Disclaimer: This article reflects the author's personal opinions and reflections. While it discusses various economic concepts, it is intended as a subjective exploration rather than a formal academic analysis. Readers are encouraged to view it as an op-ed.
The window for meaningful action is rapidly closing. It is imperative that policymakers reevaluate their approach, prioritize sustainable energy investments, and uphold strong environmental standards. The world is watching, and the consequences of inaction are too dire to ignore. The time to act is now, before it's too late.
It’s 2025. You grab the newspaper from your porch, still warm from the press, and the headline jumps out at you: "Bitcoin Explodes to All-Time Highs." The price is surging exponentially, dominating headlines and capturing attention across every corner of the media. Swept up the Bitcoin buying frenzy, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and even your uber driver can’t stop talking about it, and you find yourself catching a bad case of FOMO. It’s official: Bitcoin is on the brain—an infectious idea spreading like wildfire. All through the air is a buzz of excitement, with news outlets flooding the airwaves with nonstop coverage. At the convenience store, the cashier checks the price on their phone. Even the politicians are uniting behind the idea, finding bipartisan agreement, acknowledging its transformative potential. Meanwhile, your kids boast jaw-dropping returns, effortlessly outpacing the careful—and costly—management of your own portfolio. It’s understandable—you’ve always prioritized stability, valuing the prudence of protecting what you’ve built over chasing volatile trends. But in moments like these, it’s hard not to wonder: is avoiding volatility still the safe choice, or does it risk missing out on the financial revolution unfolding before your eyes?
Seeking Scarcity provides a brief yet profound historical account of the history of money, weaving a philosophical narrative that explores its evolution as a faith-based asset. The author aims to provide a thoughtful academic analysis of the Federal Reserve and the implications of its monetary policies.
By adopting a critical perspective rooted in Austrian School economics, it examines the fundamental notions of value and intrinsic worth associated with fiat currency, particularly in relation to the U.S. dollar and the issuance of Treasury bills that support it. The book sheds light on how the Fed's actions, while purportedly aimed at creating value and providing short-term market stability, often contribute to long-term systemic risks, including debasement, sovereign debt, and solvency, ultimately raising crucial concerns about institutional fragility and the foundational stability of our financial system. Highlighting the ironic and contradictive hypocrisies inherent in the tenets of Keynesian economics, the author challenges the conventional meaning of fiscal responsibility and our perception of economic stability, inviting readers to reexamine the foundational beliefs underpinning tradfi infrastructure.
Peter Thiel, in his book Zero to One, poses a thought-provoking contrarian question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" To uncover such truths, he suggests starting with the opposite—what does everyone believe to be true? Nietzsche captured this dynamic succinctly when he observed, "Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages, it is the rule." By recognizing widely accepted yet potentially flawed beliefs, we can start to uncover deeper, often hidden realities—what he refers to as “contrarian truths.”
What is money?
While the question may seem simple or even naive -something only a child might ask-it quickly becomes clear, upon closer inspection, that the concept of money is far more intricate and nuanced than it initially appears.
The following is a carefully constructed train of thought that has been brewing for a while, bubbling up to a boiling point, with these realizations gradually becoming deeply intertwined with how I perceive life and our rights to what it contains. In writing this series of articles, and largely in the research required to comprehend the financial and econometric jargon used by legislators and policymakers alike, my rose colored glasses have effectively been removed, and I now see the world in a way that I hadn’t before.
To those reading these words, I feel deeply honored that you’ve taken the time to engage with them. As such, I would like to take a minute to thank you, the reader, for taking a moment out of your busy day to listen to my take on the intricacies and delicate geopolitical dynamics of monetary policy as well as the shifting concept of value presented in each chapter.
Remember our contrarian question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Most people regard the dollars in their wallets and bank accounts as "money." I will argue against this premise, and revisit the question: what is money? Though readers need not arrive at a conclusion during or even by the end of the series, I encourage them to keep this question in mind as they read each chapter.
