BITCOIN AND THE EMERGENCE FROM THE FINANCIAL DARK AGES

The past 50 years of a global fiat system have had a poor track record. Boom, bubble, bust. Boom, bubble, bust.

Central bankers, armed with advanced degrees, have shown that they only know how to do two things: print money or print less money.

Attempts to lightly rein in the Fed’s balance sheet in 2019 had to be quickly reversed when financial markets started to show strain — even a few months before the world heard of COVID-19.

The past 51 years has been a financial Dark Age of quantitative easing, currency debasements and the financialization of the economy at the expense of other sectors. Added on top of the remnant of the gold standard before that, most of mankind has been at the whim of an unelected few holding power based on academic credentials and theories, rather than by the consent of the market.

As a result, it’s been a global free-for-all.

Some countries, like Argentina and Zimbabwe, have had a hyperinflationary collapse. Others, such as Japan, have tried stimulus programs to get their economy moving, only to find that they’re pushing on a string. Still other countries, like El Salvador, have been pegged to the U.S. dollar and have found relative stability, but without the freedom to control their own financial destiny.

In late 2008, the Bitcoin white paper was released. The timing of the paper was inspired by the plan to inject hundreds of billions of dollars to “stabilize” the bubble rather than let it collapse. Those numbers now seem quaint in the age of trillion-dollar stimulus programs … a mere 14 years later.

But Bitcoin is hope.

It is hope for the globally unbanked. It is hope for those who have had their wealth confiscated by government officials, whether directly by force or through the indirect theft of inflation and hyperinflation.

The Bitcoin protocol guarantees only 21 million will ever be mined. The 19 millionth Bitcoin was recently mined and several million may have already been lost from a poor understanding of the value of the asset. No matter what the “final” number is, the key is immutability.

We now live in a world where the printing press has given way to direct-deposit stimulus checks, And where the possibility of robots mining asteroids could crater the price of precious metals in just a few decades.

It’s clear no other asset class can truly be said to have a cap on its scarcity.

Already, a thriving community has grown around Bitcoin, exploring its potential in fields such as art, philosophy and human rights. For what was simply described as a “peer-to-peer electronic payment system” has far more to it than meets the eye.

Welcome to the financial renaissance. The age of financial alchemy won’t go down without a fight, but with Bitcoin, the chance to build a new system exists while leaving the old to wither on its own.