Here was an excerpt from a letter to the editor I wrote on tulips and gold: If reality is hylomorphic, as Aristotle and Aquinas argued, then every real thing is a unity of form and matter. Value, then, most precisely understood as the measure of motion toward an end, or in plain terms, velocity of progress toward a goal, is no different: it is subjectively initiated and objectively realized. The intrinsic value of a monetary object lies in the potential of its material attributes to actualize the formal functions of money. A sound theory of money must therefore account for the subject’s intention, which draws value into being by actualizing the object’s monetary potency, and for the object’s inherent capacity to store, measure, and transmit that value. Anything less collapses into what I call monetary Gnosticism: the belief that value can be conjured by decree, something from nothing, detached from the constraints of objective reality. Tulip mania collapsed for no other reason than this: the tulip bulb’s nature, its material attributes, and monetary potency could not bear the value projected onto it. It is akin to building a skyscraper with a bamboo frame; the form demands steel, and nothing less can stand. By contrast, Bitcoin’s material characteristics, maximal in potency, fulfill the necessary conditions for money to function in reality, not just imagination. Unlike tulips, Bitcoin is not a fragile vessel but an incorruptible one. Its material attributes unite to form an immutable proof-of-work ledger: the strongest monetary capsule ever devised. Tulips shattered because they could not bear the weight of the value projected onto them; Bitcoin endures because it can. And though intangible to the eye, Bitcoin is no less physical than gold. The electricity arranged into its wall of cryptographic energy is composed of physical particles, just like any other monetary object. Bitcoin is matter and energy ordered by natural law, requiring real work and real cost to preserve its immutability. Ledgers were humanity’s first form of money, from Sumerian clay tablets onward, and Bitcoin restores that role in perfected form. To say it needs government force to “back” it is to confuse coercion with persuasion, and power with legitimate authority. Exchange requires no sovereign’s permission. So long as people have needs, they will trade value for value, persuaded only by what is offered and consummated through consent. To put it as simply as can be: moral money is always more valuable than immoral money, and as such, Bitcoin will always command demand and outcompete fiat. Gold long served as the best money due to its monetary potency, but its material attributes and physical heft required centralization and introduced trust into the monetary order: a trust those “stewards of the common good” have repeatedly abused. Bitcoin, by design, solves the trust problem entirely, eliminating reliance on sovereign promises or central bank permission. To dismiss Bitcoin as a tulip bulb is to confuse accident with essence, and to mistake monetary fantasy for monetary reality. Soon, all will recognize that Bitcoin, far from a speculative flower, is the steel frame worthy of the monetary skyscraper. Neal Flesher Author, Modern Chains: The Invisible Shackles of Economic Slavery #bitcoin #nostr #tulips #gold

The money is not broken; it is working as designed. It is tempting to look at a chart of soup prices holding steady for seventy years, then exploding after 1971, and think, “Ah, money was working, then it broke.” But that framing misses the essence. When Nixon severed the dollar’s tether to gold, he removed central banking’s last constraint: reality itself. As a store of value, fiat did not spring a leak; an extractive siphon was built into every dollar by design. If the problem were merely a leak, if the money were simply broken, then we could fix it by tightening policy. But the seeming “leak” is the design; the extraction is mechanical. Fiat money must expand to survive because it is lent into existence at interest. If the supply ever stopped growing, the system would implode: every debt chasing the same fixed pool of dollars. That is why @Lyn Alden is exactly right: “Nothing stops this train.” Monetary expansion is not a policy error; it is a mathematical necessity of debt-based money. So when soup prices soar after 1971, it is not because something broke; it is because the mask came off. For decades before that, central banks had been quietly issuing more paper claims to gold than gold existed. When foreign nations called the bluff, the United States simply stopped pretending. We were playing a gold-backed paper game with the world, and when the truth was about to surface, we flipped the table and said, “What are you going to do about it?” Tragically, the world, to include the American people, answered, “Nothing.” Gold’s physicality gives it a natural centralizing gravity, and centralization requires trust. To store and exchange value at scale, we had to trust that the bankers’ gold-backed IOUs were fully redeemable for real gold in the vaults. To think fallible men could perfectly resist the temptation to paper over short-term economic pain is laughable. 1971 proved, beyond question, that claims on gold exceeded the gold itself. Otherwise, there would have been no need to flip the table. Fiat merely formalized the fraud that was already underway, and necessitated constant debasement. Since that day, productivity and wages have parted ways because the creation of money was no longer tied to the creation of value. This is what @Daniel Prince 's chart shows: Working hard, producing more value in the world, was no longer a viable strategy for accumulating wealth. Under fiat, the best strategy is to print the money, or fight for proximity to those who do. This is where @Lyn Alden is wrong; the money is not broken. It is doing the only thing it was built to do: expand endlessly, extract silently, and transfer the fruits of human work to those nearest the source of issuance. We all want relief from the pain of debasement, but “repairing” fiat is impossible. The only way to solve debasement is to solve the problem of trusting fallible men. That is what Satoshi solved for, in his own words. That is why Bitcoin matters. In summary: The dollar did not “break” in 1971; fiat revealed central banking. Fiat is not leaking value; its design necessitates debasement. Money lent into existence at interest must either expand or collapse. Gold hid the fraud behind trust; fiat ended the pretense and made it explicit. The monetary system is not broken; it functions exactly as designed. It works too well, and that is the moral problem.