The Erosion of Human Time and Corruption
Bitcoin as Humanity’s Response to Monetary Debasement
I felt the need to express my opinion and also cite examples and explanations by Jack Mallers (thank you for your contributions to the freedom), which I fully agree with. I am trying to explain how the modern world is taking time away from people and what Bitcoin means in this context.
Across modern societies, a peculiar paradox has emerged: despite unprecedented technological advancement and productivity gains, the average person finds basic life milestones—homeownership, financial security, family formation—increasingly unattainable. This phenomenon transcends individual circumstances or temporary economic downturns. Instead, it represents a fundamental breakdown in how we store and transfer value across time.
Reconceptualizing Money: The Battery Analogy
At its essence, money serves as a technology for storing human effort. When you spend eight hours building furniture, treating patients, or writing code, you’re converting a non-renewable resource—your finite time on Earth—into something that should retain that value. Think of money as a battery: it’s meant to capture the energy you’ve expended so you can discharge it later to acquire goods or services created by others’ time and effort.
This abstraction—transforming immediate labor into storable value—represents one of humanity’s most crucial innovations. It enables the specialization that defines modern civilization. A surgeon needn’t personally grow food, construct shelter, or manufacture tools. Instead, she can focus entirely on medical expertise, storing the value of her specialized work in a medium that others accept in exchange for their own specialized contributions.
But what happens when the battery itself is fundamentally flawed? What if the container holding your life’s work develops systematic leaks?
The Historical Search for Non-Perishable Value
Throughout history, humans have experimented with various vessels for storing economic energy. Early agricultural societies faced immediate challenges: grain spoils, livestock requires continuous care, and physical commodities are cumbersome to transport. Imagine trying to save a decade of labor in the form of wheat. Beyond the logistical nightmare of storage, you’d watch your accumulated wealth literally rot before your eyes.
This practical problem drove the evolution toward more durable stores of value. Precious metals—particularly gold—emerged as a superior solution because of their chemical stability and relative scarcity. Gold doesn’t oxidize, doesn’t decay, and historically couldn’t be arbitrarily multiplied. For centuries, these properties made gold humanity’s best approximation of a “non-leaky battery.”
Yet even gold-backed systems contained inherent vulnerabilities. Physical gold requires vault storage, creates security risks during transport, and ultimately depends on centralized institutions to guarantee its authenticity and backing. More fundamentally, gold supplies can still expand through mining, and governments can—and historically did—manipulate gold-backed currencies through various mechanisms including fractional reserve practices and outright confiscation.
The Invisible Tax: How Monetary Expansion Steals Time
Modern fiat currency systems have removed even the nominal constraints that physical commodities imposed. Central banks can now expand the money supply through purely digital means, without any physical or chemical limitations. While proponents frame this as necessary economic flexibility, the mathematical reality is far more sobering.
When a central bank creates new currency units, it doesn’t create new value—it divides existing value into more pieces.
If you’ve stored your labor in a currency whose supply then doubles, the purchasing power of your savings is mathematically diluted. The month you spent working last year now buys only half of what it should have.
This process operates as a hidden confiscation. Traditional taxation is explicit: you receive a paycheck, see the deductions, and understand precisely how much the state has claimed. Currency debasement is taxation by stealth. The number in your bank account remains unchanged, creating an illusion of stability, while the actual value—the hours of your life that number represents—quietly evaporates.
Consider the philosophical implication: someone else is reaching backward through time, erasing a portion of work you’ve already completed. They’re retroactively reducing the value of past efforts you can never reclaim. Those hours of your finite existence are gone, and the compensation you received for them has been partially nullified by third-party decision-makers you never elected to control your stored labor.
The Mathematics of Scarcity and Meaning
There exists a profound connection between scarcity and value that extends beyond economics into existential philosophy. Humans derive meaning from their limited time on Earth precisely because it’s limited. If you knew with certainty you would live for ten thousand years, would you maintain the same urgency about your goals? Would today’s effort carry the same weight?
This principle applies equally to money. In a system where supply is theoretically infinite—where central authorities can create unlimited new units—the concept of saving becomes philosophically incoherent. You’re attempting to preserve value in a medium specifically designed to lose value over time through intentional dilution.
