Why Bitcoin fixes this

The Roundabout Way

In 2013, I bought my first Bitcoin for $100—just for fun. When it doubled a few days later, I sold half and never looked back. Even as a software engineer who'd studied computer science and business informatics including some foundational economic classes, Bitcoin seemed like nothing more than magic internet money.

In 2016, I discovered Ethereum and was instantly fascinated. Smart contracts! A decentralized worldcomputer! Surely this was better than Bitcoin—why wouldn't it be? I dismissed Bitcoin as the old dinosaur coin that has only the first mover advantage without ever taking time to understand it.

The horse in the picture was literally me. It took almost six years until I became receptive. On a random Saturday, I coincidentally listened to a two-hour podcast episode about Bitcoin that went deeper on inflation, and that day everything started clicking. I began going down the rabbit hole that continues to this day.

Why am I sharing this? This story reflects the journey of many people I've met in the Bitcoin community. Because there's so much noise out there that oftentimes even or better especially people with strong technical or economical background miss the signal intially. Bitcoin is the signal, and every other crypto is noise.

There's a quote that perfectly captures this: Bitcoin is everything people don't know about computers, combined with everything they don't understand about money. While there's truth to this, I'm convinced the most important core ideas are actually accessible to everyone, regardless of their profession or academic background.

I believe many fundamental problems in our world stem from our broken monetary system, and that Bitcoin offers a peaceful revolution to restore sound foundations—putting the economic incentives that guide societies back in proper order.

The Technological Solution to a Technological Problem

Throughout this series, we've built a solid understanding of money from first principles to first understand why we need money and what characteristics and trade-offs matter. We've seen how shortcomings in previous forms of money like gold led to our current monetary system that is fundamentally broken and steadily eroding societies from the ground up. We've learned we can't rely on politicians and central bankers to fix this because all incentives point in the opposite direction.

Created by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009—right in the midst of the Great Financial Crisis—Bitcoin was initially adopted by cypherpunks, a movement from the late 1980s dedicated to preserving digital privacy and building the groundwork for encrypted online communication. The timing wasn't coincidental: Bitcoin's genesis block contains the headline The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks, forever embedding the reason for Bitcoin's creation into its foundation. They understood that sound money and freedom of speech is necessary for a free and flourishing society and that sometimes you need to build the tools for freedom yourself and that it's more effective to write code and build solutions instead of protesting and waiting for political change.

But what exactly is Bitcoin, and how does it address the fundamental problems that led to our broken monetary system? Remember, we saw how gold failed due to technological limitations: the telegraph created a speed gap that forced fractional banking, which then enabled centralized control over money creation. The real problem emerged when we fully abandoned gold — allowing unlimited money printing and debasement that's only possible with fiat currency. Bitcoin solves each of these core issues.

How Bitcoin Fixes the Core Problems

1. Bitcoin Fixes the Scarcity Problem: Code Over Promises

Remember the most important property of good money? Scarcity. Gold's scarcity was enforced by physics — mining was hard, expensive, and limited by natural processes. Today's money relies entirely on promises from politicians who face constant pressure to print more.

Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million coins. This isn't a policy that can be changed by emergency decree or temporary measures that become permanent. It's enforced by code running on thousands of computers worldwide, and while theoretically possible to change if the vast majority of users agreed, such a change would destroy Bitcoin's fundamental value proposition—making it economically irrational for users to support.

Here's what makes Bitcoin truly unique: it has no founder to pressure, no board to lobby, no headquarters to raid, no company to regulate. The supply rules are embedded in software that the entire network must follow.

Unlike every other form of money in history, Bitcoin removes human discretion from money creation. No one can decide to print more bitcoins to fund wars, bail out banks, or stimulate economies. The network doesn't care about politics, doesn't respond to pressure, doesn't make exceptions for any currently ruling system or ideology, and stays neutral.

This separation of money creation from political power—the secularization of money, much like separating church and state—represents the most significant monetary innovation since the invention of coinage itself.

2. Bitcoin Fixes the Speed Problem: Instant Global Settlement

Recall why gold failed in the modern world? The telegraph made information move at the speed of light while gold moved at the speed of ships. This created an unbridgeable gap that forced us into gold-backed paper money and eventually fiat currency.

Bitcoin closes this gap completely. When you send Bitcoin, you're not sending an IOU (I owe you) or a promise—you're transferring actual value at the speed of light without borders. No intermediaries needed, no settlement delays, no counterparty risk.

Compare sending gold across the world—armed transport, insurance, verification, weeks of travel — with sending Bitcoin: type an address, click send, value transferred globally in minutes or instant when using the lightning network. The transaction is final, irreversible, and doesn't require trusting banks, governments, or shipping companies.

This isn't only faster but it's a fundamentally different type of money that moves as fast as information itself.

