https://hotmail-3oyty8.filedrop.me/s/9a8b21c4-5799-43e6-867b-2f7f4f8e421aUploaded the PDF to FileDrop.
Anyway, I’ve rewritten this bit a handful of times and the current book is about 130 pages. It has been a massive writing practice, because in total it would’ve been over 500 pages if I never removed huge heaps of useless text. I sometimes preserve the ideas, but my mind has always been radically overloaded with them, and with current tech I’m able to get my thoughts down in a better way.
Considering there is no shortage of ideas, I don’t really care that I lost quite a few of them. I may rediscover them again as I go deeper into this path.
Still thinking about showing the federal deficit and M2 in this introduction though, but maybe I should just move chapters around. Anyway, enjoy the read.
Give me a rating from 0 to 10. I currently would like to give myself an 7.5 or 8/10, but I just know that future me most likely won’t agree.
P.S. You may need to zoom in to increase quality. When I zoomed in to 140% on my iPhone 13, the quality suddenly went razor sharp.
INTRODUCTIONThis book argues that Bitcoin is not a speculative technology, not a financial bubble, and of all things, certainly not a Ponzi scheme, but by far the most logical endpoint of civilization’s millennia-long evolution of information-management systems. The fact that public opinion tends to land on “Ponzi scheme” while actually meaning “pyramid scheme” already says everything about how much emotional bias is doing the thinking here. We’re talking about a lineage so ancient that it predates not only Bitcoin’s own development within the Digital Realm, but also the information-management systems of the Physical Realm, which arguably predate the prehistoric invention of scripture itself. I know this claim will strike many well-educated readers as extraordinary.
I wrote this book to make that claim feel obvious.
Analogue Minds in a Digital WorldFirst things first, we have to acknowledge a strange phenomenon that has reshaped global society on a centuries-long scale, in an instant. Humanity spent thousands of years building a world where information lived physically, from Sumerian temple archives and Egyptian papyrus scrolls to Roman libraries, medieval scriptoria, royal chancelleries, national archives, telegraph offices, railway timetable rooms, and the war rooms of the First World War. Civilization itself was organized through physical systems of information management.
And then, within a single human lifetime, the majority of all information, communication, record-keeping, and value transfer moved into something that gets hidden behind the buzzword “the cloud,” without most people stopping to think about what that actually means. Within that one lifetime, society shifted more than it did between the average Roman citizen and someone living in the 1800s. The change that digital infrastructure has caused in everyday life is among the largest transformations ever to happen to our species, and certainly by far the biggest that happened within a single lifetime.
If you were born before 1970, you carry a mind that was fully formed before any of this existed. Through neuroplasticity, the mechanism by which the brain reshapes itself according to the experiences it lives through, your intuitive thinking, your instincts that determine what feels trustworthy or risky, were all laid down during the last decades of the Analogue World. So when something like Bitcoin comes along, which violates every assumption about how information moves in today’s society, it’s entirely reasonable to intuitively feel resistance if you were to decide to commit to using this asset as a savings vehicle.
However, it is of utmost importance for readers above 50 years old to realise that your contemporaries, those working in high-level positions within banks and financial institutions, excluding those blinded by the governmental systems they operate in, which guarantee steady money rather than risk-reward outcomes, played a crucial role. With the notable exception of El Salvador and its 44-year-old president, people younger than 50 could not have pushed Bitcoin to the heights it is currently reaching. Bitcoin could not have surpassed a $1 trillion market cap without the older generation’s participation. As the graph below illustrates, generational wealth transfers slowly but surely from one cohort to the next.
Source: Dom DiFurio, “The Great Wealth Transfer in 3 Charts,” WFTV, April 23, 2025.
Wealth data from the Federal Reserve, representative of all assets and liabilities.
Source: JPMorganChase Institute, crypto involvement rate by gender and generation.
Placed together, these two statistics show why Bitcoin’s long-term position is stronger than it first appears. The generations most resistant to Bitcoin still control most of the wealth, while the generations most open to Bitcoin are still building theirs. That means Bitcoin is not only being adopted through persuasion, but through time. As wealth slowly moves from analogue thinkers to digital thinkers, the capital of society moves toward the people whose instincts already fit the asset. To keep proving to the world that it is a savings vehicle and not an asset you sell to the greater fool after you, as Buffett, the legendary analogue mind of the ancient past, once said, Bitcoin only needs the digital world to keep inheriting the balance sheet of the analogue one.
Source: Bank of America Global Research, 1000 years of tech disruption.