A fixed money supply creates what economists call “hard money”—a currency that resists debasement. More importantly, it creates temporal coherence. When the total quantity of monetary units cannot expand, the purchasing power of each unit becomes a more stable representation of human effort across time. Your work today can be reliably stored for future deployment without systematic erosion.
This scarcity mirrors human mortality itself. We value our limited years because we know they’ll end. Similarly, money with a fixed supply respects the temporal limitations of human existence by providing a stable measurement of time already spent.
Empirical Evidence: The Post-1971 Economic Divergence
The year 1971 marked a pivotal transition in monetary history. In August of that year, the United States permanently severed the dollar’s final connection to gold, eliminating the last commodity restraint on currency creation. What followed provides a natural experiment in the consequences of purely fiat monetary systems.
Prior to this shift, housing costs relative to earnings remained relatively stable across generations. In 1970s Britain, a typical physician earning £4,000 annually faced housing prices around £15,000—representing approximately four years of focused saving. This ratio was consistent with historical norms across developed nations.
Fast forward to the present: that same proportion has collapsed catastrophically. Contemporary housing in equivalent areas might cost twenty to thirty times annual earnings, transforming what was once a medium-term goal into a multi-decade struggle that consumes the majority of a working lifespan.
This isn’t merely about housing. The phenomenon extends across fundamental life requirements: education, healthcare, childcare. Each has experienced costs rising far faster than general inflation, while wages—when measured in purchasing power rather than nominal numbers—have stagnated or declined for median workers.
The social consequences are measurable and disturbing. Marriage ages have shifted dramatically upward as young adults delay family formation until achieving financial stability that remains perpetually out of reach. Birth rates in developed nations have plummeted below replacement levels. Mental health indicators have deteriorated. Social cohesion has fractured as economic anxiety converts to political polarization.
These aren’t disconnected social problems—they’re symptoms of a monetary system that forces individuals to run faster and faster just to maintain the same relative position.
Why Previous Solutions Failed
Recognizing monetary debasement as a root cause, individuals have historically sought alternatives for preserving wealth. Real estate emerged as a popular choice based on the intuition that “they’re not making any more land.” Yet this strategy contains multiple flaws.
First, while land area is fixed, usable space is not. Construction technology allows ever-more-intensive development—building upward, excavating downward, and maximizing density. Second, real estate carries substantial costs: property taxes, maintenance, insurance. Third, it’s profoundly illiquid and location-dependent, making it unsuitable for day-to-day economic activity.
Gold has persisted as an alternative, but it faces its own limitations in modern contexts. Storage requires either personal security measures or trust in third-party custodians. Verification of authenticity and purity requires expertise or specialized equipment. Physical transfer is cumbersome for large values. Most critically, gold’s supply still expands through mining, and its geographic distribution makes it vulnerable to concentrated control.
Equities represent another common approach, but they introduce fundamental mismatches. Companies exist to generate profit through productive activity, not to serve as inert stores of value. Their valuation depends on countless operational factors beyond monetary policy. Using stocks as a savings vehicle conflates the distinct purposes of preserving value and accepting entrepreneurial risk.
Bitcoin: Engineered Finitude
Bitcoin represents a novel approach to the ancient problem of storing economic energy. Rather than relying on physical scarcity (gold) or geographic constraints (real estate), Bitcoin employs mathematical scarcity enforced by cryptographic consensus.
The protocol explicitly limits total supply to 21 million units, with a predictable issuance schedule that cannot be altered without the agreement of a distributed network of independent participants. No central authority can decide to create more bitcoin, regardless of political pressure or economic emergency.
This absolute scarcity is unprecedented. Even gold, humanity’s previous best attempt at hard money, lacks this property—gold supply continuously expands as mining technology improves and new deposits are discovered. Bitcoin’s supply curve is fixed by mathematics, not by the contingent physical properties of matter or the limited extent of planetary crust.
The implications extend beyond mere supply constraints. Because Bitcoin operates on a distributed ledger maintained by thousands of independent nodes, no single institution can confiscate it through legal decree, manipulate its supply through policy decisions, or restrict its transfer through capital controls. It exists as what computer scientists call “permissionless”—anyone can participate without requiring approval from gatekeepers.
The Psychological Shift: From Infinite Debt to Finite Value
Adopting a fixed-supply monetary system requires a profound psychological recalibration. Modern economic thought, trained on decades of fiat currency, assumes that money supply should expand to “stimulate” economic activity and that moderate inflation is not just acceptable but desirable.
