On the Separation of Money and State

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“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

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The above quote is often attributed to Henry Ford, though there is no concrete evidence that he actually said it. The sentiment nonetheless holds true; the inner workings of our financial system are so opaque and convoluted that even the most financially literate among us struggle to understand it, and those that do are often too busy profiting from it to speak out against it.

Deep down, you already felt that something was off.

How is it that despite decades of concentrating in classrooms, crazy hours climbing the corporate ladder, continuous side hustles, careful investment, cutting costs and clipping coupons, you’re somehow still teetering on the brink of financial collapse, just one bad day away from bankruptcy?

Yet in stark contrast, the world’s richest continue to grow their wealth exponentially, and governments can somehow always come up with the budget needed to pursue their latest moral failing. Is it crazy to think that there’s some connection there? That there’s something wrong with the system?

I’m here to tell you that you’re not crazy, and that the system is indeed fundamentally flawed.

Take the story of imperial Japan in 1942, when the Japanese government issued and forced the use of “invasion money” in its colonies, both as a tool of unification and wealth extraction. Backed by nothing but their colonizer’s questionable guarantee, these “Mickey Mouse Dollars” - as they became known at the time - were introduced at an arbitrary valuation relative to the colonized nation’s original money, then continuously devalued to fund the Japanese conquest. To make matters worse, every time Japan lost a battle, their value would plummet, until they finally became worthless.

Piles of Japanese-issued Pesos prior to being destroyed, Manila, c 1945, Pfc Glenn Eve.

This is more or less how our current money (aka fiat money) functions today.

If you’ve spent any time around software, you already know this pattern by another name.

Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification” to describe the way platforms die. A service launches and is genuinely good to its users, because it needs them. Once enough of them are locked in and leaving would cost too much, it starts treating them worse in order to court the businesses that actually pay the bills. Once those businesses are locked in too, it claws the value back for itself. Then the whole thing collapses under the weight of what it has extracted. Search results become ads. Feeds stop showing you the things you subscribed to. The app that used to work now wants a subscription to do what it did for free last year.

The part people tend to miss is that none of it works without the lock-in. A platform can only degrade as far as your ability to leave allows. Enshittification isn’t a story about greed - greed is a constant - it’s a story about what happens to greed once exit becomes impossible.

Our money is beyond enshittified.

Paper notes started out genuinely better than the gold they represented; you could settle a transaction across an ocean in the time it took a telegram to arrive, and nobody had to ferry bullion through pirate waters to do it. That was a real improvement, and people adopted it for real reasons. Then came the lock-in: legal tender laws that compel you to accept the currency, capital controls that stop you from moving out of it, and in the United States an executive order that made owning the alternative a crime. Only once the exits were sealed did the extraction begin, and it hasn’t stopped since.

What follows is that arc, at the scale of a civilization and across a century. The good years are the classical gold standard. The lock-in is 1914, then 1933, then 1971. The extraction from users is inflation, which quietly moves the value of your work to whoever happens to stand nearest the printer. The extraction from business customers is the IMF, which does to entire countries what your bank does to you, with better branding. And the terminal stage is the 44 hyperinflations that have happened since the peg broke, each one a currency that finally ran out of people to extract from.

The difference is that you can delete an app. You cannot delete the dollar. Every platform that has ever enshittified was, in the end, opt-in, which is why the pattern is a nuisance in software and a catastrophe in money.

To understand how we got here, it’s necessary to understand the history and evolution of money, and answer the deceivingly simple question of “what is money?”

💰 A Condensed History of Money

Money is a medium of exchange that serves as a unit of account and a store of value. This is perhaps the most widely accepted and succinct definition of what money is.

But it took ages for humans to arrive at this definition, and it all began with the humble mental ledger. Abel did a favor for Cain. Cain made a mental note to pay him back later with something equivalent (though probably not how he would have liked). This meant that these favors were fungible; interchangeable and equal in value to other units of the same denomination.

As more people began to roam the Earth, it became difficult to track who owes what, and so a physical record of these exchanges emerged out of necessity. The exact mechanism did not matter; maybe it was lines drawn in the sand, maybe it was flowers, maybe it was seashells, as long as it was salable; easily tradable and accepted/recognized by most people as having value.

As time marched on, the need for these records to withstand our forgetfulness and the elements was tested, and only the most durable survived.

As humanities’ geographic footprint expanded, we began to travel ever increasing distances, so mediums of exchange that were portable and divisible were largely preferred.

