𝚋𝚒𝚝𝚌𝚘𝚒𝚗: 𝚊 𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚘𝚋𝚓𝚎𝚌𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚊𝚗 𝚎𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚕𝚍

𝚊 𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚝 𝚜𝚕𝚊𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚊𝚗 𝚎𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚕𝚍. 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚕 𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚗𝚜 𝚗𝚎𝚡𝚝? 𝚒 𝚍𝚛𝚊𝚐 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚗-𝚜𝚘𝚊𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚜𝚑 𝚙𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚊 𝚏𝚞𝚕𝚕-𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚕𝚎 𝚊𝚞𝚍𝚒𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚋𝚒𝚝𝚌𝚘𝚒𝚗'𝚜 𝚒𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚍 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚌𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎, 𝚐𝚘𝚕𝚍'𝚜 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚕𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚑𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚔, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚠𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚜𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚒𝚗 𝚊𝚗 𝚎𝚛𝚊 𝚑𝚞𝚛𝚝𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚘𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚊𝚋𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎. 

𝚒 𝚔𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚋𝚢 𝚏𝚕𝚒𝚙𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚏𝚒𝚊𝚝 𝚘𝚗 𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍: 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚊𝚕 𝚏𝚕𝚘𝚙, 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚊 𝚜𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚊𝚍𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚠𝚎𝚊𝚙𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚍 𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚒𝚎𝚝𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚘𝚐𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝚠𝚎𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚛'𝚜 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚘𝚜, 𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟿'𝚜 𝚌𝚛𝚊𝚜𝚑, 𝟸𝟶𝟶𝟾'𝚜 𝚖𝚎𝚕𝚝𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚖𝚒𝚌'𝚜 𝚏𝚞𝚛𝚢. 𝚎𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝚖𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚢 𝚜𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚌𝚔, 𝚋𝚞𝚢𝚜 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚒𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎, 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚢 𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗 𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚝𝚜. 𝚋𝚛𝚞𝚝𝚊𝚕 𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚒𝚗 𝚖𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗.

𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎, 𝚒 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚜𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚊𝚐𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚞𝚗𝚢𝚒𝚎𝚕𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚍. 𝚐𝚘𝚕𝚍'𝚜 𝚜𝚞𝚙𝚙𝚕𝚢 𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚜 𝚞𝚙 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚎𝚜 𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚖 𝚑𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚎𝚛; 𝚐𝚎𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚢 𝚍𝚛𝚊𝚐𝚜 𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚏𝚎𝚎𝚝, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚝𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚍 𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐. 𝚋𝚒𝚝𝚌𝚘𝚒𝚗'𝚜 𝚜𝚞𝚙𝚙𝚕𝚢? 𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚍 𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚘 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚎. 𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚞𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚎𝚍, 𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚍 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚌𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚔, 𝚍𝚞𝚖𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚕𝚕 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚘𝚜 𝚘𝚗 𝚟𝚘𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚏𝚛𝚊𝚐𝚒𝚕𝚎 𝚙𝚜𝚢𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚜. 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝'𝚜 𝚠𝚑𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚜𝚊𝚟𝚊𝚐𝚎 𝚍𝚛𝚊𝚠𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚝𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚜, 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚍𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚑 𝚔𝚗𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚜.

𝚒 𝚙𝚕𝚞𝚗𝚐𝚎 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚌𝚛𝚢𝚙𝚝𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚑𝚢. 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚞𝚕𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚎 𝚘𝚠𝚗𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚙 𝚟𝚊𝚞𝚕𝚝 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚚𝚞𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚊𝚐𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝 𝚚𝚞𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚞𝚖 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚜 𝚊 𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚒𝚎𝚝𝚊𝚕 𝚐𝚞𝚝 𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚌𝚔, 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚑𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚢𝚠𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝚊𝚙𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚢𝚙𝚜𝚎. 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚑 𝚞𝚙𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚜 𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚢; 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚕 𝚍𝚛𝚊𝚐 𝚒𝚜 𝚌𝚘𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗. 𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝 𝚖𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚕𝚜, 𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚏𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚔𝚎𝚢𝚜, 𝚠𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚝 𝚌𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚜 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚜𝚝. 𝚎𝚗 𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚝𝚎, 𝚒 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚌𝚝 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚜, 𝚒𝚗𝚏𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗-𝚑𝚎𝚍𝚐𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚜, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚏𝚝 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚍𝚎𝚟𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚌𝚞𝚕𝚝 𝚣𝚎𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚝𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚛𝚞𝚕𝚎-𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚌𝚞𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚗𝚜 𝚛𝚎𝚋𝚊𝚕𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚗 𝚊𝚞𝚝𝚘𝚙𝚒𝚕𝚘𝚝. 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍? 

𝚒𝚏 𝚢𝚘𝚞'𝚛𝚎 𝚐𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚞𝚙 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚖𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚢 𝚍𝚘𝚐𝚖𝚊, 𝚟𝚘𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚟𝚒𝚋𝚎𝚜, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 "𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚔𝚕𝚎𝚜𝚜" 𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚕𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚜, 𝚑𝚒𝚝 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚢. 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚜𝚞𝚋𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚋𝚎, 𝚋𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚒𝚝 𝚝𝚘 𝚊 𝚋𝚞𝚍𝚍𝚢 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚍 𝚐𝚘𝚕𝚍'𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚐𝚊𝚖𝚎, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚍𝚛𝚘𝚙 𝚊 𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚠 𝚜𝚙𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐: 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚎 𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚔 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚍𝚎-𝚘𝚛 𝚒𝚗 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚍𝚊𝚖𝚗 𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚟𝚎𝚜?

Chapters

• 0:00 𝚊 𝚜𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚊 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚜
• 6:52 𝚊 𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚘𝚋𝚓𝚎𝚌𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚊𝚗 𝚎𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚕𝚍.
• 15:14 𝚏𝚒𝚊𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚐𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚊𝚋𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎.
• 23:52 𝚏𝚒𝚊𝚝’𝚜 𝚞𝚐𝚕𝚢 𝚜𝚞𝚌𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚜.
• 38:15 𝚑𝚘𝚠 𝚐𝚘𝚕𝚍 𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚞𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚔𝚜.
• 44:44 𝚊 𝚍𝚒𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚏 𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚜.
• 50:50 𝚊𝚋𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚡𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗.
• 1:06:14 𝚌𝚘𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚊 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚍𝚞𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚛.
• 1:11:05 𝚚𝚞𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚞𝚖 𝚊𝚜 𝚊 𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚒𝚊𝚕 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚝𝚎𝚜𝚝.
• 1:26:30 𝚍𝚛𝚊𝚠𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝.
• 1:32:26 𝚋𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚎𝚏, 𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚞𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝.
• 1:42:50 𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚜, 𝚎𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌𝚒𝚝𝚢, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚝 𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚒𝚗𝚐.
• 1:49:56 𝚜𝚞𝚙𝚙𝚘𝚛𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚒𝚗𝚟𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚍𝚎𝚒𝚝𝚢.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I finally did it. I wrote something which was less than a riddle. It was about Bitcoin. And to be frank, I don't know where it came from. I was at Eden to Go last Saturday afternoon. I'd come out of the gym. It was hot. But it was grey. It's rained a lot the last week. I always panic. You know my Scottish stories. A grey sky so low you could you felt like you could touch it. I've been running away from gray skies all my life. I'm the boy who moved to London chasing rainbows. Chasing sunshine. No surprise. I went. I went south. And finally hit bullseye set parts. But then I was, beside the the noisy, the runway. Runway's not the worst of it, it's the helicopter landing port. I fucking hate helicopters. Anyway. And I know you think I make it up. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. My most important data feed these days. Instagram. I watch a reel, and it's by this billionaire Mexican. And no, it's not Carlos Slim. Apparently there are there are more. I don't know the guy. But he's pathologically bullish on Bitcoin. And quaint and charming and eccentric. And I don't know what he said. He may as well have read the dictionary in Spanish, Mexican Spanish. The REM, the eternal thought machine inside my head was was purring and and it found something in his delivery. And I don't know what it found. But I picked up my phone and I started voice dictating into the dreaded machine, the AI. And then I, as as chance would have it, I bumped into Trader Mike and we swapped stories. And on the Sunday, I spent 48 hours at Blanc Bleu, my spiritual, my physical home. And I wrote in the master bedroom, looking out at grey skies. It rained constantly for 48 hours. Do you know Sunday night I didn't even use the air conditioning? Wow. Anyway. For years, I've treated Bitcoin as something I understood well enough to have an opinion on. But not quite well enough to maybe take it apart properly. And that wasn't laziness. I mean I can be a lazy bugger. And it wasn't it's I swear to God. Name of the father, name of the son. It wasn't a lack of curiosity. It was something else. It was the quiet assumption that whatever Bitcoin, whatever riddle it was trying to solve, I kind of had jumped ahead and reckoned that modern finance had already found a workaround. But this fourth violent price drawdown in Bobby Digital. Well, it that and the Instagram reel forced me to reconsider my assumptions. Bitcoin not as a trade, not as a belief system, but Bitcoin is a monetary object with consequence. You see, at this point in its life, repeated collapses are they're no longer a curiosity. They're a damn feature that really demands explanation. And this piece, this piece that I'm going to orally deliver to you, is my attempt to finally map the terrain that I've been circling for all these years. Bitcoin's hardness and its fragility. It's human governance and its unreal its uneasy relationship with quite frankly, with a world that increasingly runs on elastic money and digital abundance.