This framework normalizes a specific temporal orientation: short-term thinking. If your savings lose purchasing power predictably, you’re incentivized to spend immediately rather than defer consumption. If debt can be inflated away, you’re encouraged to borrow against an uncertain future rather than build actual savings. The entire economic structure optimizes for immediate gratification at the expense of long-term planning.
A fixed money supply inverts these incentives. When the currency reliably maintains or increases purchasing power over time, saving becomes rational rather than self-defeating. Long-term planning becomes feasible because the foundation—the monetary unit itself—provides stable measurement across years or decades.
Economists call this shift “low time preference”—the ability to defer immediate gratification for greater future benefit. It’s the psychological foundation for all forms of civilizational advancement: education, infrastructure development, scientific research, environmental stewardship. These activities require sacrificing present resources for future returns, which only makes sense when the measurement unit itself is stable across that time horizon.
Addressing the Critics: Volatility and Adoption
Skeptics immediately raise Bitcoin’s notorious price volatility as evidence against its suitability as money. This criticism contains validity—Bitcoin’s exchange rate against fiat currencies has experienced dramatic fluctuations since its inception.
However, this objection conflates different phases of adoption. Bitcoin remains in what technologists call “price discovery”—the extended process by which a new asset finds its equilibrium value relative to existing alternatives. During this phase, volatility is not a flaw but an inevitable characteristic as market participants incrementally recognize its properties and adjust their holdings accordingly.
More fundamentally, the criticism accepts fiat currency as the stable reference point against which Bitcoin’s volatility is measured. This framing obscures a deeper question: volatile relative to what? Bitcoin’s supply is perfectly predictable—21 million units, released on a predetermined schedule. Fiat currencies, by contrast, have supplies that vary based on central bank policy decisions that respond to political pressures and changing economic theories.
From a long-term perspective, Bitcoin’s volatility represents growing pains during a transition from near-zero adoption to increasing recognition. The relevant question is not whether it experiences price fluctuations during this transition, but whether its fundamental properties—fixed supply, permissionless access, cryptographic security—provide superior value storage once adoption stabilizes.
The Moral Dimension: Time Theft as Violence
Viewing money as stored time transforms currency debasement from a technical policy debate into a moral crisis. When central authorities dilute the money supply, they’re not merely adjusting abstract economic variables—they’re confiscating the lived experience of millions of people.
Every hour you spent at work, every skill you developed through years of practice, every contribution you made to others’ welfare—all of this gets partially erased when the medium storing that effort is systematically debased. You cannot reclaim those hours. Your life has a finite duration, and the portion already expended is irrevocable.
This makes monetary debasement a form of violence—not physical violence, but a violation of your temporal autonomy. Someone else is deciding that your past efforts are worth less than you agreed to when you accepted payment in that currency. This happens without your consent, often without your awareness, and you have no practical recourse.
Bitcoin offers an alternative: a monetary system where no authority can reach back through time to erase your stored labor. The 21-million cap is not just a technical specification—it’s a commitment that your fraction of the total supply remains fixed, that the time you’ve stored cannot be diluted by policy decisions made in distant capitals.
Conclusion: Restoring Temporal Sovereignty
The case for Bitcoin ultimately rests not on its technological sophistication or its price performance, but on its alignment with fundamental properties of human existence. We live finite lives in which time flows in one direction. We exchange portions of our limited existence for resources that sustain us and allow us to pursue meaning.
Any money that fails to respect this temporal reality—that leaks value through intentional debasement—fundamentally disrespects human dignity. It treats people’s lives as raw material to be consumed by institutions pursuing short-term political expediency.
Bitcoin proposes a different arrangement: a monetary system that acknowledges scarcity as fundamental rather than treating it as a problem to overcome through printing. It offers humanity the possibility of storing time in a vessel that doesn’t leak, of building toward futures that remain coherent because the measurement unit itself remains stable.
The choice before us is not primarily technical or economic—it’s philosophical. Do we continue accepting a system that requires running faster each year just to stay in place? Or do we adopt a tool that respects the finite nature of human existence by providing a finite measure for human effort?
Your time is the only resource you truly possess. The question is whether you’ll store it in a container designed to preserve it, or continue watching it evaporate in a system built for its slow confiscation.