Inevitably, for almost every medium of exchange that emerged, someone realized they could forge, or extract, a large quantity of it relatively quickly. This in turn leads to a rapid devaluation of the medium and loss of its status as a medium of exchange, so scarcity could not be ignored.

Over time, different kinds of money with different characteristics that were in demand at that moment came and went, but only the ones scoring the highest on these 6 attributes survived, until we eventually landed on gold as humanities’ money of choice.

Gold continued to hold its dominance for millenia, and while its unwieldiness for day-to-day use meant that other forms of money pegged to its value remained in circulation, such as silver, it wasn’t until the emergence of telecommunications in the 19th century that things would really start to change.

A new, previously hidden attribute of money suddenly came in to the equation: speed of settlement. This was the first time in human history where information could travel an order of magnitude faster than the human carrying that information could; thus it became a pressing problem not only to perform transactions quickly over long distances, but to have them settle as well. This, along with the perils of ferrying tons of gold bullions across tumultuous waters, and the rise of nationalism, lead to the introduction of the paper, and then digital, bills we use today.

These bills were essentially “IOUs” issued by local bank-like entities (ie. goldsmiths), regional networks (ie. Hawalas), and eventually indirectly via government controlled central banks. These bills could be redeemed for a fixed amount of physical gold at any time, hence the British Pound Sterling’s old moniker of “as good as gold”.

A £1 English banknote issued in 1814 by the now defunct Gloucester Old Bank.

This is perhaps one of the only, if not the only, time in history where a “softer” form of money won out against a “harder” form in a free market, which shows just how important speed of settlement is. And despite our regression to an overall inferior medium of exchange to satisfy our need for speed, this system worked well for a while.

Until it didn’t.

👑 The Loss of The Gold Standard

The era of The Classical Gold Standard from 1870-1914 was overwhelmingly a time of economic prosperity and growth, characterized by monetary stability, low inflation, economic integration within and across borders, and rapid technological progress.

The start of World War I would put an end to this, when the British and their allies became the first to de-peg their currency from gold in order to fund their wartime efforts.

Other countries took notice of this, and realized that it would be impossible to continue waging war, much less have a shot at victory, without doing the same and bolstering their military spending.

The departure from the gold standard was meant to be a temporary wartime measure, but as the saying goes, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government solution. To give credit where credit is due, the next century would see several countries re-peg and de-peg their currencies to gold, but each attempt was met with more resistance and hardship than the last. It was particularly unpalatable when governments passed laws that made it illegal for their citizens to own gold, after which they would impose hefty fines and forcibly confiscate it, in an attempt to shore up central bank reserves and enforce more control over transactions. But there was a clear lack of incentive from central planners to make unpopular decisions or take away power from themselves - there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

Executive Order 6102, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 5, 1933, forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States. Remember kids, it’s not theft if the government does it.

Fast-forward to around the end of World War II, when the US was at the height of its power and influence. In an effort to stabilize the ravished post-war global economy, a new framework was created with the stated goal of “promoting economic cooperation and stability”. The Bretton Woods system would introduce a layer of abstraction over gold and instead have the world’s currencies pegged to the USD, itself convertible to gold held in Fort Knox at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce, while governments would retain the right to adjust their pegs under specific conditions.

No nation or individual (that we know of) has ever even attempted to break into Fort Knox, since no one in their right mind would think of challenging US military might directly on their home turf. In fact it’s so impregnatable, that not even auditors have been able to get inside to complete a full audit since 1953. But don’t worry, the US government assures us it’s all there.

Predictably, putting the reigns of the world’s money in the hands of a few of individuals did not end well, culminating in 1971 when the US refused to allow other nations to withdraw their deposits and ended the USD’s convertibility to gold, driving the final nail in The Gold Standard and ushering in the current era of wonky economics, hyper financialization, and fractured fiat money backed by nothing.

By ending paper money’s redeemability to gold, the state now had the ability to infinitely “print money” to fund itself, and by extension infinitely inflate away citizens’ savings, with nothing more than a keystroke to edit a record in a database. This has created an inherently fragile financial system prone to dramatic boom-and-bust cycles, in what is essentially a return to a more controlled, better regulated version of Japanese Invasion Money. Except now, the state isn’t waging a financial war on other nations, but its own citizens and their descendents.