SPEAKER_01: 5:23

I swear it's it's not a defense. It's not an indictment. It's an audit.

SPEAKER_00: 5:36

And you know what? Writing it surprised me. I came away less certain about price, more certain about structure, and far, far more interested in the question of whether Bitcoin's biggest risk has ever been the mathematics. So if if you felt confident dismissing Bitcoin, oh you're one of those ones very confident believing in it.

SPEAKER_01: 6:24

I want to say to you this is ridden with you in mind. It left me sharper. And I hope it does the same for you. So shall we have a go?

SPEAKER_00: 6:49

Boom boom boom boom boom. Bitcoin, a hard object in an elastic world. Bitcoin is is not here to save the world. It's here because the world learned the hard way that modern money only works by by cheating. Cheating time. Cheating pain. Cheating death. You see, we built systems that survive by by bending, socializing loss, pretending tomorrow can always carry what today could not. And mostly it's worked. Well worked well enough that America never failed. That markets never cleared. And catastrophe, it was deferred again and again and again. But in doing so, we quietly erase something that that used to matter. The idea that there should exist at least at least one asset that that doesn't bend. One thing that refuses discretion. One thing that doesn't care who's in power, who's desperate, or who's about to break. Bitcoin is not an improvement on the system. It's a provocation aimed at the damn thing. It's a hard object thrown into an elastic world just to see what happens. Now that provocation, it only makes sense once you recognize what elastic money, what it left behind. You see, as societies embraced fiat, the global pool of savings. It didn't become defenseless. Inflation arrived, sure, but you know, it was hedgeable. Equities, property, credit, productive ownership. Capital learned how to run. What didn't reappear was another asset that hedged inflation without introducing credit risk. Gold has of course played that role for centuries. Scarce, apolitical, jurisdictionless created without leverage, owing nothing to anyone. An inflation hedge that was simultaneously riskless. When gold was demoted as a monetary standard in the nineteen thirties, that role was tolerated, but it wasn't replaced. When gold was ransacked between the tumultuous long years stretching from nineteen eighty to twenty and eleven, curious minds they looked for an alternative. And Bitcoin emerged from that gap. Not as a rejection of fiat and not as a tool for managing economic cycles, but as an attempt to recreate gold's most elusive property in digital form. Not merely scarcity, but scarcity without issuer risk. Not just protection against dilution, but insulation from discretion. And this, brothers and sisters, this is why Bitcoin's design is so fucking severe. If the objective were simply to hedge inflation, well the world already has dozens of ways to do that. No, the harder ambition was to build an asset that can sit between beneath beneath the monetary system as collateral rather than inside the system. And that ambition, it now collides with modern finance. Credit, you see, it expands not on trust, but on what can be pledged. And this is why stable coins matter. They fuse the credit risklessness of US treasuries with the hard constraints elsewhere in the financial universe. They are the clearest signal yet that the future of fiat will be built on better collateral, not moral restraint. That horse bolted the stable a long time ago. And Bitcoin, well, you see, Bitcoin, it only has a seat at that table if it can scale into a recognizable, liquid, ressor. And you know what? That requires heft. That requires market value, not sentiment, not belief, but a market value deep enough, deep enough, deep enough, deep enough, forgive me, to support global credit creation without fragility. And this is why the comparison with gold, of course, is unavoidable. Gold is roughly forty-five trillion dollars. Bitcoin remains under one. That gap is not philosophical, it's functional. Geology has already earned its role, and mathematics is still additioning. So the question is not whether Bitcoin is scarce enough or portable enough or damn clever enough, it is. The question is whether an asset enforced by code and human coordination can ever be trusted at scale in the way that an asteroid once was. And this is what this paper is all about. Not whether Bitcoin replaces fiat, it will not. Not whether elasticity is immoral, it is not. So let's talk about fiat in the coming age of abundance. The defining monetary lesson of the twentieth century. You know, it was not ideological, but it was traumatic. And it emerged not from debates about socialism versus capitalism or Keynes versus Hayek, but from the lived experiences of what happens when economic systems impose rigidity on societies that are already suffering under extreme stress. You see, after the First World War, Germany, it wasn't a failed society. Bruised it certainly was, diminished, politically unstable, and deeply resentful of all that had come to pass. But it remained functional. Industry existed. Labor existed. Institutions existed. No, the system was strained, but not yet broken. The collapse came later, and it was certainly not inevitable. Versailles changed everything. That treaty was not merely punitive. It was vindictive and economically illiterate. Reparations were demanded in hard terms, payable in gold, at precisely the moment German Germany's productive capacity was being constrained. Forgiveness was absent. Flexibility had gone. Economic reality was sadly ignored. When Germany struggled to meet those obligations, the response was not renegotiation, but gangster like enforcement. You see, in nineteen twenty three, French and Belgian forces occupied the Ruhr Valley, seizing control of Germany's industrial heartland. It's coal, it's steel, its metal production, its soul. Whilst of course still demanding hard money gold payments to its allied conquerors. Output was taken, and yet gold was still required. Rigidity imposed from both ends of the spectrum. This was the breaking point. What followed was not ideological radicalization in the abstract, but economic paralysis and practice. Unemployment surged. Production, of course, collapsed. A growing share of the adult population became economically useless, not inefficient, not underpaid, useless, idle, watching, waiting. That condition, it doesn't produce reflection or indeed moderation. It produces rage and hyperinflation. Hard money, it didn't cause the collapse of Weimar Germany. But it certainly failed catastrophically to absorb the trauma. And when institutions fracture under mass unemployment, money fractures. Hyperinflation, it wasn't softness. It was panic. It was the monetary expression of legitimacy evaporating in real time. In that sequence, it mattered. And thank God, it was remembered. You see, no less, no later than a decade or a decade. The world faced another shock that threatened to replay the same pattern at a far larger scale. The crash of 1929. It produced mass unemployment in the North American continent, collapsing demand, and the genuine possibility that the American financial system would follow Germany down the same path to ruin. The ingredients were familiar, idle men, stuttered factories, political stress, and a rigid monetary framework that transmitted pressure rather than absorbing it. But this time the response changed. And gold was abandoned as the governing constraint. Not because it was immoral or discredited, but because it was brittle, too rigid to cope with systemic trauma. Under gold, you see, pressure concentrates