Hubris (a short story)
In the year 2029, the global economy trembled—not from war or pandemic, but from a quiet revolution that had been gathering beneath the surface like tectonic pressure.
The story began a decade earlier. @Microsoft, @Apple, @Google, and the other titans of Silicon Valley were basking in record profits. Their balance sheets overflowed with trillions in cash and equivalents, most of it parked in U.S. Treasury bonds—low-yield, “safe,” and endorsed by decades of convention. CFOs nodded confidently at board meetings. Risk was for startups. Stability was strategy.
But a storm was building, and they refused to look up.
In a small but growing corner of the global economy, something different was taking root: Bitcoin. While the tech elite dismissed it as volatile, slow, or worse — a haven for libertarians and groups trying to go around institutions — it kept humming along, block by block.
@MicroStrategy, a company dismissed as a curious footnote on @CNBC, quietly continued converting its balance sheet into Bitcoin. Others followed, slowly, and then into a growing wave. Sovereigns too: El Salvador, Bhutan, then Brazil, Czech Republic, and more. A parallel system was forming, one that operated beyond borders, beyond central banks, and beyond the cautious worldview of the titans of corporate America.
By 2027, inflation had returned—not the kind central bankers claimed to control, but the kind that eroded real wages and made corporate bonds unattractive. U.S. debt spiraled as interest payments surpassed defense spending. Apple’s $200 billion in cash began to shrink—not in numbers, but in purchasing power. They were rich, yes. But so was Rome, once.
Still, they didn’t move.
Why risk headlines for a speculative asset? Why anger investors stuck in the modalities of the past, those convinced by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett and other investing giants of the past that this Bitcoin thing was a speculative fad? Why rock the boat when the tide had always lifted them?
Because tides change.
When the dollar crisis hit in 2029, it wasn’t sudden. But the consequences were. Treasury yields spiked. Foreign investors and stable-coin companies dumped U.S. debt. The Fed, cornered, scaled up its money printing. The world finally noticed that the emperor’s currency had no clothes.
Meanwhile, Strategy’s balance sheet exploded in value, as did those of other corporations that joined the early wave of Bitcoin Treasury Companies. Once small-cap and mid-cap firms, these companies now dwarfed the giants of the past. Countries lined up to mine, secure, and settle in #Bitcoin $BTC. A new monetary standard emerged—not by decree, but by demand.
At an emergency summit in Davos, the CEOs of the world’s largest firms gathered in panic. Microsoft’s CFO whispered, “We should have bought Bitcoin back when it was under $100K.” Apple’s board, once lauded for its caution, found itself questioned by shareholders who watched their cash erode in real time.
The corporations that once shaped the world had missed the future by clinging to the past.
It wasn’t lack of information. It wasn’t bad luck. It was hubris.
And hubris, history reminds us, is always punished in the end.
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