How Bitcoin Restored My Hope in The Future
There’s a bumpy road ahead, but the destination is glorious.
The cult I was raised in taught that humanity was meant to live on a paradise earth, but that Adam and Eve threw a wrench in God’s plan when they ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Even so, they said, God intended to soon restore the world to a paradise of peace and plenty. That teaching is one of the things that attracted new members to the Church. It’s not hard to look around the world and see a vast array of injustices and problems that you feel powerless to correct. Believing the Lord would soon rid the world of those problems was comforting. Of course, the cult also taught that to bring about that peace God would slaughter everyone who wasn’t a member of their Church, but that wasn’t the bait they hooked new members with.
I believed in the paradise earth my entire childhood and adult life, so when I woke up and exited the cult, I lost my hope in a perfect future for righteous humanity. Although faced with the harsh reality that the world had to solve its own problems, at first I was very optimistic. One book that helped inject me with optimism was Dr. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker deep dives into history and demonstrates how humanity is safer now than it’s ever been. One statistic that stuck in my mind is that an adult male had a 1 in 5 chance of dying by violence in the 1500s, whereas today that chance is a fraction of 1%.
Being an analytical person myself, this data showing humanity’s slow slog toward progress and peace gave me hope and confidence in the future. Although no paradise was coming, I thought, the world was getting better and would continue to do so. My children would experience an even better world than mine, and their children all the more so.
My Hope Wanes
Then came 2020 and the world’s response to Covid. For the first six months I trusted in the “experts” and everyone in my family did as instructed: masking, social distancing, rigorous hand washing and sanitizing, avoiding crowds and unnecessary social interaction. When the CDC released its first data set clearly showing Covid was no threat to the young or healthy, I fully expected the country to respond to that data and things to go back to normal. Of course, it didn’t. Things got much worse as the fearmongering went into overdrive and the vax was held up as the only solution to the viral eradication of humanity.
As I watched these events play out, my faith in the future of our world declined rapidly. Why were people prone to respond so irrationally and do as they’re told without question? That led me to research human psychology, allopathic medicine, evolutionary tribalism, and the fiat monetary system. The truths I learned along this path were both enlightening and crushing. Although I could not deny the slow slog toward human progress, the unconscionable abuse of power reinforced by fear made me ill. It smacked of my cult days.
The parallels were unmistakable. The cult promised paradise if only members would “listen to God” (meaning the Church leaders). The public was promised a Covid-free world of health if only they would “listen to The Science™” (meaning political leaders). When cult members didn’t listen, they were threatened with marking and eventually shunning, losing their friends and family that were in the cult. When the public refused to comply, they were threatened with the loss of their jobs and shamed in the media, often leading to shunning by their friends and even family. “Do what we say or God will destroy you at Armageddon” was replaced with “Do what we say or we’ll make your life a living hell in our society.”
Moving into 2022, the data clearly showed we were right to question. More people were waking up to this fact, as evidenced by the response to fearmongering posts on social media. Whereas in the past the majority of replies were in agreement, such posts were now often ratioed with dissenters. This was heartening, but not completely. “They’ll do it again,” I told myself. “Some other tool will be used to scare people into compliance.”
My Bitcoin education began in 2020, but I abandoned it to trade in the crypto markets because I was still fiat-minded. I respected the principles of sound money but didn’t yet understand how that could change the world. Perhaps if I had stuck to my Bitcoin roots, I would have maintained my optimism. Regardless, my vision of the future is once again positive thanks to my belief in Bitcoin and sound money. Let me explain why.
Bitcoin Is Hope
The reason world governments were able to pull off the events of the last three years is because of the perverse incentives of unsound money, fiat money unbacked by any hard asset. Because fiat governments can print money at will, robbing citizens of their savings through inflation, anyone who wants to succeed needs to remain close to the people who control the money printer. Those who do, such as Big Business and Big Pharma, are rewarded by the government with some of the plunder of our savings in the form of tax breaks, bailouts, and direct government funding. Those who don’t are punished by not having a share in that plunder. This is known as the Cantillon Effect.