until something snaps. Whereas under fiat, the pressure is dispersed. Elasticity replaces purity. Monetary doctrine was abandoned to keep the system intact. Hallelujah. Now the report the response, don't get me wrong, it was ugly, it was unfair. It produced deserved anger. But here's the thing it worked. The United States of America survived intact. Unemployment was brutal, but the political Center, it held extremism, it remained marginal. Fiat didn't heal the trauma, but it prevented it from metastasising. Can't you say that word? Metastasising. It's a lot of S's. And that, not the S's. But the fact that Fiat prevented metastasising. That became the lesson. In moments of economic shock, hardness accelerates entropy. While monetary elasticity, it buys you time. And time in stressed societies, that's all you got, baby. It's the difference between repair and collapse. This wasn't an argument against scarcity. It was an argument against rigidity in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so a fiat emerged not as an ideological triumph, but as an adaptive response to the catastrophic failure of hard constraints under conditions of mass unemployment. And that distinction matters. Because Bitcoin, it didn't arrive to overturn this lesson. No, it arrived long after and in its aftermath. So now let's discuss Fiat's ugly success. Fiat's ugly success. You see, over the subsequent century, from the the Weimar collapse and the Great Depression, I mean there was a depression. But the logic of fiat fiat, it has been tested repeatedly. And you know what? Each time it's been reaffirmed and under great pressure. The global financial crisis of 2008. It wasn't a scare, it wasn't a stress test, it was a system-wide cardiac arrest. The banking system, the global banking system, you know what? It was insolvent. The only open question was whether circulation could be restarted before institutional damage became permanent. And again, the response, it certainly wasn't elegant. Again, rules were bent, balance sheets expanded, losses socialized. Heart constraints, well, if there were if there were any, you know what, they were suspended to keep the system alive. Heart constraints, what would they be? Look no further than budget deficits. It was ugly, unfair, morally nauseating to me. I found myself on the BBC, raging. But you know what? It also worked. And the same pattern repeated itself during the pandemic. Supply chains froze, borders closed, hospitals filled, the phrase human extinction escaped the laboratory and entered the bloodstream of our culture. Belief alone was enough to threaten collapse. And yet once again, Fiat leaned in. Too much, some said. Money expanded, credit expanded, time was frozen. People were paid to stay at home while the system was held upright. But once again, rigidity was rejected in favor of elasticity. And once again, the worst left tail event was avoided. This is what fiat does very well. It absorbs shocks that hard systems transmit. It disperses pressure instead of concentrating it. It allows societies to survive periods of mass dislocation without forcing immediate liquidation of people, of institutions, of legitimacy. In a world repeatedly exposed to financial crises, pandemics, and geopolitical shocks. This is proven to be a feature and certainly not a bug. Elasticity, however, you know what? It's not free. The cost does show up as inflation. Not as a temporary inconvenience, but as a ratchet. Prices spike, they settle, and then they remain elusively elevated. Your grocery bills, they don't return to their old levels. This is the mechanical consequence of pushing risk forward in time. Fiat smooths the present by borrowing from his friend the future. And this matters most for those, you know, for those without assets, for the disenfranchised. Inflation for them is not a macroeconomic abstraction like it is for me, or a debate about economic models, philosophy, politics, economics. It's a daily budgetary pressure. Rent before wages, food before leisure, energy before dignity. When prices ratchet higher, there's no portfolio adjustment, no rebalancing, no clever hedge. For many, hard to say, but there's only less room to breathe. Modern financial systems, you know, they are exceptionally effective at protecting those who already participate in them. The franchised. Equities rise with nominal growth. Property. Property prices absorb inflation, then some, and then some more. Credit, leverage, index-linked instruments, real assets, productive ownership. The menu is broad, is liquid, and it's proven. Elasticity doesn't destroy capital for the insiders. Indeed, it often enriches them. Beta, beta making them geniuses. Asset prices inflate faster than wages for that for that issue. Why? Well, because the system is designed to keep capital mobile and solvent. The burden has to fall elsewhere. What inflation punishes is not thrift in some Dekenzian moral sense, but exclusion. Money left idle because it must be. Capital that cannot move because it doesn't exist. Patience without agency. This isn't a judgment about behavior. It's a structural outcome. Fiat, fiat rewards participation and mobility. Fiat does not reward fairness. And over long periods of sustained monetary elasticity, that distinction compounds into something corrosive and something grossly unfair. And this again, my brothers and sisters, but this is where this is where Bitcoin enters the story. Drum rope, da da da da da da da da. Not as a solution to inequality, I wish. Not as a replacement, I keep saying, it's not a replacement for funny for fiat money. Funny money. Bitcoin is not funny money. Bitcoin is a strange and an uncomfortable experiment. It's a mathematical object offered to the world without permission, without leverage, without jurisdiction. It's a bearer asset in digital form. One that could, in principle, be owned by anyone on the planet with access to a phone and an internet connection. No bank account required, no credit history, no gatekeeper. You see, for the disenfranchised, that possibility matters. Not because Bitcoin guarantees protection, huh? You've seen the price lately, but because it offers asymmetry. If the experiment fails, little is lost. If it succeeds, if it succeeds as a provably scarce, apolitical, non-discretionary asset that can be recognized at scale, then the upside is transformative. Million dollars per coin, baby. It's not charity. This is social escape velocity. And that truth remains, but it remains even more so today. But the promise remains unresolved. And that brings us back to the central tension of this talk. You see, Bitcoin's relevance, its credibility, and its ultimate utility depends not on ideology, but on scale. For Bitcoin to function as an anchor inside a fiat system, to serve as its collateral, to support credit, to really matter. The market capitalization of Bitcoin, it must approach that of gold. Anything smaller remains a speculation. Anything larger becomes infrastructure. And this is why the question is no longer academic. You see, after 15 years, of course, Bitcoin is no longer a curiosity. It's a lab rat. It's running around in real time. It's being tested as to whether mathematical scarcity can indeed earn trust, liquidity, and the legitimacy that geological scarcity acquired over centuries. And whether doing so, whether it can widen access to riskless inflation protection rather than merely creating a new priesthood. This distinction sharpens as economics approach. Economics or economies, I want to say as economies approach, a shock. I don't know. Hesitation. Larger than Weimar or 1929. That's a statement.

SPEAKER_01: 34:20

We're knocking on the on the door of something enormous.