There isn’t necessarily malicious intent and secret collusion by the powers that be (though historical and contemporary records show an abundance of that), but the allure of alleviating problems in the short term via increased money printing is irresistible for any governing body. As an indirect result of this, we’ve seen 44 of the 60 recorded instances of hyperinflation occur since that fateful day in 1971 (keeping in mind that this number does not include the many instances of very high or borderline hyperinflation, such as what recently happened in Türkiye).

Despite this, many mistakenly believe the USD, EUR, and other “hard” currencies are a safe store of value. While there is some truth to the USD in particular being the best form of fiat due to its status as the world’s reserve currency, it only seems like a decent store of value when compared to other fiat abominations. If you zoom out, the USD has been inflating away for decades, devaluing by more than 95% against gold in the last 100 years.

Some examples of how currencies have fared against the USD over time. From the top right going clockwise: hyperinflation, persistent inflation, the rare few that have managed to “hold their value”, and the peg. It’s worth noting that the Swiss Franc is unique in that it was the last to de-peg from the gold standard in 2000. Source: Xe

The loss in value of the USD against gold and loss of purchasing power over time mirror each other. Meanwhile, you’re able to buy much more goods with gold today than you could 100 years ago. It seems that markets intrinsically understand the value of gold, even if the average person doesn’t. Sources: Macrotrends and Visual Capitalist.

Though there are massive advantages that come with being the world’s reserve currency, chief among them the ability to sanction and devalue not just your own citizens’ savings but the savings of entire nations if push comes to shove, it’s not without downsides. The US needs to maintain a trade deficit to keep the world awash in dollars, which means it needs to import more goods and services than it exports. This has led to the hollowing out of the US manufacturing sector where the real productivity lies and the rise of the financial sector, the latter being in many ways a drain on the real economy.

The opposite can happen too, where a government can artificially weaken their currency to keep exports competitive, as China is currently doing with the Yuan. This means that Chinese citizens are not able to enjoy the full fruits of their labor, as the world becomes increasingly reliant on their cheap exports, though this strategy has proven quite successful at the national level.

🏦 An Aside on Fractional Reserve Banking

Almost as early as people began depositing their gold for safekeeping and for the convenience of paper notes, depositories realized that not everyone will withdraw all their money at once. This meant that it was possible to lend out a fraction of these deposits to other borrowers or businesses, and make some extra income on the side.

Depositories that engaged in this risky behavior managed to extract more profits and expand their businesses more quickly, while simultaneously offering their customers lower fees and more competitive financial products, with the caveat that they expose themselves and their customers to market forces, and most importantly the possibility of a bank-run should their customers doubt their ability to keep their promise and attempt to withdraw all their deposits at once, in which case the last to pull out their deposits will be left holding the bag.

Nowadays fractional reserve banking is how nearly all banks operate, most holding less than 10% of their reserves at any point in time (even zero reserves as of recently, which sounds insane until you remember that fiat money was never backed by anything to begin with).

By mandating a threshold of reserves, governments can control how much a bank can lend. When a bank makes a loan that is only partially backed by a real asset, it is temporarily introducing new money into circulation, putting the system in a leveraged state. It generates revenue from various fees when issuing this loan as well as interest arbitrage, i.e. by giving you a higher interest rate than the one it received. This creates an incentive for the bank to give as many loans as possible, but is balanced by the risk of the borrower defaulting, and in the past, the limited supply of assets backing these loans.

How fractional reserve banking increases the money supply. In this example, what started off as a $100 deposit has become $171 in loans, $27.1 in reserves, and $12.2 in eventual interest payments and fees.

The risks of fractional reserve banking tend to manifest acutely during times of economic turmoil. For example, in the US, the “Free Banking” era from 1837-1863 saw half of all banks collapse with a measly average lifespan of 5 years, which prompted the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 to act as a central bank and lender of last resort.

But even that didn’t prevent the Great Depression from 1929-1931, where over 9000 (no that’s not a typo) banks failed. This prompted the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1933 to insure deposits up to a certain amount, which has since been increased to $250,000 per depositor per bank.

While it’s true that banks today are better regulated than they’ve ever been and failures are far less frequent, the industry has become extremely consolidated so they tend to be larger and more painful than in the past; case in point, the 2008-2012 Global Financial Crisis saw 465 banks fail, and last year (2023) saw the collapse of 6 US banks, with two of them being the 2nd and 3rd largest bank failures in the country’s history. As long as a fractional reserve system is in place, the risk of failure always looms.

