Fix the Money, Fix the World
It started with a signed book from a Bitcoin conference, turned into a dystopian novel about dollar collapse read cover-to-cover on three flights, and ended in an Uber with a surprisingly elegant solution to one of Bitcoin’s oldest problems: how do you explain it to someone whose eyes don’t glaze over?
Lawrence Lepard signed copies of The Big Print at BitBlockBoom 2026. The inscription said everything about where his head was: “If we fix the money, we fix the world.” Block height 944,600. Bitcoin price $72,750. A moment frozen in orange hardcover.
But Lepard said something else at the conference that stuck. After writing an entire book making the case for sound money, he’s now convinced that handing people a different book entirely — Lionel Shriver’s dystopian novel The Mandibles — is more effective at waking people up than his own carefully argued work.
That’s a remarkable thing for an author to admit. And it turns out he’s onto something.
179 Pages Over Three Cities
Dallas to Chicago. Chicago to Indianapolis. A week of back-to-back Bitcoin conferences — BitBlockBoom, Thank God for Bitcoin, the Bitcoin Ministry Summit — finally giving way to a travel day and a kindle novel.
The Mandibles: A Family 2029–2047 by Lionel Shriver is not a Bitcoin book. It’s a family drama about the collapse of the dollar, published in 2016, set in a near-future America that feels less fictional every year. It’s become a cult classic in the hard money community precisely because it does what no white paper or investment thesis can: it makes you feel what currency debasement actually does to ordinary people.
179 pages in one travel day. A😫💀 reaction said everything.
The Weimar Republic, Mapped Forward
The most striking observation from the reading: The Mandibles feels like someone read the inside story of the German Weimar Republic and mapped it over America a decade out. The parallels are chillingly precise.
Germany in 1919 was not a backwater. It was one of the most sophisticated economies in the world. American exceptionalism, Lepard argues in The Big Print, is not a monetary shield. Shriver shows you why through characters you’ve come to care about — which is exactly the point.
There’s a thread connecting all of this to Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place — and it runs deeper than a casual comparison suggests.
Corrie ten Boom was an ordinary Dutch watchmaker — the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands — living above her father Casper’s shop in Haarlem when the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940. Compelled by their deep Calvinist faith and their reverence for the Jewish people as “the apple of God’s eye,” the ten Boom family quietly transformed their home into a center of resistance. A secret room was built behind a false wall in Corrie’s bedroom, large enough to hide six people. Over two years, they sheltered an estimated 800 Jews and resistance members.
In February 1944, they were betrayed. The Gestapo raided the house. The six people hiding in the secret room — refugees called it “the Angel’s Den” — were not found. But Corrie, her sister Betsie, and their 84-year-old father Casper were arrested. Casper died in prison ten days later. Betsie died at Ravensbrück that December, telling Corrie before she died: “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” Corrie was released twelve days later — due to a clerical error. A week after her release, every woman in her age group was gassed.
She spent the rest of her life traveling to over 60 countries telling that story. The Hiding Place, published in 1971, has sold over three million copies. Stranger than fiction — because it is not fiction at all.
Both stories share something essential: ordinary families caught in extraordinary systemic collapse, the young seeing clearly what adults rationalize away, character revealed under pressure. The crucial difference is that The Hiding Place actually happened — making it simultaneously more hopeful and more sobering. People really can show that kind of courage. And it really did get that bad.
Coming from three days at Thank God for Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Ministry Summit, that Corrie ten Boom lens reframes the entire conversation. It’s not really about the money. It’s about what happens to people — and who they become — when the money breaks.
The Three-Tier Stack
Bitcoin is famously hard to explain. Bitcoiners joke — and also don’t joke — that it takes 10,000 hours to truly understand it. It seems to require an unusual combination of interdisciplinary experience: engineering and finance, military and cryptography, or something like having actually lived and thought in different languages and currencies.
The people who tend to grasp it fastest share something: they already know, viscerally, that the dollar is just *one answer *to the money question, not the answer. That’s almost impossible to teach someone who has never left the dollar ecosystem.
Which is what makes the education problem so persistent — and what makes the following stack so interesting.
The genius of leading with the children’s book, in particular, is that it works as a gift for literally anyone — your pastor, your financial advisor, your neighbor, your kid’s teacher — and none of them will feel lectured at. The giver doesn’t look preachy. The concept lands before the resistance kicks in.
Fix the Money
It’s worth stepping back and noting what kind of week produced this reflection. BitBlockBoom is the hard money / investment conference. Thank God for Bitcoin is the faith and ethics intersection. The Bitcoin Ministry Summit is explicitly about the church and sound money and circular economies and cross boarder payments. Three very different communities, converging on the same thesis from different angles.
Lepard’s inscription — if we fix the money, we fix the world — threads through all three. It’s not just a financial argument. It’s a moral one. Which is probably why fiction and children’s books end up being better vectors for it than spreadsheets.
The Weimar Republic didn’t end with a spreadsheet either.
