It's simultaneously dispiriting and exciting to witness the success of prompt engineer content creators in various niches. The generic AI slop voice justifiably annoys people. And yet, much of the same audience ironically mistakes its cringey syntax for elevated prose once it conveys substance.

A Perpetual Bitcoin Spring Instead of storing our time like a freezer stores ice, our fiat monetary system melts it into liquid dripping relentlessly down the drain. Money, at its essence, is meant to be a battery of stored human effort traversable across space and generations. We are still producing energy, yet it no longer compounds. Rather, it is instantly confiscated via inflation and taxes to sustain the image of stability. It isn't "the price we pay for civilization," but a tribute to Leviathan—a pure extraction. In our paycheck-to-paycheck society, the present must steal from the future just to survive. This is the culmination of a half-century feedback loop: - In 1971, Nixon terminated the gold standard. - In the 1980s, credit expanded and wages stagnated. - Post-Y2K, American dynamism faltered while asset inflation exploded. - Post-COVID, liquidity divorced itself from productivity. Now, loose fiscal policy is dominant, tight monetary policy is subservient, and our fiat monetary system parasitically feeds on its own citizens. Quantitative easing borrowed order from the future, and quantitative tightening is the repayment with chaos as interest. We human beings have become collateral to maintain the appearance of solvency. The vicious cycle only continues to accelerate: Fed tightens → liquidity drains → corporations tighten their belts → consumers absorb costs → demand weakens → Fed errs → Cantillonaires soak up liquidity → pictures of rocks sell for millions → rinse and repeat. Ever-greater entropy climbs down the wealth ladder with each successive cycle. Those without assets bear the consequences of sovereign mismanagement. When the price of money is controlled by fiat central planners, a free-market capitalist economy becomes a cronyist and corporatist bureaucratic state—an unsustainable system sowing identitarian division to distract from its exacerbating wealth division. True wealth is the freedom to lower time preference, delay gratification, and plan beyond the immediate. A paycheck-to-paycheck society is a citizenry stripped of temporal leverage and condemned to lives of quiet desperation. Nearly 70% of us are bound to the never-ending now—neurotic, reactive, and nihilistically unwilling to even consider posterity. As scarcity tightens, our optimism and beliefs decay. When our core beliefs decay, fiat—whose only real collateral is belief—is at its most vulnerable. Every empire fails when it extracts energy from its own citizens to preserve its appearance of vitality. - Rome literally melted away its currency's value. - Britain abdicated industrial production. - The US offshored its workforce *and* delegated its financial sovereignty. After punishing savers for decades, the outsourced empire is now running out of foreign energy to extract. Tariffs are nothing but a death rattle. From a metaphysical perspective, our purpose has inverted: Humans were meant to use money as a tool for coordination. Fiat now uses humans as a Matrix-style battery to artificially sustain itself. When money dies, it is buried not by revolution, but through a paradigm shift in belief and technology: - The Roman denarius collapsed into nature's ledger (gold). - Gold was abstracted into mankind's ledger (fiat). - Now that the gap between settlement and transaction speeds has closed, fiat will dissolve into proof-of-work cryptographic consensus. As we've witnessed over the last 15 years, fiat beneficiaries will stubbornly sink with the ship. Bitcoin will not rise because more people suddenly believe in it, but because they sense their wealth melting away like an ice cube. They *will* migrate to the life raft. This Fourth Turning is the harsh but temporary winter prelude to a blooming monetary consciousness: A Perpetual Bitcoin Spring where time, energy, and value realign. Block by block.

Culture peaks in periods of political stasis. Politics thrives as culture declines. Clearly the spiritual and, in turn, cultural pillars of our civilization are deteriorating. https://x.com/BasedMikeLee/status/1980350916604919967?s=19 We all desire progress. When on the wrong path, however, we must turn back and rediscover the correct one. The mob mentality playing out in the streets exemplifies Fourth Turning upheaval: "Helplessness and panic lead to group formation or rather to a clustering together in masses for the sake of gregarious security." - Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition https://x.com/academyofideas/status/1275856099955089408?s=19 The proclivity of individuals today to engage in group identification is not only a danger to the stability of a society, but a psychological regression to primitive consciousness marked by a pathological craving for belonging over truth. https://medium.com/@academyofideas/edward-bernays-and-group-psychology-manipulating-the-masses-2ef53544a4cd