Moreover, even if the depositors were eventually made whole thanks to FDIC insurance, the FDIC holds around a cent and a quarter for every insured dollar - a fund of $137 billion against some $10.7 trillion of insured deposits, and that bailout money has to come from somewhere. In fact, I’d take this a step further and assert that fractional reserve banking has never truly worked, and only became somewhat workable due to the existence of a lender of last resort that can create money out of thin air (and inflate away peoples’ savings ad infinitum).

There are other less visible but no less insidious side effects to this practice: for starters, depositors have little to no say on how their deposits get invested, leading to a situation like the one we find ourselves in today where every major US Bank has a stake in or has provided financial support to weapons manufacturers supporting genocide.

As stated earlier, the ability to create unbacked money creates a leveraged financial system. The result of this is that economic output and real value are divorced from valuation. Roughly speaking, if you know how long something takes, and how much effort it takes, you should be able to price it. But by pumping money into the system and continuously devaluing your time and effort, prices get distorted and this equation breaks down. Just like you can’t do science without standard units of measurement, you can’t properly measure economic output without a stable unit of account.

Are companies really worth “more”, or is the value of the dollar just worth less? Guess attending a Jerome Powell watch party during work hours was the productive thing to do after all. Source: Bloomberg, Apollo Chief Economist (BBG ticker: .GLMOSUPP G Index, SPX index)

What’s more, the interest that banks attach to these loans leads to a concentration of wealth and exasperates societal inequality. It saddles individuals with debt they end up having to pay many times over, significantly impacts their quality of life, and imposes what is essentially debt slavery in all but name. Today we see this manifest in everything from student loans to mortgages to credit cards, where individuals and businesses alike are heavily incentivized to borrow and maintain debt on their balance sheet, since the value of a dollar today is worth more than the value of a dollar tomorrow, which in turn leads to more money in circulation and higher prices, which in turn leads to more borrowing, which leads to higher prices, which leads to more borrowing, and so on and so forth. In such a system, your wealth is primarily determined by your proximity to the debt creation mechanism, formally known as the Cantillon Effect.

The Cantillon Effect in action: the top 0.1% of the US population has seen the dollar amount of their wealth multiply by 10 times since 1980, while the bottom 50% have stagnated. Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these same dynamics created by fractional reserve banking at an individual and business level show up at the level of nation states.

🇺🇳 The Rise of Financial Neocolonialism

Picking up where we left off: despite the failure of the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that were created to oversee it and provide loans to countries facing difficulties continue to exist today, albeit in a much more sinister form.

If the last section was the extraction of users, this one is the extraction of everybody else. A platform that has taken what it can from the people using it turns next on the businesses that came for those people; a monetary system that has taken what it can from its own citizens turns next on everyone who has to hold its currency in order to trade.

Originally they would provide financial assistance for post-war reconstruction and development processes. However, as the decades went by, the IMF and World Bank would become the primary lenders to developing countries, and the conditions they imposed on these loans would become increasingly predatory.

With the dispassion of a private equity firm that is focused on nothing but increasing revenue, they would impose austerity measures alongside these loans that would in aggregate lead to mass poverty and unemployment, included but not limited to:

• Requiring countries to open up their markets to foreign investment
• Privatizing state-owned enterprises
• Cutting government spending on public services like healthcare, education, and social welfare programs
• Shifting agricultural production away from food crops for domestic use and towards cash crops for export
• Limiting or restricting the export of certain natural resources or manufactured goods that the country could otherwise use domestically
• Mandating that a certain percentage of key export commodities must be sold on the global market

All while applying heavy pressure on leaders to debase their currencies and yet accepting payments in gold.

Only under a fiat standard can the world’s food basket be reduced to importing basic necessities. Source: howMuch

This creates a vicious cycle where indebted countries need to take out more loans to pay off previous ones, saddling them with an even greater burden and even harsher “structural adjustment programs”, causing them to remain in perpetual debt to the IMF and World Bank, and by extension the countries that control them, ultimately turning them into vassal states.

Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”, and boy are these countries paying it. What’s more, the IMF imposes “surcharges” which add an extra 2 or 3 percentage points to the most indebted borrowers’ loans. Sources: Visual Captialist and CEPR

To make matters worse, very few of these loans are put towards their intended use. The vast majority are needed just to pay off the interest on previous loans, while the rest are used to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and their cronies, as they live in extravagance with palaces, yachts, and supercar fleets, all while increasing the state budget for policing their own citizens and clamping down on any dissent.