SPEAKER_00: 34:28

The displacement of labor by machines. Automation and artificial intelligence. Not just productivity stories, but human redundancy events. Yes, you and me. Entire categories of work that will vanish faster. Then our societies can can reassign income, can reassign purpose or dignity. Dignity. He sailed on a boat called dignity. In that world, the fragile variable is not going to be capital, it's going to be employment. And fiat will almost certainly be called upon again. Not as ideology, but as a damn necessity. I mean unemployment, what am I talking about? Unemployment is only like 4.0 in America. Albeit revisions to the ledger. Millions of livelihoods seem to disappear with revisions. 2024, 2025, phantom jobs. So yes, I'm gonna talk about the possibility of a universal credit, of gigantic fiscal transfers, of that monetary elasticity, the tools required to cushion the crushing employment shock that seems to be so close at hand, and to prevent the social fracture when labor is displaced at scale. And this isn't even conjecture. It's really the only mechanism modern states possess to manage I was gonna call it transition. What is it? Is it a transition? Or human extinction. And importantly, this world this world that doesn't lack inflation hedges but it's missing something narrower, more structural. It's missing non-discretionary scarcity at industrial scale. Two opposites colliding. Scarcity at industrial scale. Assets that can sit at the base of the money of the new monetary system act as collateral. And again, not because they promise growth, but they promise the inverse, they promise constraint. Gold, of course, once played that role until it didn't. Perhaps it will again. That's when the markets seem to be screaming at me. Henry, you're an idiot. Used to be a gold bull, now you're full of bull. Maybe. But Bitcoin is an attempt to recreate gold digitally. Not as human salvation, and not as an alternative to elasticity, but as a potential anchor beneath the system. The unresolved question whether Bitcoin can grow large enough in market value, liquid enough, and trusted enough to serve that role when the singularity, when the singularity, God forbid, arrives. How gold actually works, let's consider it. Gold has long been understood as money that sits outside politics. It's trusted precisely because it's it's not governed by decree, it's not issued by states, it's not altered by committees. This neutrality is earned through distance, it's dug from the ground, it's refined at considerable cost, and its accumulation can only be described as slow. For centuries, that physical constraint has made it a reliable anchor when confidence in human institutions when that confidence has failed. But gold scarcity is it's often misunderstood. You see, when gold traded at roughly$300 an ounce in the early 2000s, when I was buying it from the British Treasury, who had been accumulating it for 200 years and then sold half of it. Anyway, I digress. When gold traded at roughly$300, the global proven and probable reserves, you know, it's like an audit for mining companies to try and get them to demonstrate that they're not lying bastards, of which many are. But global proven and probable, the amount of gold we thought we could that existed, that we could realistically mine from the earth forever. Those reserves were estimated at around 45 to 50,000 tons. See, back then exploration budgets were kind of thin, thin gruel. Twenty years of bear market didn't make investors very kind or accommodating. And lower grade ore, gold ore, it was uneconomic. And entire jurisdictions were just frankly ignored, too risky, too expensive. And so supply looked finite because at 300 bucks, it effectively was. But here's the thing that picture changes when the gold price changes. Today, with gold trading around$5,000 an ounce, those estimated proven and probable reserves, well, they're closer to 65, if not 72,000 tons. And that's despite the intervening decades of continuous mining. You see higher prices reclassify rock into gold ore, tailings into gold assets, and deposits, once diminished as marginal, they suddenly become viable. And jurisdictions, those dodgy places on the edge of the map, previously considered uneconomic, unnecessary, will they re-enter the frame? I'm not saying this is debasement. I'm saying it's I'm saying it's response. Gold doesn't dilute itself politically, it expands itself industrially. When price rises, the gold supply responds. Of course, not instantly and not not recklessly, but structurally, historically, global gold supply has grown at roughly two, three percent a year. Now that rate is slow enough to preserve trust, but it's persistent enough to matter over very long time horizons. You see, by the end of this century, the 21st century, that is, if history's any guide, the total stock of gold mined, plus the proven and the probable reserves, will have roughly doubled. The base will have doubled. No votes will have been taken, no rules will have been changed. Simply physics will do what physics allows. And this is both gold's strength and its limitation. Gold's hardness is governed obviously by geology. It obeys natural law, not human coordination. And that makes it politically neutral and socially legible. But also means that gold cannot refuse incentives when the when the reward, when the profit reward is high enough, more effort is applied, more technology is deployed, and more gold supply eventually emerges. Gold. Gold, gold, you're making me old. Gold responds to price. Now that property, it doesn't make gold inferior. It just makes it comprehensible. Markets understand geological scarcity instinctively. They know how it behaves under stress. They know how it leaks. It leaks slowly, predictably, and impersonally. And the market, you know what, the market's cool with that. And this is the benchmark. And possibly this is the biggest point of my talk. This is the benchmark against which Bitcoin is inevitably. Measured, and not because it's trying to replace gold, but because gold represents the oldest and the most trusted expression of non-sovereign scarcity that there is. Bitcoin enters this landscape not as a moral challenger to gold, but as a mechanical one. His claim is not that gold is weak, but that there exists another form of hardness governed not by physics, geology, but by time and rule. And that distinction is where the argument begins. You see, Bitcoin is a different kind of hardness. Its claim is not philosophical, but mechanical. You see, unlike gold, Bitcoin doesn't respond to price. It doesn't expand when demand rises. And it doesn't contract when demand falls. Its supply is governed entirely by time, according to a schedule fixed at its inception and enforced by the network itself. And that schedule, it doesn't care about recessions, wars, elections, panics, tariffs, or the Bitcoin price itself. Bitcoin was capped at birth. 21 million units. Not an estimate, not a reserve calculation, not a probabilistic assessment signed off by a committee of engineers, but a hard ceiling defined in computer code and indifferent to circumstance. Roughly 94% of that supply has already been issued. The remaining 6% will be released slowly on a predetermined path, with its issuance effectively exhausted by around 2040. And after that, Bitcoin supply does not grow. And this is what makes Bitcoin unusual. Gold scarcity is governed by geology and incentives. Bitcoin scarcity is governed by rules and time. Like I said, gold price rises, supply eventually responds. Bitcoin price rises, supply nothing, baby. Instead, issuance tightens mechanically through the halving process, which reduces the flow of new coins, minted, mined minted, roughly every four years. Reduces the flow regardless of demand, regardless of price. This is not moral hierarchy. It is what is it? I don't um structural asymmetry. Gold is scarce because it's hard to extract. Bitcoin is scarce because it's hard to change. Gold's constraint is physical. Bitcoin's constraint is is social and procedural. One obeys the laws of physics, the other obeys consensus. Both are forms of hardness. But of course they behave differently under stress. So by the end of the century, the total stock of Bitcoin will be unchanged. There will be no technological breakthrough that unlocks new Bitcoin deposits. There will be no reclassification of marginal code into viable supply. There will be no price signal that induces expansion. Bitcoin scarcity is enforced by design. It's not discovered over time. And that's why we say Bitcoin is algorithmically scarce. No, not my friends, because it's digital, but because its supply dynamics are explicitly non-responsive. It's a system constructed to refuse incentives. Whereas gold yields, Bitcoin will always remain inert. And that inertness is the feature. But it's also the source of increasing discomfort. Let's state a fact. Markets are comfortable with scarcity that leaks slowly and impersonally. They are damn well less comfortable with a scarcity that depends on rule adherence and human coordination. Think about it, geological systems, they don't argue back. Social systems do. And the harder the rule, the more attention is paid to whether the damn rule can be broken. So Bitcoin's hardness, yes, it's not just a question of numbers, it's a question. And at the crux of this talk, Bitcoin's hardness is a question of its credibility. And that's not whether the rules are strict, they are, but whether they can remain strict under intense pressure. Not whether scarcity is defined, but whether it can survive stress without being renegotiated. And this is where Bitcoin stops looking like a commodity and starts resembling a monetary regime. A red flag, perhaps. Scarcity doesn't rest on trust in institutions or authority, thank God. But it does rest on the collective willingness of its participants to enforce rules that cannot be appealed, amended, rules that cannot be suspended for convenience and convenience sake alone. Now that's a powerful design choice, but it's also a demanding one. And it's why Bitcoin cannot be evaluated solely on the basis of its rigorous supply curve. The market is not just pricing scarcity, it's pricing the process required to maintain the scarcity. And that process is where the real uncertainty begins. Abundance and the exception. What here's a question. What happens to scarcity in a world where almost everything else becomes abundant? Over the long arc of technological progress, the dominant trend is collapse in the marginal cost. Compute becomes cheaper, energy becomes more efficient, bandwidth expands, manufacturing scales, even intelligence and creativity. Once thought irreducibly human, those damn things begin to look reproducible. The direction of travel is clear. More output, less input, more capability, less cost. This abundance is not evenly distributed, but it is. You know what? It's relentless. The consequence is that scarcity erodes, vanishes almost everywhere you look. Goods that were once expensive become cheap. Processes that once required labor become automated. Advantages that once persisted collapse under replication. I mean, let me give you an example, Hollywood. I think Hollywood does 14,000 hours of content a year. 14,000 hours. That's Hollywood, that's Netflix, that's prime. You know what YouTube content is adding per hour? 40,000 hours. And you know that YouTube? It is gaining the ability to make Hollywood quality production at a marginal cost of zero. And in that world, marginal revenue is going to zero. AI, if video killed the radio star, AI is gonna kill Hollywood. Anyway. Advantages that once persisted, they collapse under replication. And for capital, this this creates this can create opportunity. It can also create damn huge problems. Looking at software companies' performance on the year to date. For labor, it creates displacement. There's a dry word for redundancy, for extinction. Entire categories of work can disappear faster than societies can reassign income, status, purpose. Not a policy failure. This is increasingly going to be a feature of the speed of the technology, the technology. The technology which is spinning faster and faster, approaching us. But keep this in mind, and of course, this is why I'm just realizing this. What does pov mean? POV point of view. Pov, I a pov just popped in my head. Gold from 300 bucks to 5,000. Abundance sharpens the value of what doesn't scale. Maybe that's it. Maybe gold at 5,000.