The internet was the biggest communication shift of the twentieth century, and the people who doubted Bitcoin’s legitimacy were the same people who understood, from lived experience, how often “the next big thing to invest in” turned out to be noise. The dot-com bubble was real. The skepticism it produced was reasonable. But that skepticism didn’t only land on bad investments. It landed on everything digital, including things that were never investments to begin with, but tools that would quietly rewire how the world worked. The same generation that watched dot-com collapse was also slow to trust email, slow to trust the internet, slow to trust the mobile phone.
There seems to be an infinite number of examples. I’ve listed some pretty entertaining ones: physicians, for example, warned that the human body could not survive speeds above twenty miles an hour. They said that the motion of train travel caused a condition they named “railway neurosis,” a genuine medical diagnosis at the time. Or, the printing press would flood the world with misinformation and destroy the trained human memory that civilization depended on. Coffee was a poison that would make men sterile and women barren. Anesthesia was ungodly interference with pain that existed for a reason. Vaccines were an abomination, injecting the filth of animals into human blood. Pasteurized milk stripped food of its vital essence. Clocks imposed an artificial tyranny over the natural rhythm of the day. Gas street lighting would make cities immoral by enabling nightlife. The bicycle would cause uterine displacement, infertility, and a condition physicians published papers on called bicycle face. Edison ran a public campaign to convince America that alternating current was too dangerous to wire a city, and recommended it be used for executions instead to make the point. The automobile was a noisy toy for the rich and required what was called a full motoring staff to drive at safe speeds. Radio waves would damage the brain. Recorded music would kill live performance. And the airplane had no practical military value, and even if it did, it was considered far too fragile and unpredictable to ever be relied upon for anything serious…
Every single one of these was the considered opinion of serious people. Physicians, clergymen, engineers, elected officials. The experts of their age. And every single one of them was wrong in exactly the same way: they judged a new thing by the standards of the one it was replacing.
Bitcoin is not the exception to this pattern. It’s the latest entry in it. And the argument this book makes is that it was always going to be: that something like Bitcoin wasn’t just possible, it was inevitable, the logical conclusion of a very long chain of decisions humanity made about how to store and move value. Its minimalistic design digitized and automated a free, public, unhackable ledger with predetermined, unchangeable rules.
Growing up with a computer meant you could ask every question you ever had. Not just the ones your teacher felt like answering. The internet did something nobody fully predicted: it let people of ordinary intelligence outlearn people who were objectively smarter, simply by removing the bottleneck of access. That’s the world that produced this book.
Worse yet, 2013 was a bleak year, considering nearly all middle-class households were still participating in a market that up until 2008 “couldn’t fall.” And if that market couldn’t fall, with all its sophistication and Nobel Prize-winning economists being treated with more reverence than physicists, then how can anything not fail? It’s like building the Tower of Babel with modern technology, getting everyone so excited about this massive thing that will finally solve everything, the excitement tipping into pure collective psychosis, and then watching the whole damn thing collapse under the arrogance of assuming all problems have officially been solved.
Contemporary PriesthoodThe political polarisation we’re seeing has no boundaries and is growing in its justification for violence. Nobody actually knows where anything is going, including the smartest person you know. I fully subscribe to that, while also holding the conviction that this monetary system will eventually debase itself. That polarisation is the literal manifestation of a socio-psychological disease, behaving exactly like tuberculosis. It just spreads, and all we seem capable of doing is writing books explaining the complexity while getting nowhere.
On top of that, we have cancer cells flowing through our fragile global economic body. The ones who steal directly, who vandalize, who block roads and burn things down in the name of a cause, are obvious and small-scale. The real damage happens higher up. Regulatory bodies staffed by the industries they’re supposed to oversee. Lobbyist-written legislation that looks like public policy but functions as a moat for whoever can afford the lobbyist. Deficit spending that shifts the cost onto people who weren’t alive yet when the decision was made. Currency printed in quantities that quietly tax everyone holding savings, with no vote, no announcement, no accountability. Revolving doors between politics and the industries those politicians just finished regulating. And underneath all of it, an entire class of people whose full-time occupation is extracting value from systems they didn’t build and have no intention of maintaining.
The tumor is what happens when that tendency reaches power. Frans Timmermans of the PvdA stepped down from his European Commission chair with the kind of humbleness that didn’t quite convince anyone who was paying attention, and RTL and NOS received him like a returning hero, leading with the fact that the man speaks seven languages as if that alone qualified him to run a country. Then he stepped into actual electoral politics and got absolutely slaughtered. That humiliation revealed something. The institutions operating above that level are probably even more incompetent than the ones we usually bother criticising. Twisted from the bottom all the way to the top.
When I say Bitcoin is the logical endpoint of civilisation’s millennia-long evolution of information-management systems, predating banks, paper contracts, and arguably scripture itself, they look at me glass-eyed, as if I’m just another ideologically possessed person pushing crypto. No, my older analogue friends. This is where the world will inevitably land.