Further adding insult to injury, not only are these misused loans taken out without the consent of the people, but they are also taken out in their name, and they and their descendants are the ones who end up bearing the brunt of the consequences with none of the upsides.

US President Donald Trump’s favorite dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s new palace and prison. Somehow the government is always able to find the funds for these types of projects, yet Egypt remains in perpetual poverty and political repression, despite possessing immense resources and human capital, and being one of the largest recipients of IMF loans and US military aid. All this before the latest round of loans and currency devaluation too.

Even in democratic countries where the elected leaders are aware of the dangers of relying on IMF loans, most if not all still end up taking them, and they can hardly be blamed. The need to alleviate immediate suffering and a political environment that favors short termism to boost re-election chances means they probably couldn’t get away with anything else.

Beyond the geopolitical motives, the only reason the IMF and World Bank are able to recklessly give out loans that have questionable benefits at best, disastrous consequences at worse, and no hope of being paid back, is simply because they’re incentivized to do so. Just like your local bank, they are able to conjure up infinite dollars at close to or zero interest, then lend them out at much higher rates, an incentive further strengthened by their ability to levy structural adjustments to force the wants of global superpowers over the needs of the indebted, resulting in an amped up massive scale Cantillon Effect.

🌐 Towards a New Global Ledger

It’s easy to look at the state of our financial system and wonder how we managed to screw it up so badly, and blame our predecessors for being simpletons with zero foresight. But it’s the height of hubris to think that things would be any different had you or I been in charge. The unwieldiness of using physical gold as the monetary standard was a major challenge which fiat provided a much needed solution for, and should we replay the events of the last century even while knowing what we do now, it’s unlikely that we’d end up with a materially different result.

Every actor in the system is simply playing the best hand they’ve been dealt; the global superpowers are trying to preserve or expand their hegemony, the banks give out loans because their mandate is to increase revenue, and people/countries take those loans to satisfy their immediate needs and wants. That’s not to say some entities aren’t more blameworthy than others, just that there isn’t necessarily a single entity responsible for all this, but an all corrupting system with fiat at its core.

Rather than look to the past, it’s more prudent to look to the future and ask ourselves, if we were to create a new global financial standard, what would it look like? To answer that, we need to start with a simpler question: what currency or commodity would be at its core?

For starters, it would need to score high on the characteristics of money mentioned earlier, so it would need to be:

• Scarce, with a high stock-to-flow ratio or even a fixed supply
• Indestructible
• Able to instantly settle over long distances
• Divisible into any number of units
• Widely recognized as having value

And since we’re letting our imagination run wild, why don’t we also make it so that it’s:

• Permissionless - no one can stop you from using it or taking custody of it if you’re the rightful owner
• Censorship Resistant - no one party can arbitrarily modify it
• Strikes a balance between optional privacy (for transactions) and transparency (for auditability)

Alas, synthesizing such a material in the physical world is simply beyond our current scientific means.

But in the digital world, it’s a different story.

In 2008, on the heels of yet another global financial crisis, an anonymous programmer under the moniker of Satoshi Nakomoto would bring us to the closest we’ve ever been to this ideal form of money and create his magnum opus, Bitcoin. Though not quite there yet, it nonetheless possesses all the monetary properties of gold and then some, but none of the physical ones.

Originally called “Electronic Cash System”, it was far from the first attempt at implementing a form of electronic money (in fact writings on decentralized money go as far back as 1976, and the idea of a new form of money suitable for the information age goes even further back to 1845), but it was the first to solve the double spending problem without the need for a trusted third party, and in the coming 16 years would gain market acceptance as the money movement protocol of the internet age, proving itself to be the most secure, decentralized, and censorship resistant form of money to date.

I’ll delve into the exact mechanism of how it works in later blog posts (if you can’t wait, watch this) in addition to a deep dive into the technical details and current challenges/shortcomings, but for now the best way to understand it is to compare it to another type of money used in the past on the island of Yap in the federated states of Micronesia: Rai Stones.

The Rai were massive circular limestones that were challenging to move around. Instead, the stones would remain stationary in one location and the islanders would orally keep track of who owned which stone. When a transaction was made, usually for a large expense such as a funeral or a wedding, the communal ledger would get updated. Such a simple system was surprisingly robust, as the effort and danger involved in extracting and transporting stones limited the amount of new supply that could be introduced, and unless more than half the tribe conspired against you, no one could steal or claim possession of your Rai. It wasn’t until the introduction of modern sailing ships that the scarcity of the Rai would end and the system would show its first signs of collapse, followed by German colonization that took control of the stone ledger and forced the use of fiat money.

