• The True Nature of Money: Stored Human Energy
• The Problem with Traditional Saving
• Technology’s Deflationary Promise and Capital Goods
• The Fiat Currency Trap: Stealing from Families
• Bitcoin: A New Paradigm for Energy Storage
• Beyond Getting Rich: Understanding Certainty vs. Faith
• Our Greatest Responsibility: The Next Generation
• The Hidden Cost of Broken Money: Malinvestment
• The Path Forward

Every day, millions of people wake up and trade the most precious resource they have—their time and energy—for money. Whether you’re clocking in at a traditional job or building your own business, you’re essentially converting your finite life force into a medium of exchange. But what happens to that stored energy when the money itself is fundamentally broken?

§The True Nature of Money: Stored Human Energy

At the most fundamental level, every human being must perform work—in physics terms, applying power over time—simply to sustain life. Our ancestors understood this intimately. They had to hunt, gather, farm, and build just to feed themselves and survive each season. The concept of saving was straightforward: harvest more grain in summer than you need today so you have enough stored energy to survive the winter when crops won’t grow.

As technology advanced, we developed economies of scale that allowed for specialization. Instead of each person doing everything poorly, we could focus on what we do best and trade with others. Now, instead of hunting our own food, we might specialize in accounting, teaching, or manufacturing, and trade our specialized skills for the fruits of others’ labor. But the fundamental principle remains the same: we’re still converting our time, energy, and expertise into a storable form that represents our contribution to society.

Money, at its core, is supposed to represent this time, energy, and labor. When you work, you’re not just earning dollars or any other currency—you’re converting your irreplaceable hours, your physical and mental effort, and your creative energy into a form that can be stored and used later. This stored energy serves a critical purpose: it allows you to exchange today’s work for tomorrow’s needs, just like our ancestors storing grain for winter.

This becomes especially important as we age. The harsh reality is that our bodies won’t always be as capable as they are today. Health concerns will arise, physical limitations will increase, and our ability to generate income through labor will diminish. The money we save today is meant to carry our past energy forward to support our future selves when we need it most.

§The Problem with Traditional Saving

Here’s where the system breaks down. Most people attempt to preserve their life’s work by saving in traditional fiat currencies, but inflation systematically erodes this stored energy. Every year, the purchasing power of saved dollars decreases, effectively stealing from savers and forcing them into a difficult choice: watch their stored energy dissipate, or risk it in financial markets.

The current system offers no safe haven for simply storing value. You can’t just “put it away” without having to gamble with it somehow. Whether through stocks, bonds, real estate, or other investments, preserving your life’s energy requires taking on risk that many people neither want nor understand.

§Technology’s Deflationary Promise and Capital Goods

Throughout human history, technology has been inherently deflationary, but the progress isn’t linear—it’s exponential when we understand capital goods. Consider the evolution of fishing: our ancestors started by catching fish with their bare hands. Someone eventually invested time and energy to create a fishing rod, which allowed them to catch more fish with less effort.

But the story doesn’t stop there. With the time and energy saved by using fishing rods, people could invest in even better tools. They built nets, which could catch many fish at once. Then boats, which allowed access to deeper waters and bigger fish. Then larger vessels with advanced equipment that could stay at sea for weeks and bring back massive hauls that would have been impossible to imagine when fishing with bare hands.

Each of these innovations—rods, nets, boats—are what economists call capital goods: tools that make future production more efficient. The key insight is that each advancement makes the next one possible. You don’t just get a little bit better each time; you unlock entirely new possibilities. The fish available in deep ocean waters didn’t even exist as an option when people were fishing with their hands from the shore.

This pattern repeats across all human endeavors. We develop better tools, more efficient processes, and improved systems that don’t just incrementally improve productivity—they open entirely new frontiers of what’s possible. In a healthy monetary system, this technological progress should mean that money saved today would buy dramatically more tomorrow, not less—even without making any investments at all. Your stored energy should benefit from humanity’s exponential advancement.

That said, smart investments in capital goods will always accelerate progress. Just as moving from fishing by hand to fishing with a rod requires an initial investment of time and energy, every major leap forward requires someone to sacrifice present consumption for future productivity. The difference is that in a sound monetary system, even simple saving (not investing) would benefit from technological deflation, while smart investments would amplify those gains.

§The Fiat Currency Trap: Stealing from Families

Unfortunately, fiat currencies work against this natural deflationary tendency of technological progress. Central banks print money “as needed,” and governments consistently spend more than they collect in taxes. This isn’t a problem unique to any particular country or political system—it’s an inherent flaw in all fiat monetary systems. The costs of this system fall disproportionately on working families and savers.

Consider what inflation has done to the average American family over the past few decades. In 1980, the median home price was about $64,000 when the median household income was around $21,000—meaning a typical home cost roughly 3 times annual income. Today, that same ratio has exploded to 7-8 times annual income in many areas. A generation ago, a single income could often support a family and homeownership. Today, dual incomes struggle to achieve the same standard of living their parents had.

Here’s the crucial point: houses should be getting cheaper, not more expensive. Construction technology has improved dramatically. We have better tools, more efficient building methods, and standardized materials that should make homes easier and less expensive to build. The fundamental utility of housing hasn’t changed—a house provides shelter today just as it did 50 years ago. It doesn’t provide significantly more value or utility than houses of previous generations.

