You know what really grinds my gears?
The coffee argument.
You’ve heard it before…
*What’s Bitcoin good for? You can’t even buy coffee with it.*
This is currently the #1 most infuriating FUD.
Closely followed by the environmental argument.
Only, the climate cultists have gone suspiciously silent on Bitcoin’s sacrilege, it’s supposed crimes against mother Gaia. Most likely because the pope of ESG is suddenly on CNBC, extolling the miraculous virtues of Bitcoin. The message was received, and the faithful have fallen in line with bovine obedience.
Bitcoin is now sanctified. They’re not allowed to touch it.
*It’s actually great for the environment, didn’t you know!?*
Hallelujah, praise the lord…
So, that’s done.
Bereft of their favorite cudgel, critics are now reduced to dredging up the tired, old coffee argument. You know, the one from 2015…
My dear and cherished readers, who in their infinite wisdom and endless compassion, will excuse the slightly abrasive tone - because this coffee stuff is super annoying.
Also, I’m typing this 35’000 feet up in the air, now on my third Bloody Mary. That seems as good an excuse as any to rant.
Why is it annoying?
Ok, this may be shocking…
But Bitcoin is not for buying coffee.
Micro payments are the most pedestrian, most unimaginative use-case.
Those who think Bitcoin is for Tiffany to pay for her pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks, or for some Sudanese sheep herders to trade goat cheese, will be sorely disappointed.
It’s so much bigger than that.
It’s not about micro payments, it’s about the financial world order.
Bitcoin is a forcing function - it is the lightning rod for the financial reset we need.
What do I mean by that?
We are collectively staring into the abyss.
In the Feb 2024 Fiscal Report, the US government estimates that the financial position of Social Security and Medicare is underfunded by $175.3 trillion!
That’s a debt/GDP ratio of 640%.
In other words, promises have been made that would consume the nation’s entire economic output for 7 years and 5 months.
These are promises that cannot and will not be honored.
You can almost hear TradFi bro:
*It’s ok, we just owe it to ourselves.*
Wrong.
These are entire generations that have built their careers, their life savings, their retirement plans on sand, on promises that must be broken.
You think people will take this lying down?
This is what wars are fought over.
This is not just an American problem.
Unfunded liabilities are global and structural pillars of the postwar order - they are fast crumbling underneath every developed country.
When you have a world in extreme debt, it is a sign that nobody wanted to pay for past choices. It was politically more expedient to put them on the national credit card, kicking the can down the road. These are often commitments from many decades ago. Often, the beneficiaries of these decisions are long dead and gone. If nobody wanted to foot the bill at the time, do you really think we’ll find volunteers now - twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty years after the fact?
Fat chance.
Instead, coercion is required. Good old fashioned force.
This is why the end of debt cycles has historically sparked war.
The process of civilizational decay and rebirth is a deeply ingrained and human phenomenon, and usually spans 50-60 years (three generations).
As the saying goes:
The first generation sows it, the second grows it, and the third blows it.
This cycle is so ancient, that it’s even found its way into scripture. The book of Leviticus prescribes a so-called Year of Jubilee as a remedy for these purges. The Year of Jubilee comes around once every fifty years and is a special time during which all debt is *forgiven* and all slates wiped clean — a great financial reset:
Here’s the terrifying part:
The end of the debt cycle is all about who gets to reset the ledger. Whoever resets the ledger gets to define the winners and losers, and define the new rules.
Might makes right, and the winner gets to reset the ledger.
Except this time there won’t be a winner…
We've never been through a financial reset with nuclear warheads. And these aren't your grandad's nukes either...
We've been diligently refining them these past 80 years.
Modern arsenals include weapons like the B53 - a thermonuclear bomb with a yield of 9 megatons, making it 600 times more potent than Hiroshima.
That's enough to kill everyone and everything within a 10-mile radius and spread radioactivity for hundreds of miles around the blast site.
Today, there are approximately 13’400 nuclear weapons, of which 3’720 are active warheads - enough to wipe out human civilization many times over.
Unless…
Unless we could get out of our own way, to reset the ledger outside of government force, to introduce something in a sly roundabout way they can’t stop.
Enter digital gold on the Bitcoin network - the first incorruptible central bank in cyberspace. Much like gold, it is a check on sovereigns and institutions alike.
Crypto custodians and exchanges are the layer 2 applications built on top of Bitcoin, they are digital banks. These can be instantly margin called if they squander their users’ trust. FTX, Celsius, and BlockFi are a few recent examples of this self-correcting mechanism.
This is a completely voluntary game.
As Bitcoin continues to absorb monetary premium, it is a peaceful reset of the ledger, although it will undoubtedly be painful for some.
This reset has been progressing in 4-year cycles, or rather in increments of 210’000 blocks at a time. These cycles are best imagined as outward rippling concentric circles, each layer pulling in a new cohort of the population. These are people who denominate their savings in Bitcoin and are opting into this new ledger.
It’s a game of who can stack the most sats.
Except most of the world doesn’t (yet) realize this is the game that’s being played. As these incentives play out over the next few years and become more obvious to the general population, expect these cycles to intensify.
Imagine living through the stealth reset of the financial world order, and complaining you can’t use Bitcoin to buy a mochaccino…
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Great rant! The Bitcoin Standard is a timechain, ledger, rails and settlement layer for the global economy - "the first incorruptible central bank in cyberspace" as you say. Hence why it's so important to be building a Bitcoin Economy with L2s bringing smart contracts and DeFi to the Bitcoin network. New forms of currency are created through tokenisation and synthesised BTC trustlessly pegged 1:1 to our non-custodial stakes in the network. The global economy is more than a monetary system. Only the financially subliterate can envisage a Bitcoin-only world in which we simply barter sats for products. I still like using my Lightning wallets to spend and earn, though.... but when 1 sat is worth $1 in today's purchasing value, we'll have moved on to other Bitcoin ecosystem solutions by then.