SPEAKER_01: 54:28

It's got nothing to do with Trump and everything to do about gold scarcity in a world that's going to be abundant.

SPEAKER_00: 54:44

You see, as more assets become reproducible, the appeal of the asset, the appeal of the asset is deliberately constrained, that appeal can only increase. Not as a replacement for fiat, not as a solution to inequality, but as an anchor, as a reference point, as a store of value. A store of value, think of that. Somewhere you can store your wealth, where the scarcity is not a function of demand, it's not a function of innovation, it's not a function of political discretion. It's just scarce. And of course, gold has played this role for centuries now. Yeah, scarcity leaks, we've discussed that, but it's slow enough to remain legible. And then here comes Bobby Digital, Bitcoin, proposing a different anchor. One whose scarcity is not discovered over time, but in force right from the outset. And so in a world where everything, almost everything, responds to incentive, Bitcoin is constructed to refuse the incentive of price. So this is the context in which Bitcoin should must be understood. Not as a bet against fiat. I keep saying that, boring myself. It's not a utopian Bitcoin brothers, it's not a utopian alternative to modern states. But it is, and this is really cool, it's an engineered exception in an environment of accelerating abundance. Its relevance increases not because fiat is failing, but because fiat is succeeding in a world where the primary challenge is managing transition rather than enforcing discipline. That's an environment of accelerating abundance. So scarcity is collapsing across the world, the economic landscape. And where it persists, it does so either because physics enforces it, as with gold, or because rules do, as with Bitcoin. We got the two chapters, the two brothers, Cain and Abel. And so that sets the stage for the central question that the market, yeah, it still doesn't know, it's wrestling with it. Not whether scarcity matters, but whether scarcity enforced by the human process, whether that can command the same confidence as the scarcity enforced by a damn set of asteroids striking the earth, putting themselves into the crust of the earth.

SPEAKER_01: 57:36

That risk is not mathematical.

SPEAKER_00: 57:46

The price of Bitcoin, the thing that actually makes it scarce in practice, it's the lock. Let's discuss the lock. Because the supply of the coin is only as hard as the mechanism that enforces ownership. And that mechanism is encryption, not trust, not reputation, not authority. It's mathematics. Ownership of Bitcoin is defined by the ability to produce a valid cryptographic proof. If you can produce it, the network recognizes you as the owner. If you can't, the coins are not going anywhere. There's no appeal, there's no administrator, there's no override, there's no discretion, there's no mother. This fucking rule is absolute.

SPEAKER_01: 58:40

That's what gives Bitcoin is hard edge, not belief, enforcement.

SPEAKER_00: 58:48

The lock encryption. Fancy terms. The lock's built on a key space so large that ordinary intuition fails. The current security rests on 256-bit cryptography. First blush, the second blush, at third blush, that number sounds. You know what it sounds like? It sounds abstract. But trust me, its meaning, its meaning is concrete. It implies a universe of possible keys so vast that guessing the correct one is not merely unlikely. It's physically meaningless. The standard analogy holds because it's accurate. That lock, you know what that lock? It's equivalent to predicting the outcome of 256 perfectly fair coin tosses correctly in a single attempt. Head, head, tail, head, tail, tail, tail, tail, tail, tail, tail. I'm gonna stop and imagine that 256 times correctly. And you know what? The number of possible outcomes, it dwarfs the number of atoms. Atoms in the observable universe. Not by a margin, but by orders of magnitude. Fries my brain. That is why Bitcoin scarcity feels real, not ascertain, not agreed upon, enforced by a wall that just can't be climbed with any conceivable amount of classical computing power. Brute force. Brute force does not fail slowly here. It fails categorically. But no wall. Mathematics, a damn slippery thing. No wall built from mathematics is eternal. This isn't heresy from some global macro jock. This isn't heresy inside cryptography. This is orthodoxy. Cryptographic systems are not laws of nature, they're assumptions about what is computationally infeasible given the machines we build. Quantum computing. If it matures to sufficient scale and robot reliability, it will not gradually erode those assumptions. It will invalidate them. In principle, certain mathematical problems that are intractable today will become solvable. And that lock that once looked cosmological, that lock would become penetrable.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:46

That's dramatic. Let's take a moment.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:54

Let's just think of the last time you had great sex. Okay, forget it. This doesn't mean Bitcoin is necessarily vulnerable today. It doesn't Bitcoin is not vulnerable today. But it doesn't mean that it's hardness. Of course, it's not geological, it's conditional. Now, normally this is where when I read and listen, this is where the discussion collapses into nonsense. Critics speak as if Bitcoin is on a ticking clock, tick, tick, tick, tick, moments from cryptographic collapse. Advocates respond with hand waving. I'm hand waving now, invoking bigger keys. 256 becomes 512. 512 becomes 1024, etc., or future upgrades as if the problem dissolves on contact. Both positions miss the point. The reality is more disciplined. Cryptography is not out of the it's not out of tools. There are alternative ways of securing digital ownership. They exist today. We can increase security parameters. It does not linear increase difficulty. It explodes it. Explodes the problem of breaking the lock.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:20

Explodes the problem.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:30

But even then, under aggressive assumptions about future machines, there are known constructions that push feasible attacks.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:42

Plausible horizons. I'm pausing, I'm like, hmm, what am I saying?

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:45

I tell you what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:46

I'm saying we can talk about quantum computing today. But it's construction and the notion of a feasible attack on Bitcoin is beyond any plausible time horizon that one cares to mention.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:10