3. Bitcoin Fixes the Centralized Power Problem: True Decentralization

Just as healthy democracies separate powers between legislation, enforcement, and courts to prevent abuse, sound money requires separating the power to create money from the power to spend it. Our current system concentrates both powers in the same institution — government. This fundamental design flaw has become so normalized that most people never question it, yet it represents one of the most dangerous concentrations of power in human history. Future generations will likely look back at this era with bewilderment, wondering how societies ever accepted giving the same entity both the power to spend money and create it.

Like the internet's decentralized architecture, Bitcoin has no CEO, no headquarters, no single point of control—making it equally difficult to shut down or censor.

But what does decentralization actually mean in practice?

No central authority: Unlike every other monetary system, Bitcoin has no trusted third party that can change the rules. No Federal Reserve, no European Central Bank, no government that can decide to create more money or freeze accounts.

No single point of failure: When China banned Bitcoin mining in 2021, the network didn't miss a beat. Mining operations simply moved to other countries, and the hash rate actually increased. This demonstrated Bitcoin's resilience and global, distributed nature.

Universal access: If you have an internet connection, you can access Bitcoin. No discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, gender, or social status. No permission needed from banks or governments.

This decentralization would enable a critical change in how societies using Bitcoin-based systems could fund themselves. Without the ability to print money, governments would need to carefully allocate collected taxes instead of using inflation as hidden taxation. When the true cost of wars and spending programs becomes visible through direct taxation, societies can and would weigh real trade-offs because additional money for wars would have to be explicitly collected from citizens, leading to strong transparency and awareness of true costs—in contrast to creating debt and kicking the can down the road.

Bitcoin as Superior Money

Let's return to our properties of good money and see how Bitcoin measures up:

• Scarcity: Perfect. Fixed supply enforced by code and economic incentives.
• Durability: Digital information doesn't decay, rust, or deteriorate.
• Portability: Send any amount anywhere in the world in minutes.
• Divisibility: Each Bitcoin divides into 100 million satoshis—perfect for any transaction size.
• Fungibility: Every Bitcoin is identical and interchangeable.
• Verifiability: As soon as you receive a transaction, you can be 100% sure it's bitcoin. The verification cost at that moment is almost zero. Compare this to verifying gold purity, which requires melting it down—highly costly on top of transportation costs.

Bitocin represents the culmination of thousands of years of monetary evolution, intentionally improving upon gold's properties and combining them with the speed of digital communication.

Why Bitcoin and Not Some Other Cryptocurrency?

This is where network effects become crucial. Money naturally converges to a single standard in free markets — not by force, but by necessity. While traditional financial markets today operate under heavy government control, Bitcoin creates its own free market through decentralization, allowing people worldwide to opt into better money regardless of their government's monetary policies. This same convergence pattern that drove adoption of gold throughout history is now driving Bitcoin adoption.

Lyn Alden provides a great example of this in her book: in World of Warcraft, players were supposed to use the game's official currency, but they naturally gravitated toward Stone of Jordan rings as money because these had better monetary properties—crucially, when players died, they lost their official game currency but kept their Stone of Jordan rings, making them a superior store of value. The game developers didn't intend this, but players collectively chose the superior form of money.

Bitcoin has unique characteristics that no other cryptocurrency replicates:

• No pre-mine and no starting price: Everyone potentially had the same chance to buy or mine Bitcoin from the beginning—no special allocation for founders or early investors and no initial price set, which is common for all other projects that are more similar to IPOs where insiders get early access.
• No founder: Satoshi disappeared, ensuring not only that no single person could be pressured to change Bitcoin's properties, but also that it truly moved into community governance rather than being led by a founder like Ethereum or controlled by a company and VCs like Solana or Ripple and most other projects.
• Network effects: This connects to what we discussed as acceptability and salability (cf. post 2) — Bitcoin has the largest, most secure, and most decentralized network and is steadily growing. Money's value comes partly from how many others accept it, which is growing over time.
• Proof of Work security: Bitcoin is anchored in the physical world through energy expenditure, making it costly to attack while allowing anyone to participate in securing the network through mining. This differs fundamentally from newer systems like Ethereum's proof-of-stake, where influence grows with wealth ownership, potentially leading to centralization over time as the wealthy accumulate more direct control on top of more wealth.
• Accessible verification: Anyone can run a Bitcoin node—essentially maintaining their own copy of the blockchain to verify all transactions independently—with inexpensive hardware, ensuring the network remains decentralized. Side note: This differs from miners, who compete to add new blocks to the chain by solving computational puzzles in order.
• Focus on money: Bitcoin tackles the biggest use case in the world—money itself. Which means its addressable market is all global monetary wealth, not just some application segment. There's a second point here that's initially hard to grasp and merits a future deep-dive: even promising applications on other blockchains will eventually be built on Bitcoin instead. Why? Because every application needs money, forcing other blockchains to create tokens—but these tokens aren't actually money when analyzed properly. Applications requiring real money will migrate to higher layers on Bitcoin, similar to how email and web applications are built on top of the internet's base protocols rather than reinventing the foundation over and over again.
• Grassroots adoption: Bitcoin has no paid marketing or executive team—as Bitcoiners say, we are all Satoshi.