Spoiler Alert: We later come to find that what we often refer to as “money” is rather an abstracted (fiat) form of currency.
In my formative years growing up as a young man in America, my money was always green, -the same green as the lawns mowed and hedges I’d cut on weekends and during summer breaks in exchange for it. I distinctly remember the feeling of personal success I had after one particularly hot day, as I gazed into my little black Velcro wallet. At the time, the greenbacks staring back at me were a proud reflection of my hard work, symbolizing the cumulative value of my time and energy I’d exchanged for them, and the opportunity and optionality they provided brought me excitement. However, It took me quite a while before I was ever able to see the grift and come to understand the perilous nature of the paper instrument in my possession. The Joie de vivre of my wide-eyed youthful naivety, combined with the absurdity of the conspiratorial notion of the idea that we were being defrauded, significantly hindered my analytical journey and fostered a mindset idolizing indulgence and excess.
As prices began to rise, inflation became an unavoidable topic, prompting persistent questions about its causes and implications for money and value. This curiosity deepened after the 2008 recession and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC),when conversations with my father, spurred by the media's constant use of buzzwords like "yield curves," "sovereign debt," "deficit spending," and "debt-to-GDP ratios," helped me obtain a grasp of these unfamiliar financial concepts. These discussions led to broader concerns about the nation’s strategy for reducing financial burdens and managing debt obligations, as well as a foray into understanding the Econometrics and Financial Engineering occurring under the Keynesian framework of the Federal Reserve. At this time I found the salient concept of inflation consistently crept into my thoughts, eventually occupying mind as a full time resident as I became fixated on the problem.
This exploration ultimately raised more questions than it answered, sparking the discussion about what truly backs the dollar and the inherent value of money. Was this all really a collective hallucination? Did we all just decide one day that money had value, or was there something more to it that I was missing? I began to question whether our collective understanding of money and its value was fundamentally flawed. While these conversations with my father didn’t necessarily yield all the answers I was looking for, the journey for them had began.
As the journey continued, my early interests in psychology and economics naturally converged in behavioral economics, heavily influenced by the works of Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely, Amos Tversky, and others. Their insights have been pivotal in shaping my understanding of the human psychology underlying collective market behavior and the causal and correlational dynamics of capital flows. This foundation led to a inquiry into the debate between the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and the Random Walk Theory, further illuminating the mechanisms driving markets and the psychological forces of fear and greed. It also highlighted broader phenomena such as crowd mania, and tulip bulb bubbles, groupthink, and the influence of incentives, biases and heuristics, as reflected in historical price action in both speculation and typical spending habits.
I have spent a great part of the last four years being pulled into what is best described as an Austrian Economics rabbit-hole. To anyone familiar with the book Maniac Magee, I liken this process to how I imagined him approaching Cobble’s Knot -a seemingly endless tangle of intertwined threads that, when pulled, loosened in some areas while tightening in others. In a similar way, this journey has brought clarity to parts of my understanding, while simultaneously compounding perceived complexities in others.
What began as a straightforward attempt to answer the seemingly intuitive question of, “What is money?” gradually evolved into an exploration of the nuances of Bitcoin as both a dual asset class and a payment protocol. Initially, this journey was driven by a search for flaws—an attempt to disprove its validity or identify a superior alternative. Yet, time and again, my arguments were met with logic superior to my own, systematically narrowing my options until the answer became undeniable. I’ll save you the time and effort—it was a futile endeavor. [There is no second best.]
As you dive deeper into the world of monetary systems, learning about, The Creature from Jekyll Island, Executive order 6102, what happened under Nixon in 1971, and Satoshi’s groundbreaking work in integrating cryptography with the solutions to the double-coincidence of wants and the Byzantine Generals Problem, it becomes increasingly more difficult to ignore Bitcoin as another form of money: a money that just happens to have in aggregate, properties superior to nearly all other forms currently in existence.
