How Sound Money Made Me Think Differently About Everything

I don't remember hearing about Bitcoin before the summer of 2014. My computer science professor casually mentioned Bitcoin's first real transaction: someone bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin. Back in 2010, when it happened, those Bitcoin were worth about $40. At the time I heard the story in 2014, 10,000 Bitcoin were worth roughly $3 million. Today, that would be over a billion dollars.

My initial reaction to this story (before I did the maths) was "What kind of idiot trades magic internet money for something real, like pizza?"

But underneath my scoffing was something else: regret. Part of me wished I'd stumbled onto Bitcoin early, bought just a few hundred coins, and forgotten about them in some digital wallet. The other part of me—the rational, engineering part—dismissed the whole thing as a speculative bubble. Another tulip mania. Digital beanie babies. I told myself it was mania to feel better.

That dismissal cost me more than money. It cost me six years of understanding.

The Expensive Education

Here's the thing about being a software engineer—you can understand exactly how Bitcoin works and still miss the point entirely. By 2018, I understood the cryptography. I could explain the consensus mechanism, the mining process, the elegant simplicity of the blockchain. But I was like a mechanic who could diagram an engine without grasping what freedom of movement means.

The real education came from watching my world get slowly poorer.

Five layoffs in ten years. Not because our companies failed—because they succeeded in all the wrong ways. Zero-interest money flooded tech with capital that had nowhere else to go. We built features no one wanted, hired teams we didn't need, burned cash on office perks that Instagram loved and engineers tolerated. Then rates ticked up, reality returned, and I'd wake up to find another friend's Slack profile deactivated.

Meanwhile, my parents told me about buying their first house in the 1970s for $30,000. Not a down payment—the whole house. Today that same house would cost over a million. They weren't investing geniuses. They just lived in a time when money held its value long enough to save it.

We don't live in that time anymore.

The dollar is a melting ice cube, and we're all pretending it's an asset.

The System That Requires Your Debt

[Credit to Tom Bilyeu for crystallizing this insight about debt being required in our system]

Here's what nobody tells you about our monetary system: it's not broken. It's working exactly as designed. The system doesn't just allow debt—it requires it. If we all paid off our debts tomorrow, the whole thing would collapse. New money only enters circulation through new debt. It's a perpetual motion machine that only moves forward.

Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power. The Fed doesn't hide this. They target 2% inflation like it's their job. Because it is.

[Read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin for the full story of how this system was designed - available at major book retailers]

When saving money guarantees losing money, everyone becomes a gambler.

Watch your friends. Your barista day-trades between lattes. Your dentist owns three rental properties he manages through an app. Your retired parents are in growth stocks because "safe" bonds don't even beat inflation. This isn't financial sophistication—it's desperation dressed up as strategy.

The system whispers its rules every single day: borrow, spend, speculate, or get poorer. There is no fifth option. Until there was.

The Moment It Clicked

March 2020. The world panicked and the Fed responded by issuing more dollars in three months than existed in the first 200 years of America. Markets rallied as the single largest upward transfer of wealth was taking place, from those without assets, to those with them. This dramatic expansion in the money supply benefited those close to the spicket, while it stole from the poorest amongst us by increasing the nominal cost of everything around them.

That's when I finally understood what I'd been missing about Bitcoin. It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme. It was a get-poor-slowly prevention system to those who save it.

[For the technical explanation that finally made it click, watch 3Blue1Brown's "But How Does Bitcoin Actually Work?" ↗]

What Bitcoin Actually Is (And Isn't)

Let me be clear: Bitcoin is technically difficult to understand. The cryptography is complex. The game theory is subtle. And scandals like FTX—where people confused a corrupt exchange with the protocol itself—have muddied the waters. When FTX collapsed, people said "See? Crypto is a scam!" That's like saying dollars are a scam because banks fail.

FTX was a company. Bitcoin is a protocol. One had a CEO who played video games during investor calls. The other has no CEO at all.

But here's what Bitcoin actually is, stripped of hype: maths that can't be argued with.

21 million coins. Forever.

No emergency exceptions. No policy adjustments. No "just this once" money printing. No committee can change it. No crisis can expand it. No politician can promise it away for just a shot at re-election.

In 1776, the founders tried to encode freedom in parchment. In 2009, Satoshi encoded it in mathematics.