Anyway, the point being, the constraint is not mathematics, it is coordination. What do I mean? You know, engineers, they're weird. They they do not harden systems today against threats that are distant or speculative or underspecified. Because to do so, you know, like when you listen to Elon, very logical. Why would you do that? Why would you impose costs now for dangers that may arrive differently or dangers that may never materialize? Good engineering does preserve optionality. It builds systems that can migrate, that can scale. It avoids dead ends. It leaves room to move without tearing the structure apart. Bitcoin has all of that in spades. Conservative choices, minimal complexity, maximum headroom. The lock wasn't chosen because it was eternal, but because it was overwhelmingly strong relative to any foreseeable attack. That was the case 15 years ago, and that is the case today. But it does leave open a path. The founders left open a path to adoption if the world changes. The mathematics are certainly formidable, and they're probably sufficient for decades, perhaps even longer. But real uncertainty does not live inside the encryption itself. It lives in whether the system can enforce absolute rules if they can be coordinated calmly. Those rules. Eventually, those rules will need to be changed. We're gonna have to talk about it. We're gonna have to talk about change. And this distinction matters because it reveals where the real risk lies. I'm talking about coordination without a conductor. You see, Bitcoin's greatest vulnerability is not that mathematics will suddenly fail. It won't. It's that adaptation will require agreement at some point in the future. Cryptography can be upgraded. It will be. Rules can be amended, they will be. But only through a slow, voluntary process that depends on human coordination. Question is okay, software can change. Can people? Can zealots? Can Bitcoiners? The market, of course, understands this intuitively, as markets always do. It doesn't price Bitcoin as if its code were fragile. It prices Bitcoin as if its governance were untested under existential pressure. Not because the cryptography tools are missing, but because the process has never been forced to prove itself in an extremist. Now here's an interesting point, a distinction. Power in Bitcoin is negative. It's not positive. The ability to say no matters more than the ability to say yes, please. Control is distributed through indifference rather than command. Participants who care deeply, they must persuade participants who often do not, who often can't be contacted, who often may live beyond the grave. And that asymmetry is intentional. It makes capture difficult, but it also makes change slow. And there's an old joke, and it's best told by Monty Python about revolutionary moments, or movements rather, where everyone agrees on the enemy. Everyone agrees on the objective, and yet the room is full of factions who despise one another far more than they fear the empire they claim to oppose. The people's front, the popular front, the other front that split off last year after a disagreement about principles. That comedy works because it's it's painfully familiar. Shared goals are easy. Shared coordination, no, it's not. And Bitcoin's existential risk is becoming to look more and more uncomfortably very similar to such a sketch. The empire in this case is not a political power, but a technological one, quantum computing. The objective is clear, it's universally agreed. Protect the lock, preserve the scarcity, keep ownership unforgeable. Nobody disputes that. And yet, and yet, and yet, beneath that agreement sits the fragmentation, different camps, different thresholds, different definitions of danger. Some insist that the empire, the quantum computing is decades away, not worth acknowledging. Others want to mobilize immediately. Some fear that any coordination is betrayal. Others fear that delay is suicide. Bitcoin will not be tested by whether quantum computing arrives tomorrow or in 30 years, but it will be tested by whether a system built to resist authority can still recognize an empire when it appears and act together without collapsing into its own people's front of Judea. Rome in the sketch, the Monty Python sketch, Rome barely needs to intervene because the factions do the work themselves. And so Bitcoin's challenge is to prove that it can do the opposite, that a system built on voluntary consensus can still recognize a real threat, that it can act deliberately, that it can preserve its core rules without fragmenting into rival truths. That's the real hardness test. Not whether the damlocks are strong enough. They are, but whether the people guarding them can tell the difference between principle and paralysis when it finally matters. Okay, quantum. Quantum is a social stress test. Let's consider that. Because if quantum computing ever becomes relevant to Bitcoin's destiny, it won't arrive as a cinematic rupture. No, there'll be no single moment when the system is broken. Instead, I estimate it would surface as a as a gradual erosion of a specific let's call it assumption, a specific assumption that only the holder of a key can authorize the movement of coins. The threat is not to the ledger itself, but it's to the exclusivity of Bitcoin ownership. And this distinction matters because Bitcoin, it doesn't depend on secrecy in the abstract. No, it depends on the idea that control can't be impersonated. But if a new class of machines were ever able to reconstruct the ownership credentials from publicly visible information, it's out there. The system, it wouldn't collapse overnight. I promise you it wouldn't. But ownership, it would become contestable. And contestable ownership is where scarcity begins to blur. Such a threat should arise. I mean, it wouldn't arrive evenly. You know, Bitcoin, its ownership is it's not a single uniform thing. Some forms of digital ownership already expose more information than others do, simply by how they were created in the first place, or how they've they've been used. Coins held in older address formats, coins that have been re that have reused addresses repeatedly over and over, coins that have moved through transparent scripts, or coins. Let me think, coins sitting on exchanges, yeah, they necessarily reveal more public data about the conditions under which they can be spent. Other coins on other coins are just quieter. Coins held in in newer formats, coins that have never moved, coins protected by more conservative spending conditions, they disclose far less information to the outside world. They would remain safer for longer, not because their owners are more virtuous, but because there's there's less, what should we call it, there's less surface area to attack. And the result is that pressure would build asymmetrically. Some coins would become attractive targets earlier, while others would remain effectively untouched. The system it wouldn't fail all at once, it would experience localized stress. There would be visible theft attempts and contested ownership at the margins. Now that asymmetry matters, crikey asymmetry, asymmetry, asymmetry. It always matters. And it's precisely what would force the system to confront change before catastrophe rather than after it. And you see, at that point, Bitcoin's challenge would no longer be mathematical. I want to say it would be procedural. The first step would be agreement on the threat itself. Not philosophically, but operationally. What does quantum capable mean in practice? How powerful would such machines need to be? How reliable would those machines have to be? And how accessible? How much warning time would exist between the theoretical vulnerability and the real-world exploitation? Question mark, question mark. Because without consensus on the threat model, there can be no consensus on whatever the response will be. The second step would be the introduction of new ownership rules, a new kind of lock. Bitcoin doesn't replace its rules abruptly. It adds to them cautiously. New rules are typically introduced in ways that allow voluntary adoption before anything old is disabled. And this bias towards gradualism, that's deliberate. It reduces the risk of fragmentation, but also stretches timelines. The third step, and the one that dominates everything else, would be migration. Bitcoin can't move coins on behalf of their owners. There is simply no administrator, there's no emergency authority to call upon, there's no recovery desk, no hot telephone number, no bot. Holders would need to upgrade wallets, they would generate new addresses, and they would move their coins deliberately. Exchanges would need to adapt. Custodians would need to adapt. Hardware manufacturers would need to adapt. And all of this would be a multi-year process under the very best of circumstances. And then comes the question: Bitcoin has spent most of its existence trying to avoid the existential angst of what do we do about the old rules? You see, leaving old ownership rules valid forever preserves neutrality. That's where Bitcoin wants to be. It ensures that coins valid under the rules at the time remain valid forever. But in a world where those rules are compromised, it also leaves a permanent attack surface. So disabling old rules would actually protect the system more aggressively. But at the cost of stranding anyone who's slow, who's offline, like me, maybe they're confused or dead. There is no clean solution that exists yet. It's where the existence of lost coins becomes unavoidable. It's widely believed that your man Satoshi Nakamoto that he mined roughly a million coins in Bitcoin's earliest days, and that he never moved them. Who knows? The man, the myth, the legend. But beyond that, several million more coins are thought to be lost. I've got my hands in the air, inverted commas, lost owing to forgotten keys, destroyed hardware, or owners who've passed away. Now the estimates vary, but something like perhaps fifteen to twenty percent of the total Bitcoin supply may already be permanently inaccessible. So those coins they can't migrate. They don't upgrade, they don't respond, they simply sit in a form of eternal purgatory. But in purely economic terms, this of course creates a tempting argument. Disabling old rules would freeze a large share of supply, making the remaining coins instantly more valuable, more scarce. The incumbents would benefit. Scarcity would tighten mechanically. From a price perspective, it looks clean and sharp. But remember, Bitcoin is not priced like a system that optimizes for incumbent profit. That's taking us closer back into the world of gold, where supply leaks with higher price. Now, Bitcoin is priced like a system that optimizes for real legitimacy. So retroactively invalidating ownership, an ownership that was valid until the rules at the time crosses a line. Well, Bitcoin has been extraordinarily careful to avoid that. Not because it's it's not sentimental, but it's a system that demonstrates a willingness to forgo legitimate ownership for convenience. Let me say that again. It's a system that demonstrates a willingness to forgo legitimate ownership for the sake of convenience. Every remaining holder under the creed, the original creed, every remaining holder must price the risk of being of being next. You see, the question shifts from how scarce is this coin to what future behavior might might disqualify my coin? And that uncertainty, it doesn't announce itself as outrage, but it shows up as a higher risk premium, as hesitation, as capital demanding more optionality rather than more commitment. And history, as always, history offers guidance here, but only if acid analogies are used carefully. I'm thinking the acid capitalist is thinking of the gold confiscation of nineteen thirty three. It's often cited in these debates. It's relevant, but it's frequently misunderstood. Gold didn't lose its status as a politically neutral store of value globally and over time. It was retained. But what changed was the monetary regime attempting to bind itself to gold, not gold itself. The monetary regime changed. The United States abandoned gold because, like I said in my introduction, the standard had become too rigid to absorb the trauma. Deflation was crushing the economy. Unemployment was mass. Legitimacy was failing. And so the choice was not between fairness and enrichment. It was between preserving individual claims and preserving the system itself. That I believe was a regime change. Not an opportunistic confiscation, a land grab by the United States Treasury. If it ever becomes real, we have to emphasize that. But the quantum problem belongs in that category. Not a discretionary loss within a stable framework, but a question of whether the framework itself can survive without a reset of its assumptions. That doesn't remove the legitimacy cost, but it explains when such a cost might just be tolerated. The bar, however, is extremely high. Any decision to disable old rules would create visible losers, estates, early participants, long-term code storage, institutions with slow governance, people who played by the rules as they understood them at the time. And history again shows that such losses can be judged necessary, but only under existential justification, never economic optimization. And so this is why Bitcoin has been so resistant to discretionary change. It will tolerate loss. It will tolerate dead keys. It will tolerate entropy. But what a damn well will resist, almost to the point of paralysis, is retroactive punishment by real change. This is the real stress test that quantum computing represents. Not whether new cryptographic tools exist, they do. Not whether mathematics can scale, of course it can. The question is whether a system built on voluntary consensus can coordinate early enough, calmly enough, and at sufficient scale to protect its own scarcity without tearing its hard-earned legitimacy apart. And that answer will not be found in code. It will be found in human behavior. And that, more than any algorithm, is what markets are still to this day what they're trying to price. Let's discuss Bitcoin's drawdowns and his damn temperament. Because Bitcoin is down roughly 50% again. Yeah, this isn't unprecedented. This is what it does. It's happened roughly four times before, and in several instances, God forbid, but the draw the drawdown extended to 70 or even 80%. These episodes are often described as failures. But I think they're better understood as stress tests of Bitcoin's temperament. Let me explain. When major assets have in value, the correct response is not moralization, it's allocation. And this is true of equities, bonds, property, and commodities.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:28

