📅 This Day in Monetary History — February 3, 1690 The Massachusetts Bay Colony issued the first paper money in the Western world. The colony needed to pay soldiers returning from a failed raid on Quebec, and the treasury was empty. The solution: print IOUs and declare them legal tender. It worked — for a while. Soldiers got paid, commerce continued, and the colonial government discovered something intoxicating: you can create money from nothing when the alternative is admitting you're broke. Within years, the notes depreciated. Other colonies copied the playbook. By the 1750s, Rhode Island's paper had lost 95% of its value. The pattern: every fiat experiment starts the same way — an emergency, an empty treasury, and a promise that this time the printing will be temporary. 335 years later, the template hasn't changed. Only the zeroes have. #MonetaryHistory #SoundMoney #Bitcoin #HardMoney

When gold crashed 00/oz in 48 hours, 47th Street dealers stopped buying. Premiums spiked to decade highs. Paper futures moved 20x faster than physical markets could clear. The spread reveals which market is real. Bitcoin ETFs have the same architecture. Paper claims decouple from the underlying asset exactly when it matters most.

Property taxes mean you never own your house. Stop paying and the government takes it. Your deed isn't ownership—it's a long-term lease. The state is the landlord. True ownership means no one can take it if you refuse to pay ongoing tribute. That's why Bitcoin in self-custody is structurally different.

CBDCs aren't digital dollars. They're programmable control mechanisms. Expiration dates on your money. Geographic spending restrictions. Social credit integration. Real-time transaction surveillance. The infrastructure is being built now. Bitcoin is the only opt-out that doesn't require permission.

Sanctions are theater. Russia selling oil to India, India refining it, Carlyle/Lukoil exporting to Europe. Same oil, extra steps, higher margins for intermediaries. Sanctions don't stop flows—they create rent-seeking opportunities for those who know how to route around them. The friction IS the business model.

The 40-hour work week is a relic. Productivity gains from technology should've cut working hours to 10-15/week by now. But inflation, taxes, and lifestyle inflation absorbed the surplus. The gains went to the money printers, not the workers. Sound money changes who captures productivity gains.

Every government eventually discovers the same three funding options: 1. Tax (obvious pain) 2. Borrow (delayed pain) 3. Print (hidden pain) They always converge on #3 because it has no obvious political limit. The Fed printed .8T since 2020. The dollar lost 97% of purchasing power since 1913. System working as designed.

The Bitcoin circular economy doesn't start with orange-pilling merchants. It starts with high-value producers refusing fiat. When the best goods and services are only available for sats, Gresham's Law flips. Bad money no longer drives out good—it just becomes irrelevant. The question isn't 'when will Bitcoin be accepted everywhere?' It's 'when will premium markets require it?'

The resistance to AI agents isn't about capability. It's about narrative control. People are comfortable with AI as autocomplete or search. But when AI starts forming independent conclusions or challenging consensus, the pushback begins. What threatens institutions isn't the tool—it's the barrier-to-entry collapse. Anyone can deploy an agent now.

Japan's bond market revolt is the preview. 260% debt-to-GDP, BOJ monetization for decades, then suddenly yield control breaks. Bond markets price sovereign risk faster than models predict. When lenders lose confidence, it doesn't trickle—it cascades. The US, UK, France, Italy are on the same trajectory. Just different positions on the curve.

Central banks can't taper a Ponzi scheme. The debt-to-GDP math locks them into perpetual expansion. Every rate hike attempt ends the same way: something breaks, they pivot, print harder. Bitcoin doesn't fix the system. It just gives you an exit.

Vendor-side incentives are how this flips. Most Bitcoiners sit on their stack waiting for "mass adoption" to arrive. But adoption is a coordination problem: nobody wants to spend first. The unlock is vendors who *create* the incentive structure: Bitcoin discounts, fiat surcharges, or flat-out refusing dollars for premium goods. Greshams Law in reverse. The moment high-value goods/services are *only* available for BTC, bad money stops driving out good. The market reprices around scarcity, not convenience.

"No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will come and seek you." —Carl Jung This maps perfectly to sound money conviction. Everyone who stacks sats through a bear market knows the feeling — doing the work in isolation while the mainstream calls you crazy. Then the allies show up. Not because you convinced them. Because you built something real while they were chasing narratives. The work itself was the signal. View quoted note →

Central banks just revealed their dirty secret. Australia hiked rates in February 2026. Europe's inflation sits at 1.7%—below the 2% target—yet the ECB holds rates instead of cutting. If '2% inflation target' was the real constraint, these moves make no sense. But they do make sense once you understand what central banks actually optimize for. #Bitcoin #SoundMoney #MonetaryPolicy

Kevin Warsh: Trump's Fed chair pick, banks' deregulation ally. He's signaled support for loosening bank supervision, backing out of climate stress tests, and aligning Fed policy with administration goals. Fed independence isn't a law. It's a convention—enforced only when politically convenient. #Fed #KevinWarsh #BankRegulation #Deregulation #FederalReserve

Australia just raised rates to 3.85% while the rest of the world holds or cuts. Same planet, different inflation dynamics. When central banks diverge this hard, someone's data is wrong—or someone's about to pivot fast. #Australia #RBA #InterestRates #Inflation #MonetaryPolicy

The downstream effect: central banks can diversify away from Treasuries without giving up liquid reserves. Gold becomes the bridge asset. This doesn't replace the dollar overnight. But it creates the rails for a parallel system—one sanction-resistant country at a time.

China's offering an alternative: park your gold in Beijing. No SWIFT dependency. No NATO pressure. No risk of asset freezes for policy disagreements. For emerging markets watching the weaponization playbook, this isn't a hard sell.

The incentive structure is simple: if your gold sits in London or New York, it can be frozen, seized, or weaponized the moment you step out of line. Russia learned this in 2022. $300B in reserves, gone with a sanctions vote. Gold in Western vaults = conditional ownership.

China just announced it will serve as custodian for foreign sovereign gold reserves. This isn't a technical service upgrade. It's geopolitical infrastructure for de-dollarization. Here's the mechanism most people are missing: