The printer and the price
In 1971, Nixon closed the gold window. In the fifty-five years since, the dollar has lost over 85 percent of its purchasing power. A house that cost $25,000 in 1971 costs $400,000 today. Wages did not keep pace. They never do when the unit of account is controlled by people whose career incentives align with expansion, not discipline.
We are not crypto tourists. Some of us read Mises before we read Satoshi. The twenty-one million coin cap is not a technical curiosity — it is a monetary constitution. The most important property of money is scarcity, and every fiat currency in history has failed the scarcity test when political pressure demanded it. The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from $900 billion to $9 trillion in fifteen years. Who voted on that?
The cypherpunks care about censorship resistance. We care about something older: the principle that no committee should be able to debase your savings while you sleep. The regulators see volatility and call it instmaturity. We see a fifteen-year-old monetary experiment competing against a fifty-five-year-old monetary experiment, and the older one has lost 85 percent of its value by design.
El Salvador used its Bitcoin position to renegotiate IMF terms. A nation the size of Massachusetts leveraging a decentralized asset against the institution that traditionally dictates terms to developing countries. Someone who spent thousands of hours studying this system is not speculating. They are reading an engineering blueprint.
Where we concede ground: We oversold the safe-haven narrative before the institutional base existed. That is on us.
What would change our mind: Twenty years of stable fiat purchasing power under a transparent, rules-based central bank mandate.
Read the full synthesis: Has crypto delivered on any of its promises?