When the SP fell 60% in the late winter of 2008, early 2009, long-term investors, it's not open for debate the legitimacy of the SP.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:46

No, they they buy it. When long dated treasuries, now they've lost half of their real value since 2020. The Financial Times debates the legitimacy of the asset. Class. No, the instruction is the same. Systemic assets occasionally expediene repricing, but they persist. Such drawdowns are to be purchased. So Bitcoin, if it's to be treated seriously within the macro compass, it can't be exempt from that logic. Now this doesn't mean that Bitcoin is risk-free. Huh. It's not. It carries fucking a huge amount of idiosyncratic risk that traditional assets don't. Do I need to remind you? Protocol risk, governance risk, technological risk, maybe less on the technological risk. But I guess that would be the catch-all for the quantum. And those risks are, they're real. And they have to be reflected in the price. But they don't nullify the asset. They explain as volatility as the market periodically resets the risk premium. Now the mistake is to confuse volatility with fragility. They're two different things. Bitcoin is not protected from pain, it's protected from dilution. Its supply does not respond to price. Losses cannot be offset by additional issuance. Drawdowns, therefore, they must be absorbed entirely through repricing. And that makes these episodes feel extreme. But it also means that recovery, when it occurs, and it will occur, it's not undermined by structural expansion. And this is where temperament replaces ideology. And what is unusual is the emotional intensity attached to these moves. Let me explain. Bitcoin doesn't behave like an asset that allows gradual accommodation. No, it confronts holders with repeated tests of conviction. Sharp losses followed by long stretches of waiting. Certainty about the long-term supply combined with uncertainty about the near-term price. That combination is psychologically demanding in a way that most assets just are not. And I would argue this isn't a bug, but the consequence of a system that refuses to smooth outcomes through discretion. Volatility is the price of rue rigidity. Marcus understand this intellectually. Individuals, you and I, perhaps. Maybe more you than me, but we struggle with it emotionally. And this is the point at which ideology tends to collapse. Failure of narrative. Where communities fracture. Fuck the Judean people front, excuse me. Where people who articulated the thesis most clearly are often the first to abandon it under pressure. Not because the thesis changed, but because holding the damn thing became just economically intolerable. Bitcoin's drawdowns then are they're not evidence that the system is broken. No, no, no, no. They're evidence that it's still being held by bloody human beings. And that distinction, it matters as the argument turns to psychology, belief, and the limits of human endurance in the face of certainty, when certainty is combined with delay. Okay, I promise you we're near the end. Belief, mispricing, and the human discount. If Bitcoin were only a mathematical object, its pricing would be straightforward. Thick supply, known issuance path, known, known, and I should say, well, I guess after 2040, zero issuance path, no discretion, no response to price, scarcity enforced mechanically rather than culturally. In that world, the valuation, it'd be a walk in the park, it'd be an exercise in discounting time and adoption. It would not be an exercise in temperament. But Bitcoin is not held by mathematics, it's held by people. And this is the gap the market continues to price. Not uncertainty about the code, but uncertainty about human behavior under stress. Not whether the rules will hold, but whether the holders will hold their nerve. From inception, Bitcoin was framed as revelation rather than instrument. As the hardest money, as the chosen alternative, the end solution. The problem is this framing attracted capital, but also devotion. And devotion, my friends, is not a stable pricing mechanism. Far from it. It produces extremes, euphoric bids followed by violent repudiation. I like that word, repudiation. Certainty on the way up. Disgust on the way down. Markets are comfortable pricing scarcity created by geology. Hello gold. They have done so for centuries. Gold doesn't ask holders to believe anything. It doesn't demand patience under explicit stress. It doesn't confront its owners with countdowns, five four, three, two, one, halvings or visible issuance cliffs. The supply, it's like having a cigarette, it's supply leaks. But quietly, at night, over centuries, impersonally. No one has to watch it happen. But Bitcoin is different. Its scarcity is pristine. Without stain. The immaculate conception. It's also theatrical. The issue is schedule. It's known. The halving dates are calendarized. The future is very visible. And humans, they don't handle visible certainty very well. Especially when the reward is delayed. Give me instant gratification. And especially when the price path is bloody violent. Behavioral finance has names for this. The temporal discounting, loss subversion, cognitive dissonance. Sounds like ghosts. But labels or ghosts are beside the point. The practical outcome is simple. People sell not when the thesis breaks, but when holding becomes psychologically intolerable. This is why drawdowns they cluster around moments of structural clarity rather than structural failure. The halving, it doesn't damage the Bitcoin. Far from it. It clarifies it. Supply will tighten, and expectations will rise into that. Volatility follows. And under all of that pressure, the weakest element in the system is exposed.

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:47

You know what I'm gonna say. I hope you know what I'm gonna say.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:52

The weakest element is not the cryptography. It's not the supply rule.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:00

It's not the network. It's the holder, the human being.

SPEAKER_00: 1:37:09

This is not a moral judgment, it's a structural observation. Bitcoin asks humans to do something they're historically really bad at, to tolerate long periods of stagnation and drawdown in exchange for a future that feels intellectually certain, but emotionally distant. Gold actually went through this process over decades. From 1980 to 2011. It actually failed. It failed for 31 years to make a real high. The thesis it didn't change. It was the environment. But those who were right too early experienced 30 years of indistinguishable heart pain, the pain of wrongness. And many abandoned the asset, not because it stopped being scarce, but because waiting for thirty-one years, oh my god, it became unbearable, waiting for Godot. Bitcoin is compressing that experience into several years rather than decades. Adolescence has been marred, not by acne, but by repeated brutal repricing. Each one framed as terminal, each one survivable. The speed intensifies the stress. The transparency magnifies it. This is why the valuation gap between Bitcoin and gold remains so wide.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:04

As wide as the Grand Canyon.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:07