AI is fundamentally incompatible with our inflationary fiat monetary system. Sovereign debt levels depend on expanding GDP and moderate inflation to remain serviceable. In the US, the Federal Reserve's dual mandate is to achieve stable inflation and maximum employment. AI introduces deflationary and labor pressures antithetical to said mandate. Central banks must react to these pressures with artificial stimulus. As a result, real output will continue to decouple from money expansion. In a sovereign debt crisis, debasement and repression to inflate the debt away are all but inevitable. If AI counteracts inflation and replaces human labor, then the fiat system weakens even further. While fiat may persist in the short term through monetary adaptation (stablecoins, e.g.), the long-term macro direction points toward a bifurcated economy: Asset owners will continue to compound wealth while real labor income continues to contract. Over time, this may trigger structural monetary reform away from pure debt fiat toward a currency tied to energy, as envisioned by Ford and Fuller. Bitcoin’s energy-anchored, scarce design offers a deflationary digital monetary system uniquely suited to an AI-driven economy. To elaborate, Bitcoin resolves both historical and emerging issues: - AI Currency (digital scarcity for digital abundance) - Sovereign Debt Crisis (appreciating vs. fiat) - Triffin's Dilemma (globally neutral reserve asset) - Gold's Weaknesses (digital, portable, decentralized) In our era of unsustainable sovereign debt, deglobalization, and AI-driven productivity and wealth inequality, Bitcoin's integration with renewable energy and national strategic reserves signals its growing role as the monetary foundation of the future. "It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on." - Satoshi Nakamoto

Zcash launched in 2016 with enormous hype, reaching an all-time high around $6,000. Even after the recent pump, it trades ~94% below that peak. Price reflects network effect, liquidity, and trust. $ZEC has lost all three relative to $BTC. For years, 20% of every Zcash block reward went to the Electric Coin Company (ECC) and the Zcash Foundation—a built-in developer tax. Bitcoin has never had a pre-mine, dev fund, or central authority. Its fairness and immutability give it unmatched monetary credibility. Zcash's privacy originally relied on zk-SNARKs initialized through a trusted setup ceremony. If even one participant in that setup was compromised, the system could've theoretically created infinite undetectable ZEC. The 2022 Halo upgrade introduced a new type of zk-proof, eliminating the trusted setup entirely. The current shielded pool no longer has this vulnerability, yet funds remain in the older Sapling pool. Zcash’s original design introduced an unverifiable trust assumption at the protocol level—a dealbreaker for sound money. Zcash’s cryptography is cutting-edge but highly complex, widening its attack surface. Bitcoin’s simplicity (UTXOs, PoW, open auditability) makes it antifragile. Every Bitcoin node can easily verify total supply. In Zcash, supply verification is comparatively opaque, though less so after Halo. Bitcoin’s ~20,000 nodes, ~1M daily active addresses, & vast developer base dwarf Zcash’s ~200 nodes & ~3k daily active addresses. Low usage cripples Zcash's network effect. Currently, only ~6-15% of Zcash transactions are shielded; ~94% of volume is transparent, enabling correlation attacks. Clearly, most users skip its core privacy feature, undermining its unique value proposition. Bitcoin’s partial privacy beats Zcash’s shielded pool via scale. Its ~500K daily transactions boost anonymity across Taproot, CoinJoin, and Lightning. Zcash’s low adoption limits its privacy. Bitcoin’s anonymity set grows with every Taproot output, CoinJoin mix, and Lightning node. More users = more privacy. Zcash’s small shielded pool (27% of supply) remains easier to analyze. Taproot boosts Bitcoin’s fungibility. Complex scripts now blend seamlessly with regular transactions. At 39% adoption, privacy scales with use. Zcash’s optional shielding splits its anonymity set, reducing its effectiveness. CoinJoin adds entropy to Bitcoin’s chain analysis. Each mix obscures inputs/outputs. Larger mixes (100+ users) make tracing harder. Zcash’s ~94% transparent volume leaks data, weakening privacy. Lightning nodes route payments off-chain, hiding details via onion routing. Channel opens blend with Taproot spends. Zcash’s 27% shielded supply lacks sufficient volume for true cover. Privacy needs liquidity. Bitcoin’s $2.3T market cap and ~500k daily transactions amplify its anonymity set. Zcash’s $4B market cap and low shielded use can't compete. Scale is king. Zcash’s regulatory overhang limits adoption. It’s grouped with Monero and other privacy coins under AML scrutiny. Major exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance have restricted or delisted ZEC in multiple regions. Bitcoin, in contrast, is legally recognized as a commodity in major jurisdictions and held by public companies, ETFs, and nation states. Governance disputes between ECC and Zcash Foundation have led to further fragmentation and confusion, blurring its narrative. Is it a privacy coin, a payments coin, or a compliance-friendly hybrid? Uncertainty kills conviction. Bitcoin has one chain and one vision only: hard, sound, decentralized, permissionless, and uncensorable money. Zcash is transitioning to a hybrid PoW/PoS consensus algorithm (Crosslink & Trailing Finality Layer). Modifying the base layer protocol erodes immutability and sound money principles. This consensus shift reallocates rewards (~40% to stakers), potentially centralizing power among large holders. Founders, ECC, and Zcash Foundation (~1-2% of supply from past rewards) could earn outsized staking yields, exacerbating wealth centralization à la fiat. Like the Cantillon Effect, early insiders (who benefited from Founders’ Reward and Dev Fund) gain from new staking rewards at the expense of smaller holders, compounding their advantages in a PoS system. Bitcoin avoids this with pure PoW. Ultimately, Bitcoin has crossed the monetary Rubicon. It's now a macro asset held as treasury reserve and collateral globally. Zcash remains a niche tech experiment, not a monetary network. After 9 years, Zcash has failed to achieve network growth, liquidity, or cultural relevance. With Bitcoin’s evolving privacy roadmap, it will incorporate most of Zcash’s privacy capabilities while keeping its monetary integrity intact. In the long run, Bitcoin’s modular privacy approach is more sustainable, auditable, and adoption-friendly. Sound money demands absolute credibility in scarcity, decentralization, and security. Zcash fails on all three compared to Bitcoin. $ZEC has underperformed $BTC in every market cycle since inception. All signs point to that trend continuing indefinitely.