Never in recent history has this Effect been clearer than during the response to Covid. According to the Oxfam report Profiting From Pain, “Billionaire wealth has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic as companies in the food, pharma, energy, and tech sectors have cashed in. Meanwhile millions of people around the world are facing a cost-of-living crisis due to the continuing effects of the pandemic and the rapidly rising costs of essentials, including food and energy. Inequality, already extreme before COVID-19, has reached new levels.” According to the report, while as many as 263 million people were put into extreme poverty in 2022, reversing decades of progress, “a new billionaire has been minted on average every 30 hours during the pandemic.”
Why have the costs of essentials been rising? Inflation. The United States printed $6 trillion during the response to Covid, but where did the money go? According to a report from the Washington Post detailing extensive fraud and abuse, “Those with the deepest pockets, savviest lawyers and best connections often proved adept at accessing the money, while some of the hardest-hit schools, hospitals, businesses and families were shortchanged.” The Post also stated that the printing created “a rapid rise in prices nationally.” The rich got theirs while inflation hurt the average citizen. That’s the Cantillon Effect.
None of this would be possible on a Bitcoin standard. Because you can’t print Bitcoin out of thin air, all spending must be justified, preventing such fraud and abuse. There is no money printer, so there can be no Cantillon Effect. The incentives for Big Business to buy favors from politicians through funding campaigns all but evaporates, as those politicians no longer have the ability to print money that gets funneled to those businesses. The playing field is leveled, the money system fair. Inflation that robs your savings can’t exist since money can’t be printed, so the individual’s savings grow in value over time rather than being plundered for the government to spend on unlegislated projects and wars.
The trickle-down effect of the money printer also disappears. Under a fiat system, the money flows to the industries that support the government’s narratives, and naturally those businesses enforce that narrative among their employees as well. Since businesses that do not abide suffer, those which toe the line grow and profit at their expense. This was clearly seen in the response to Covid as Big Box chains made billions while mom-and-pop stores were forced to shut down. With fewer smaller employers, people are forced to tow the Big Business’ line or be unemployed. In this way fiat creates a top-down power structure that stifles free enterprise and free thinking. Thus the Bitcoiner mantra, “fix the money, fix the world.”
This top-down control also mirrors the cult. Rather than working to improve the world, members were taught God would fix everything in due time. This engendered a spirit of complaining about the world’s problems while remaining in complacent inaction. With the power of the money printer in the hands of the government, helpless people look to the government to solve all their problems, further reinforcing this power structure and stifling personal responsibility and action. This is not a judgement against those people. The money printer truly does make it much more difficult for the individual to solve their own problems. Money printing robs them of their hard-earned savings and constantly raises prices through inflation and the Cantillon Effect, making it more difficult for people to keep their heads above water.
Bitcoin fixes these economic problems and the resulting social issues they produce. Decentralized, secure sound money puts the power of the purse back where it belongs: in the hands of the people. If the government wants to spend money to fund some project, it can only do so with the permission of the people. This incentivizes politicians to do the will of the people rather than that of Big Business. While not completely removing the incentives for corruption, a Bitcoin standard would greatly reduce those incentives, demolishing the top-down power structure and replacing it with a bottom-up one.
The End Is Nigh
I believe this eventuality is coming. As governments destroy their currencies from the debt spiral now in motion, an alternative will be desperately needed. World leaders will have no choice but to jump off the sinking Titanic of fiat and onto the life raft that is the sound money standard of Bitcoin. They won’t like it, it will cost them power, wealth, and influence, but they will do it to save their skins.
A few smaller nations have already dumped their fiat in favor of a Bitcoin standard. Others have their citizenry bypassing corrupt banks and the hyperinflating fiat through the use of Bitcoin and its Lightning network. The domino effect of smaller countries ditching fiat will spill over to ever larger nations until the almighty US dollar finally does the same.
Strap in and hang on. The fiscal ride is likely to be a wild one, and the destination is no Utopia. But it is a world of fair money and free thinkers with a government under their control rather than the other way around. That’s a world worth hoping – and fighting – for. May it be so.