Despite losing its monetary value, the Rai is still used in ceremonial exchanges to this day.

Though a bit of an oversimplification, Bitcoin is just a modern, digitized, and decentralized version of The Rai with a known total supply (21 million, though the amount is arbitrary) and a set, front-loaded “mining” schedule (every 210,000 blocks, i.e. ~4 years, the supply of new Bitcoin halves, with ~19.8 million already in circulation). It’s a single ledger with a single source of truth, distributed in such a way that it can be verified by anyone with an internet connection at any point, and is near impossible to be tampered with. Instead of a community of islanders who ensure the integrity of the ledger, you have an army of computer programs (known as Nodes) validating transactions, and instead of attributing ownership to an individual it is attributed to a wallet address.

What makes Bitcoin particularly unique is not just the underlying technology. The sequence of events since its inception, leading up to today, are outright impossible to replicate. Don’t believe me? Then go ahead and clone the Bitcoin codebase, change the name, launch your own version, and see how far you get.

Despite an endless torrent of replicas and competitors, even if some are technically superior, none have been able to dethrone Bitcoin, neither in terms of market cap nor usage, and unless an extremely powerful entity backs them, it’s nearly guaranteed none will. It’s not just the first mover advantage, but the network effect and community that has been built up over the years, the battle-tested trust that has been established, and the careful balance of incentives for ecosystem participants, all which have made it so that there is a single recognized canonical implementation of Bitcoin.

While far from perfect, because of all these properties, Bitcoin has the potential to be the foundation of a new and sound global financial system, and that potential has been reflected in its market price. Even if it doesn’t end up living up to its promise, we now have the blueprint for what sound money in the digital age would look like, and the most suitable candidate to be the base layer of a new global financial system will be one that resembles Bitcoin, if not Bitcoin itself.

Not pictured: the ~$144 trillion US treasuries market. In the last 20 years, Bitcoin has gone from being worth less than a penny to being worth more than the GDP of most countries, briefly surpassing silver’s global market cap, and with a growth rate only matched by GPU maker Nvidia. Source.

But how would an economy not based on fiat or fractional reserve banking even function? How would people and businesses engage in economic dealings?

What if I told you that you don’t need to imagine such an economy, because the blueprint for it already exists?

🕌 An Abridged Primer on Islamic Finance

Many non-muslims are surprised to learn that Islam has a lot to say about money and finance. It’s not just about praying 5 times a day or avoiding pork and alcohol; it’s a comprehensive religion with guidance on every aspect of life, including how you earn, spend, and save money.

The topic of morality of money is a vast and complex one, and I’m not qualified to delve into it here. However, I can provide a brief overview of the most relevant principles to us today.

Islamic Finance, at its core, is about promoting real economic activity, discouraging speculative behavior, upholding financial stability, fostering community development, encouraging low time preference thinking, and ultimately aligning economic activities with moral values.

To ensure this, it lays out a set of rules, which if followed, inevitably lead to a sound financial system. The most relevant to us today are:

• An extremely strict prohibition on engaging in usurious transactions (e.g. interest bearing loans), whether issuing or receiving them.
• Price fixing is prohibited, the value of goods should be determined by supply and demand.
• Contracts and financial transactions need to be built on the basis of equity and risk sharing. This renders explicit that there is no such thing as a “risk-free” business or investment.
• Financial transactions should be backed by a known amount of tangible assets. Selling that which you do not own, or trading in derivatives, options, futures, and other highly speculative contracts is (in most cases) prohibited.
• Investments in businesses deemed unethical or harmful (e.g. alcohol, gambling) is prohibited.

Even if you’re not a Muslim or don’t ascribe to Islam’s teachings, taking these rules in isolation, it’s impossible to refute their wisdom. Had they been applied correctly, we would still be on something akin to a gold standard today, there would be no neverending wars and financial crises, businesses would be allowed to go bankrupt to usher in value creation for more than just the boomers, and companies like Kalshi and Polymarket wouldn’t be wrecking havoc on the young and vulnerable.