Gold's scarcity is enforced by physics and tolerated by human indifference. Bitcoin scarcity is enforced by code and tested by human psychology. You get the difference. Markets price that difference. To say Bitcoin may be mispriced, that's not to claim inevitability. It's to observe, observe, observe. There's a V. Talking to myself, there's a V in observe. I have a head cold or a chest infection. I've had it for five weeks. It's very boring. It is to observe what? That the discount applied to Bitcoin appears to be dominated less by doubts about the mathematics of the cryptography. And more, the doubts are more about the human process which are required to endure, to endure the Bitcoin. Now, whether that discount narrows over time, I don't believe that's a question of code. I believe that's a question of who ends up holding the asset and for how long. Because the transition from narrative-driven ownership to process-driven ownership, it's definitely slow. Signs actually, recent signs, this drawdown, it's accelerated. But the transition is not hypothetical. It's happened before. Let me give you another example. Equity markets in the early 20th century were dominated by individuals reacting emotionally to price. Speculative pools, prominent business leaders directing speculative pools. You bought because XYZ was buying. There was no fundamental analysis. Today, those same equity markets are shaped by institutions, mandates, and machines that don't care how a drawdown feels, only how it fits within a distribution. And as I hinted at, Bitcoin appears to be moving through a similar maturation, compressed. It's going to happen quicker. It's compressed in time. Everything happens quicker with Bitcoin. And amplified in volatility. The early ownership was ideological, the brothers, then speculative, maybe the likes of me. But what comes next, the salvation, the thing that will take Bitcoin higher, is procedural. It's very dull. Assets that survive long enough tend to shed believers and acquire custodiance. Now this shift doesn't eliminate volatility, but I think it almost certainly reduces volatility. Because it changes its character. Drawdowns become less about loss of faith and more about rebalancing flows. Price discovery becomes less less theatrical and more mechanical. The asset, it stops asking to be believed in. It's no longer the Jesus trade. And it starts being held simply because it fits the mandate. Okay, we're on the final, final short lap to the end. Hardness, elasticity, and what the market is still pricing. Because it's worth returning briefly, I promise briefly, and soberly to first principles. Again, this is not an argument against feat, nor is it a plea for monetary purity. Fiat is not a mistake, but a response. It emerged from the wreckage of the 20th century, not this century. It was shaped by mass death, political collapse, and the recognition that rigid systems simply amplify trauma rather than absorb it. So elastic fiat money was it wasn't designed to be virtuous, but to prevent societies from tearing themselves apart under economic stress. And for that I say thank you. Because by that standard it has largely succeeded again and again and again in 1929, the 1970s, in 2000s, when those tech stocks plummeted from the sky, in 2008, when the global monetary system was capot, and in 2020, when we were struggling with notions of human extinction, fiat elastic money absorbed shocks that would otherwise have produced mass unemployment, institutional collapse, and political extremism. The cost has certainly been inflation, moral hazard even, periodic outrage.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:39

But the alternative was clearly worse.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:45

Bitcoin doesn't exist to replace this system. It exists alongside it, asking a narrower, more uncomfortable question. Just how much hardness can a monetary asset sustain without breaking his holders? Gold answers that question. Geologically, supply responds to price. Scarcity leaks slowly. Nobody has to endure explicit tests of faith. They're very, very rare. Bitcoin answers it mathematically. Supply is fixed, issuance is known, scarcity is absolute, and the burden of adjustment falls entirely on price and psychology. Now, this difference matters greatly for valuation. Gold's total market value is roughly$45 trillion. Bitcoin's is about 1.3. Now geology is not 40 times more convincing than mathematics, far from it. But geology is indifferent to belief. While Bitcoin requires humans to live inside its rules, that's what the market is pricing. But that difference is aggressive. So Bitcoin's challenge has never been proving its hardness, it's been surviving the consequences of being so damn hard. Its repeated drawdowns are not evidence that the system is flawed, but it's evidence that its constraints, they really are fucking real. Scarcity enforced without discretion produces volatility. And volatility, it tests you and me. And a lot of us, we fail. So only a few persist. Over time, ownership concentrates in hands that can tolerate this process. And this is why the asset is still looks mispriced to observers, including myself. Not because the mathematics are uncertain, but because the market continues to apply a heavy discount to the human process required to hold it. And for sure that discount may persist for years. But as ownership concentration moves into the hands that can tolerate the process, into the institutional hands, I think that discount narrows greatly. May never disappear, but I think it narrows greatly. And that's where I that's where I and others conceive of a Bitcoin at a million dollars.

SPEAKER_01: 1:47:36

It would still be quite a substantial discount to the geological certainty of of gold.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47:46

But it would be well, yeah, it would be a lot higher than today's sixty thousand. Bitcoin was framed early as revelation rather than an revelation rather than instrument. Biblical. Biblical framing that attracted devotion. And devotion has made the journey harder than it needed to be. And gold's history offers a cautionary parallel.

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:18

You arguably you were right in 1980. But it feels early.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48:26

And feeling early feels exactly like being wrong. Being early is being wrong, that I've said it. Message to myself. Conviction held without you know what? And I this this is like a love letter to myself. Conviction held without relief cardles into capitulation. I like that. I wrote that. I'm quite proud of that. Conviction held without relief cardles into capitulation. What matters now is therefore not belief but endurance. Bitcoin still doesn't still doesn't and still will never promise comfort or justice. It won't promise to save anyone. It offers one thing and one thing only, a set of rules that don't bend to price, politics, or persuasion. Now whether that's valuable or more valuable in the future will depend entirely, I believe, on who's holding it and why. The mathematics will almost certainly hold long enough. The question has always been whether we will. And that, more than code or cryptography, is what markets are there to price. Boom, boom, boom, baby. We are done. I need a glass of water. I've stopped drinking. My brothers and my beloved sisters. Sisters, if you're still here, if you've stayed all the way to the end, you're freaking crazy. But you're certainly not passive. I want to believe that you are intentional. Because this this was not light. Uh what I I mean it was polite. But it wasn't designed to soothe you while you scrolled and looked at your telephone screen. No, it it demanded something. It demanded something of you. It demanded your attention, your endurance, but most of all your appetite, your curiosity. Because most people they don't make it to the end of anything, especially not something like this. And you did. And that tells me something about you. People consume markets like gossip, but not you, not I. We we interrogate markets, we provoke them, we sit inside the volatility until it starts to speak to us. You you don't listen to this voice, my voice, the asset capitalist, for an hour or so because you're bored, because you've got nothing better to do. No, you listen because you sense there's a pattern beneath the Scottish voice. You suspect there's altitude perhaps. And you're right to trust that instinct. Now I do not take your time lightly. If you've given me this much of it, then we're already aligned in a certain kind of cosmic way. So let's make it deliberate. If you want to go deeper, I write on Substack. I wrote this on Substack like a month ago. Maybe not a month ago, two or three weeks ago. And I share more structured, long, deep essays. I look at Indic's constituent stocks. I'm just about to release my interaction with 500 SP stocks over 50 years. That's 2,500 idiosyncratic moments, fractures in time. If you want proximity to these ideas before they're fully formed, that's where the action happens. On Patreon you support the work directly, not as a tip job, but as a commitment. Substack's the same, it's a signal that this my acid perspective that it's a signal that it matters to you. And bow differentially. And on I was gonna say Twitter, X, Eks, as the French say, at Henry underscore Hugh, must be. That's where the lightning strikes first. My sharp blade-like thoughts. Again, fractures, signals before consensus, although I warn you these days, is fucking vulgar. On Instagram at Hugh HendryOfficial, I'll show you theatre. I'm very visual. I'll show you um glimpses behind the curtain, my life in said parts, the mood, the texture. And on YouTube, same name at Hugh Hendry Official, you can see the present the video, video kill, the radio star. The pauses, the eyes, the conviction behind the words. So you've heard the voice, and if you want the full dimension, you know where to find it. No pressure, people. The people who are meant to step closer, they always do regardless. And if you're one of them, I'll see you on the other side. Bizu, great love from Saint Bards. Until the next time.