When you truly understand money, you realize Bitcoin isn't competing with other cryptocurrencies—it's rather competing with every store of value that has ever existed including real estate.

"But I'm Too Late!"

Every year since 2009, people have declared Bitcoin too late. Yet global adoption remains extremely low, comparable to the internet in its early days when most people didn't have email addresses.

Bitcoin isn't a get-rich-quick scheme—it's an alternative monetary system still in its early stages. You should consider it based on understanding the core problems it addresses and how it fixes them, not on gambling expectations.

It always feels expensive when you first look at Bitcoin—but ask yourself compared to what actually? History shows that time in the market beats timing the market for Bitcoin.

Even those who bought at the highest peaks during previous downturns found themselves breaking even within four years and profitable within five. Of course, past performance doesn't predict future results, and this isn't financial advice—you need to do your own research, come to your own conclusions and to eventually develop the conviction necessary to hold it through potentially volatile phases with peace of mind.

Yes, Bitcoin has been volatile in the short term, but it has trended sustainably upward over the long term, reflecting its growing bottom-up adoption. This volatility is actually an indication of how early we still are. When you understand the fundamentals—that our current monetary system will likely continue debasing currencies while Bitcoin offers a genuine alternative—the logical response becomes clearer.

As Lyn Alden compellingly puts it: Nothing stops this train. I highly recommend her talk at the Bitcoin Prague conference 2025. The debt-based system requires ever-increasing debt to function, making continued currency debasement inevitable. This creates a compelling case for increasing Bitcoin demand over time.

You ultimately must answer these questions for yourself and derive your decision based on your personal conclusions:

1. Will Bitcoin remain decentralized? This is non-trivial to answer, and extensive research by various people continues on this topic. We'll explore this further in future posts.
2. Will demand for Bitcoin increase over time while supply stays fixed? Given the likelihood of continuing currency debasement and the mathematical constraints of our debt-based system, this seems probable. But again you must reach your own informed conclusion based on first principles and assumptions.

There's no universally right or wrong answer, as no one can predict the future. But we can make informed decisions based on understanding the fundamentals. One thing is clear, and most people agree on it: our current financial system is fundamentally broken, and nothing stops the train of continued currency debasement.

Final Thoughts

Bitcoin represents the first truly global and digital monetary system that operates through voluntary adoption rather than government mandate and can transfer value of any size across borders in no time. While current UX challenges around technical literacy and accessibility exist, these reflect the early stage of adoption—similar to the internet in its early days when setting up email or browsing websites required technical expertise. However, many developers, builders and companies are actively working on solutions and accessibility has improved dramatically already.

Bitcoin's adoption follows individual choice based on understanding its properties relative to alternatives. Yet participants join the network for vastly different reasons, which creates an interesting dynamic: some seeking protection from currency debasement, others pursuing speculative gains, still others motivated by the vision of a peaceful revolution that realigns economic incentives without violence or coercion. Yet regardless of individual motivations, each participant strengthens the same underlying network that enforces identical rules for everyone. A Venezuelan fleeing hyperinflation, a Silicon Valley investor diversifying assets, and an advocate for peaceful revolution all contribute equally to Bitcoin's security and decentralization.

The Bitcoin protocol doesn't care about politics, nationality, or ideology. It treats all participants identically, creating a neutral monetary system that doesn't discriminate or polarize. Bitcoin represents a universal language of value that transcends borders and political systems and allows everyone to exchange value on that basis.

Whether Bitcoin adoption reaches critical mass to become a global unit of account remains to be seen. For many, it's already functioning as a store of value — which historically precedes becoming a unit of account and achieving broader acceptability. The network effects as well as the macroeconomic outlook with an almost guaranteed ongoing and accelerating currency debasement suggest this trend continues and indeed nothing stops this train. The timeline remains an open question. I think we are already faster than most people ever thought.

Throughout this series, we've explored the fundamental problems with our current monetary system and examined why Bitcoin might offer a genuine solution. My hope is that you now have a solid foundation to understand these underlying issues, why it's important to everyone, and are encouraged to go down the rabbit hole further, studying and validating these statements yourself—don't trust, verify. The choice is yours now to accept a monetary system that systematically erodes your purchasing power, or opt into one that preserves it. We've examined the evidence—the history, the mathematics, the incentives. Bitcoin works not because of promises or policies, but because of protocol baked in code, game theory, and decentralisation.

You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the orange pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. - Morpheus