Unfortunately, the current system is anything but sound, and Islamic banks are no exception. In fact, the overwhelming majority are just conventional banks with a few tweaks to make them “shariah compliant” while ignoring the tainted foundation they’re built upon, and the majority of Islamic scholars have begrudgingly given their blessing to fiat money, fractional reserve banking, and other practices that are clearly at odds with Islamic principles. Even if you don’t participate in the economy in any way except for using a checking account, it doesn’t matter because fiat money has interest baked in at the protocol level; it’s nearly impossible to escape the dust of usury.

Again, it would be hubris to assume we would’ve been able to create a better system or to dismiss the efforts of our predecessors, or to claim that the fatwas (formal rulings) on the permissibility of fiat were issued by scholars that lacked deep economic knowledge or were in the pockets of the state. The much more likely explanation is that our predecessors simply lacked alternatives, and the current system was the best compromise they could come up with.

Nonetheless, with the emergence of a technology that resolves the core issues of fiat, I believe there’s no longer a good excuse for continuing to use the broken system we were all born into, at least beyond what is strictly necessary, and that there’s an opportunity to re-work the financial system from the ground up in a way that is beneficial to all of humanity, not just Muslims.

To borrow a metaphor: if you found yourself stuck on an island where there’s nothing but pigs, then it’s permissible for you to consume them to avoid starvation. If you one day discover the existence of rams, the pork is once again forbidden and you’re obligated to consume the rams instead.

We’ve found the rams 🐏.

🛡️ Common Objections to Bitcoin, Answered

Though I could write entire articles about it, it would be remiss of me not to address the objections that come up as soon as people start taking Bitcoin seriously.

You can already guess what my opinion on the matter is, but keep in mind that I’m extremely biased. I’ll simply share a summary of the common objections and my commentary. You need to do your own research and decide for yourself; don’t trust, verify.

As with any novel technology, especially one that doesn’t cleanly fit into our existing frameworks, skepticism is the default reaction, and most of it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I’ll go a step further: not only does Bitcoin clear the bar, I’d argue it’s the best, most technologically advanced form of money humanity has produced.

Nonetheless, let’s go over some of the common arguments against Bitcoin, and why I believe they are flawed:

1. It is unclear if Bitcoin is a commodity or a currency; this drives a lot of confusion, as the two are treated differently under most legal and financial frameworks. To this I say, it is a commodity that can be used as a currency, and the fact that it can be used as a currency is what gives it value. This is not a new concept, as gold has been used as a currency for millenia, and is still used as a currency today in some parts of the world. Though one could argue that gold had a use case before it was used as a currency and still does, it’s not these use cases that give it such a high market value, but its monetary properties.

2. Bitcoin is not backed by anything; not only is the premise of this argument false as Bitcoin is backed by the energy it takes to secure the ledger, and the energy cost of securing the ledger is increasing over time, it ignores the fact that fiat currency is also unbacked, and neither was gold or any other commodity that acted as the lynchpin of a financial system.

3. You cannot physically hold Bitcoin; this is true, but it’s also true of fiat money, as most money in the world today is digital, existing only as numbers in a database. Moreover, we already recognize that digital assets, such as domain names, logos, and patents have value, and that they can be bought, sold, and traded. Bitcoin is no different.

4. Bitcoin is used for illicit activities; again, this is true of every other asset, including fiat money. In fact, humanity’s worst crimes are funded by fiat printing, and the US dollar is stained with blood. If anything, the transparency afforded by the blockchain and the ability to view the holdings of every wallet address makes Bitcoin an inferior option for illicit activities.

5. There is no central authority controlling Bitcoin; this is a feature, not a bug. The lack of a central authority means that no one can manipulate the supply of Bitcoin, and that the rules of the system are enforced by the network itself, rather than a handful of individuals. This makes Bitcoin secure and censorship resistant, enforcing a sort of forced cooperation and preventing one country or entity from unilaterally devaluing it. This means that just like gold, the value of Bitcoin is determined by the market. What’s more, the decentralization mechanism is crucial to maintaining the integrity and immutability of the blockchain. What can be improved, then, are the laws and regulations around Bitcoin, which are still in their infancy, and the lack of a clear legal framework in many jurisdictions can be a cause for concern, but this clearly isn’t an issue with Bitcoin itself but with our antiquated bureaucracies.

