods back to the U.S.,
  • And sell them to consumers who were buying with borrowed or printed money.

The fiat system didn’t make foreign workers cheaper, but it made it possible to use them without consequences.

We stopped needing to earn our imports by making things. We could just finance everything with paper and debt. Capital loved it. Wall Street loved it. Politicians loved it.

But working people? Not so much.

From Janesville to Youngstown, from Flint to the Bronx, the outcome was the same: a slow, grinding hollowing-out of America’s industrial base and middle class.

🏦 Makers and Takers: How Finance Replaced Work

In Makers and Takers, journalist Rana Foroohar lays out how U.S. corporations gradually stopped investing in workers, R&D, and physical capital—and instead prioritized stock buybacks, dividends, and debt-fueled growth.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Many of those companies had to play that game—or risk being eaten alive.

In a fiat system with low interest rates, abundant capital, and massive global competition:

  • Shareholder pressure rewards short-term profit over long-term investment.
  • Stock buybacks boost prices faster than hiring or training workers.
  • Outsourcing and financial engineering became necessary survival tools—not just greed.

This wasn’t just a few bad CEOs. It was a system-wide shift in incentives.
The rise of finance wasn’t a deviation—it was an adaptation.

🤖 You Can’t Skill Your Way Out of This

Today, people are told to just “learn to code” or “work harder.” But what they’re really up against is a global fiat machine that rewards capital over labor, and extraction over production.

That’s why:

  • Degrees don’t guarantee jobs,
  • Effort doesn’t guarantee stability,
  • And “just working harder” feels like treading water.

It’s not that Americans don’t want to work. It’s that the system no longer rewards domestic labor—because it doesn’t need to.

🧱 What Comes Next?

The world is starting to wake up. Countries are buying gold. Some are experimenting with Bitcoin. Others are trying to de-dollarize trade altogether. Trust in the U.S. dollar isn’t infinite—and neither is the empire it props up.

The dollar still works—not because it’s sound, but because there hasn’t been a better option. Yet.

But every empire that runs on paper eventually runs out of trust. And when that happens, the real cost of all those “free” imports comes due.

₿ A Hard Money Future: Why Bitcoin Matters

The only real way to end this game is to remove the cheat code: fiat money itself.

A return to hard money—like Bitcoin—could force the system to reorient around real productivity, long-term investment, and sustainable value creation.

Without the ability to endlessly paper over deficits, businesses would once again have to:

  • Build resilient supply chains
  • Invest in their workers
  • Serve customers over shareholders
  • Plan for decades, not quarters

Bitcoin doesn’t just offer escape—it offers discipline. It turns off the short-term game and invites long-term thinking back into the economy.

💬 Closing Thought

Fiat gave us the illusion that we could consume without producing.
But in the long run, reality has a way of settling the bill.
Maybe it’s time we stopped running the tab—and started building again.

Why I Support Bitcoin: A Personal Journey Through the Global Failure of Fiat

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For most of my life, I’ve worked with businesses and nonprofits trying to make the world better. I’m a mechanical engineer by trade. I like building things that work. But the more I’ve worked across systems, the more I’ve realized something deeply broken sits at the root of almost every failure: fiat money.

A Friend, a Business, and a Broken Economy

A few years ago, a friend of mine was helping advise a small, sustainable clothing business in Sri Lanka. They used natural dyes and traditional techniques to create jobs for locals—especially for people who often couldn’t access the formal economy. It was working. Until it wasn’t.

The Sri Lankan currency collapsed during a financial crisis. Inflation soared. Imports became unaffordable. And the business, despite doing everything right, failed—not because of bad management or a poor product, but because the foundation it was built on—its currency—was rotten.

This is what fiat does. It breaks systems from the bottom up. And it leaves regular people holding the bag.

How Fiat Hollowed Out America

We often think of developing countries suffering from bad money, but the same decay has hit the United States. The post-WWII American economy was built on sound money and a manufacturing base that rewarded long-term planning and production.

That changed in 1971, when Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. With no monetary anchor, we entered the era of fiat—the era of cheap credit, endless deficits, and quarterly capitalism. Easy money made it easier to offshore jobs , because capital flowed wherever short-term profits looked best. Domestic manufacturing collapsed (such as in Janesville, Wisconsin). Towns hollowed out. Entire regions like the Midwest were gutted for the sake of Wall Street’s earnings calls.

Short-termism infected everything:

  • Companies spent more on stock buybacks than R&D or wages
  • Governments ran up debt with no repayment plan
  • Individuals chased consumption over savings, just to stay ahead of inflation

Economic Hitmen and Empires of Debt

In Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins explains how U.S. institutions loaned billions to developing nations for infrastructure that looked good on paper but benefited U.S. contractors more than locals. When those countries couldn’t repay, they were forced into austerity, resource sell-offs, and geopolitical obedience. Debt became a weapon.

Today, China is doing the same through its Belt and Road Initiative. In Sri Lanka, China took control of the Hambantota Port on a 99-year lease when the country couldn’t pay its debts. In Greece, China’s COSCO controls the Port of Piraeus. In Australia, they secured a 99-year lease on the Port of Darwin, now under review due to national security concerns.

This isn’t charity. It’s colonialism with spreadsheets.

Fiat Money Rewards the Few, Punishes the Many

Every time a central bank prints new money, it steals from savers and wage earners. Those who hold fiat see their purchasing power decay. This is especially cruel during periods of inflation, like the 8% spike in the U.S. in recent years.

Bitcoin fixes this.

  • It has a fixed supply: 21 million coins, ever.
  • It can’t be printed or manipulated by any government.
  • It rewards saving, planning, and long-term thinking.

It flips the fiat incentives:

  • Instead of spending now, you’re rewarded for holding.
  • Instead of inflation eating your wealth, deflation preserves it.
  • Instead of trusting a corrupt institution, you trust code and math.

Why I Share Bitcoin With Others

I’ve read the books. I’ve seen the failures. I’ve lived through broken systems and watched people I care about suffer—not from laziness or ignorance, but because the monetary foundation was cracked.

Bitcoin is the best alternative I’ve found to a rigged, decaying system. It’s not just about investment. It’s about dignity. Agency. Fairness. It’s about building something that can last.

This is why I support Bitcoin. And this is why I speak up.