The Constitution was a brilliant attempt to constrain power through words and institutions. It worked... until it didn't. The money got corrupted. We ditched the hard gold standard in favor of fiat, AKA money by decree. The ability to spend without taxing changed the game entirely. Every protection got reinterpreted. Every institution got captured. Every safeguard bent until it broke.

Bitcoin doesn't rely on human restraint and good will. It relies on thermodynamics and game theory incentives. The energy required to corrupt the system exceeds the benefit of corrupting it. It's the first money in history where the rules literally cannot be broken, only followed or abandoned. Hard money is a corruption deterrent.

Parchment can be amended. The maths cannot.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

[For a digestible history of fiat money collapse, read "When Money Dies" by Adam Fergusson - a chilling account of Weimar hyperinflation]

Every fiat currency in history has failed the same way: those in power eventually print more of it. The incentives are too powerful to not do it. If a country can, it eventually will.

Rome diluted its denarius. Weimar Germany printed marks until they were wallpaper. Zimbabwe. Venezuela. Argentina. The list reads like a countdown to our future.

"But the dollar is different," people say. "It's the reserve currency."

So was the British pound. So was the Dutch guilder. Reserve currencies last 80-100 years on average. The dollar's reserve status run started in 1944. Do the maths.

Bitcoin is the first money that can't be corrupted by human weakness because it doesn't rely on human strength

something explaining game theory incentives in the bitcoin protocol

this section should answer the question of how bitcoin doesn't rely on human strength, or a central authority, but should explain the game theoretical incentives behind how bitcoin works. This point is imporant and it may be important to explicate game theory as a concept or framework.

The Peaceful Exit

Here's what gives me hope: we don't have to convince anyone. We don't have to fight the system. We don't have to win elections or change laws. We can just... leave.

Every person who exchanges fiat for Bitcoin is making a personal declaration of independence. Not from their country—from the monetary system that slowly steals from them. It's the most peaceful revolution imaginable: a simple choice to store your work in something that can't be inflated away.

Yes, it's volatile. Every new system finding its level looks chaotic at first. Yes, it uses energy—transparent, auditable energy, unlike the hidden costs of aircraft carriers and banking systems that prop up fiat. Yes, it's been declared dead 400+ times by experts who don't understand it.

And yet it keeps working. Block after block. Transaction after transaction. Yet to miss a beat since coming online in 2009. A parallel system growing stronger while the old system grows more desperate.

The Question That Changed Everything

Ten thousand Bitcoin for two pizzas. In 2010, that seemed insane for the pizza shop. Today, had that first pizza purchaser decided to drink water and fast for the evening, that choice would have been worth over a billion dollars. But here's the real question: Was the pizza buyer foolish for spending digital gold on food? Or prophetic for using Bitcoin as actual money while everyone else was still calculating its fiat exchange rate?

I think about those pizzas often. Not with regret for missing out—I wasn't ready to understand in 2014 and that's ok. But that transaction represents something profound: someone saw Bitcoin's true purpose before the rest of us caught up.

Your grandparents could save money and trust it would be worth something later. You can't—unless you change what money you're saving.

The current system incentivizes short term thinking and offers you only one guarantee: your money will lose value. It's not a risk, it's a certainty. Save $50,000 today, and in 20 years it will buy half as much–or less. That's not economics—that's theft in slow motion that teach this lesson: saving is stupid, take on debt, speculate or become poor.

Bitcoin offers a different bet: volatility today in exchange for incorruptibility forever. Uncertainty in price for certainty in supply. The possibility of loss for the impossibility of debasement.

We're not choosing between safe and risky. We're choosing between guaranteed erosion and possible preservation.

I don't know if Bitcoin reaches a million dollars or crashes to zero. What I know is this: every fiat currency in history has eventually failed. Every. Single. One. The dollar won't be different just because we hope it will be.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin keeps producing blocks. Every ten minutes, forever. No committee meetings. No emergency sessions. No promises broken. Just maths, energy, and time.

You're already making a choice. Holding dollars is a choice—to accept 2% minimum annual debasement. Using banks is a choice—to trust institutions that have failed before and will fail again. Staying in the system is a choice—to hope this time is different.

Bitcoin isn't about getting rich. It's about not getting poor. It's about storing your work in something that can't be printed away while you sleep.

That professor who told us about the pizza transaction? He wasn't laughing. Twenty years from now, which side of history will you be on—the ones who laughed at expensive pizzas, or the ones who understood what they represented?

The game you're playing is rigged. Now there's a different game, open to all and free from tyranny. Your move.