6. The energy consumed in Bitcoin mining is wasteful; once again, a false premise, as the energy consumed in Bitcoin mining has the critical function of securing the ledger - think of the massive amounts of processing power guarding the network as the equivalent of the tanks guarding Fort Knox. They make it so that anyone attempting a brute force attack would first have to spend billions of dollars to even stand a chance at succeeding, not that there would be any incentive in doing so, since a security failure is sure to negatively impact the value of Bitcoin. What’s more, Bitcoin mining actually has some benefits, as it stabilizes the grid, makes use of energy offshoots, encourages the development of clean energy sources, and allows for the near-perfect transfer of the value of energy. Even if you don’t agree on the benefits of Bitcoin’s energy consumption model, the energy used in mining gold or securing the banking system is an order of magnitude greater than that used in Bitcoin mining, and the environmental impact of gold mining is far worse.

7. Bitcoin cannot scale and will never be used in day-to-day transactions, thus it is not a serious currency; this is a valid concern, as Bitcoin’s current transaction throughput is limited to 7 transactions per second, and the fees can be high when the network is congested. However, the Bitcoin network is constantly being upgraded, and there are several solutions in the works that may allow it to scale to meet the demands of a global currency, the most promising being the Lightning Network, a second layer solution that allows for instant and near-free transactions, which is already live and being used by millions of people (though it too has its own set of shortcomings). This also doesn’t take away from the scenario that Bitcoin could still be used as a reserve currency rather than a day-to-day currency, just as silver was used alongside gold.

8. Bitcoin’s volatility makes it unsuitable for day-to-day transactions, and instead makes it a speculative asset; there’s no doubt that storing your earnings in Bitcoin could expose you to significant losses, though you’d have be a particularly unlucky individual to somehow still lose money on an asset that appreciated from $0.000764 to tens of thousands of dollars. Nonetheless, it remains the case today that many use Bitcoin speculatively, though this is also true of every other asset. Even fiat has day-to-day volatility that we are not aware of, and depending on where you’re from the currency you use is likely more speculative and prone to collapse than Bitcoin, bending to the whims of a few (likely corrupt) individuals. Meanwhile the price of Bitcoin is driven by a combination of global speculation and fundamentals, with the latter becoming more dominant over time. It has already overcome some serious challenges that could have shut it down, yet instead they’ve only served to strengthen the case for its use as a global reserve currency. To date, it has survived being outlawed in several countries (most prominently China, since it conflicts with their new global digital ledger project), numerous high profile hacks, the collapse of several multi-billion dollar exchanges (most notably FTX), several attempts to make undesirable changes to it’s source code, and still its percentage in cash holdings globally continues to rise. That’s not to say that something in the future won’t happen that seriously degrades the integrity of the network, but as more people use Bitcoin, the price becomes more stable, and the speculative nature decreases. If you’re a risk averse individual, this caution probably aligns with your thinking, though I’d encourage you to recognize the risks associated with holding any other asset.

Thus I posit that upon closer inspection, most arguments against Bitcoin tend to be based on a misunderstanding of how it works, or a lack of understanding of the current financial system, and have likely been misrepresented by those consulted on the matter. The arguments for Bitcoin tend to be based on a deep understanding of both, and the realization that most arguments against apply even more strongly to fiat. Regardless of your opinion, one cannot deny that it’s simply the best alternative we have to the current system, despite not being perfect.

🔑 The Exit

Fiat’s record isn’t mixed, it’s perfect - in the way a disease with no survivors is perfect. Every fiat currency ever issued has lost purchasing power. Not most of them, and not only the ones run by obviously corrupt regimes: all of them, across every form of government, every century, and every level of national wealth. The dollar has kept roughly three of the hundred cents it was worth in 1913, and the dollar is the success story - the reserve currency, the one every other currency is measured against. What looks like a survivor is simply a currency that hasn’t finished failing yet. There’s no counterexample to reach for, no country that found the discipline, no decade where the temptation was declined - and at some point a 100% failure rate across two centuries and every nation that ever tried stops being a run of bad luck and starts being a property of the design. A government that can print, prints. Debasement is the only tax that never has to be voted on, and nobody who has ever held that lever has left it alone.

For the first time in a century, money has an exit that doesn’t require moving gold across an ocean or asking your government’s permission. You still can’t delete the dollar. But you no longer have to hold it, and once you understand what holding it actually costs you, you’ll be racing towards the exit.

📜 Acknowledgements

Many of the insights in this post were only made clear through the scholarship and thought leadership of individuals who chose to make their work accessible to all, most notably Dr. Saifedean Ammous, Lyn Alden, Harris Irfan, Ray Dalio, and Alex Gladstein.

The Bitcoin community by and large, especially Bitcoin Design.

And of course, those friends that wouldn’t stop talking about Bitcoin.