A system dependent on perpetual credit expansion is not a free market capitalist system. It actively distorts the pricing mechanism and suppresses the natural state of long-term, productivity-driven deflation. The Keynesian view holds that an unmanaged market economy stagnates in high unemployment and low output. The solution, therefore, is active government management through fiscal policy (spending and taxation) to restore demand. After the catastrophic failure of the fractional-reserve system during the Great Depression, why wasn't there a transition to full-reserve banking? Why did the Chicago Plan, proposed by leading economists to place a 100% reserve requirement on demand deposits, fail? 1. Sound money restrains the state. A full-reserve system and hard money standard act as a fiscal straitjacket. Direct taxation is politically unpopular and has limits. Inflating the money supply is a subtler, less transparent way to finance war and welfare. 2. Intervention flatters the political ego. Letting the market correct itself is viewed as politically untenable. Government officials want to be seen as pilots of the economy. Avoiding recessions and fighting unemployment earns them political legitimacy. 3. Bankers resist reform. A transition to full-reserve banking would demote banks to mere custodians. Their profitability and influence would plummet. Bank lobbyists are a powerful political force, and they would fight tooth and nail to preserve the system that empowers them. 4. Debt is a powerful drug. Credit would only be extended from real accumulated savings. Loans would become much scarcer as a result. In a society addicted to leverage, such fiscal rehabilitation would be immensely unpopular. When people condemn the "excesses of unrestrained free-market capitalism," they fundamentally misdiagnose the problem. Central banks engineer unsustainable credit booms. Businesses misallocate capital, and governments exploit the busts to justify unprecedented expansions of control. The Keynesian perspective didn't prevail because it was superior, but because it enabled Cantillonaire government omnipotence: privatizing profits, socializing losses, and relentlessly collecting the hidden tax of inflation.

What % of people affected by this historic liquidation event will become $btc maximalists? What % will leave the space forever? Imagine where Bitcoin's price, market cap, & adoption metrics would be if everyone stayed humble, stacked sats, and held spot in cold storage.

Leftists corrupt ordo amoris. Disordered love leads to moral corruption.

True success is living in complete alignment with your values. Errors are inevitable growing pains. After all, we're only human. True failure is the destruction of your self-esteem—the reputation you have with yourself—via consistently betraying your values.

Bankers are the Cantillonaire captains who'd rather sink with the ship than join us Bitcoiners in the life raft. It isn't a trade; it's the exit from an unfixable system.

late-stage c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ fiat

Regarding worldviews, there is no such thing as a "None." Neutrality is illusory. Either you shape your philosophy with intent, or the prevailing orthodoxies of the zeitgeist shape it for you. An open mind is only useful if it closes on truth.