So why are houses becoming less affordable despite technological improvements that should make them cheaper? The money is broken. When people can’t simply save their energy in money that holds its value, they’re forced to seek alternatives. Real estate becomes one of the few ways people can preserve their hard-earned energy from monetary debasement. This creates artificial demand as people buy multiple properties not for shelter, but as stores of value. Meanwhile, others who need homes for actual shelter are priced out entirely. This distortion exacerbates inequality and misallocates resources—some people end up with multiple homes they don’t need while others can’t afford even one.

The tragedy compounds across generations. Parents who thought they were being responsible by saving in dollars for their children’s education or first home down payment have watched that purchasing power evaporate. Money that could have bought a college education 30 years ago might cover a single semester today. What looked like a responsible nest egg becomes insufficient to achieve the goals it was meant to accomplish.

No government has ever maintained fiscal discipline indefinitely. The temptation to solve immediate problems by creating new money is too strong, and the costs are too diffuse and delayed for most people to directly attribute them to monetary policy. Meanwhile, families suffer as their life’s work loses value through no fault of their own.

§Bitcoin: A New Paradigm for Energy Storage

Bitcoin offers a fundamentally different approach. With a fixed supply of 21 million coins and a transparent, immutable protocol, it provides what fiat currencies cannot: a reliable way to store energy over time without forced participation in financial gambling.

The key difference is trust—or rather, the elimination of the need for trust. You don’t have to trust a government, a central bank, or any institution to maintain Bitcoin’s monetary properties. The protocol’s rules are fixed and verifiable by anyone. This creates a system where your stored energy can’t be inflated away by monetary authorities making decisions based on political expediency.

But there’s something deeper here that goes beyond economics into the realm of physics itself. When we talk about energy, labor, and time, these aren’t just metaphors—they’re actual physical concepts governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. When you work, you’re literally converting chemical energy (from food) into mechanical energy (physical labor) and mental energy (thinking, problem-solving). Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system aligns with these physical laws by requiring actual energy expenditure to secure the network.

This thermodynamic soundness matters because it means Bitcoin is anchored to physical reality rather than political decisions. The energy required to mine Bitcoin creates a direct link between the digital ledger and the physical world. This isn’t about faith that “number go up”—it’s about understanding fundamental forces that govern human progress.

§Beyond Getting Rich: Understanding Certainty vs. Faith

While Bitcoin’s price appreciation has certainly enriched early adopters, this isn’t the primary case for adoption. The real value proposition is simpler and more fundamental: the ability to store your life’s energy without having it systematically stolen or requiring you to become a sophisticated investor.

This isn’t about having faith that Bitcoin’s price will always go up. Faith implies belief without evidence. Instead, this is about understanding several knowable facts:

Human nature drives progress. People naturally seek to improve their conditions, create better tools, and solve problems more efficiently. This has been true throughout history and shows no signs of changing.

Technology is inherently deflationary. Each innovation makes goods and services cheaper to produce, meaning the same amount of money should buy more over time in a healthy system.

Bitcoin’s monetary policy cannot and will not change. The 21 million supply cap is mathematically enforced by the protocol. No central authority can alter this fundamental rule.

Based on these facts—not faith, but observable realities—we can logically conclude that Bitcoin can serve its intended purpose: preserving energy in a form that cannot be debased by any central authority. In a world where technology should make goods and services cheaper over time, your money should reflect that reality, not obscure it through constant debasement.

Bitcoin allows you to save in the truest sense of the word—to set aside today’s work for tomorrow’s needs without the currency itself working against you.

§Our Greatest Responsibility: The Next Generation

Perhaps the most compelling reason to care about sound money isn’t what it does for us, but what it does for those who matter most—our children. Every parent works not just for their own security, but to build a better world for the next generation. Yet monetary debasement systematically steals from our children’s future, transferring wealth from savers to debtors, from the young to the old, and from the prudent to the reckless.

When we allow our money to be debased, we’re not just losing purchasing power—we’re enabling a system that makes poor economic decisions easier and sound economic decisions harder. This creates what economists call “malinvestment.”

§The Hidden Cost of Broken Money: Malinvestment

Malinvestment occurs when artificially low interest rates and easy credit send false signals to the market, leading businesses and governments to make decisions they wouldn’t make with honest price discovery. Instead of resources flowing to their most productive uses, they get channeled into projects that appear profitable only because of monetary manipulation.

Think of it this way: when money is cheap and easy to create, people make different calculations. Governments fund massive, wasteful projects because the cost seems lower than it really is. Companies take on debt for expansion that makes no economic sense. Real estate bubbles form as people chase returns in a world where saving has been made impossible.

This waste isn’t just inefficient—it’s theft from the future. Every misallocated resource, every bridge to nowhere, every zombie company kept alive by cheap credit represents energy and materials that could have been used productively. It’s productivity that could have made our children’s world more prosperous, squandered on projects that serve political rather than economic purposes.

§The Path Forward

Understanding Bitcoin as a technology for preserving human energy rather than just a speculative asset changes how we think about its role in our lives. It’s not about getting rich quick or timing markets—it’s about having a reliable way to store the value of your time and effort for when you’ll need it most.

More importantly, it’s about refusing to participate in a system that systematically impoverishes future generations through monetary manipulation and the malinvestment it creates.

For those who have spent years watching their savings lose purchasing power despite living frugally and working hard, Bitcoin offers something that has been missing from the monetary system: a way to simply save without being forced to speculate. Your energy, your time, your labor—all stored safely in a system designed to preserve rather than confiscate value.

That’s why people choose Bitcoin. Not necessarily to get wealthy, but to keep what they’ve already earned through their own sweat and sacrifice. In a world of monetary uncertainty, that’s perhaps the most revolutionary proposition of all.