Michael Wilkins / Michael Wilkins is on Nostr

Founder, Involve Digital.
Founder, The Bitcoin Transition.

Focused on sound money, incentives, and systems.
Bitcoin as a monetary protocol, not a speculative asset.
Exploring how hard money shapes technology, productivity, and long-term human progress.

Last Notes

2026-02-14 08:53:38 UTC

- reply

Honestly I think Switzerland is the closest country to running a proper democracy. Everyone else pretends they have democracy but they don’t.

2026-01-05 21:25:32 UTC

After 10+ years and 30,000+ hours of studying the history of money, monetary failures, hard money systems, Austrian economics, and Bitcoin, a few conclusions become unavoidable.
Money is not created by decree.
It emerges as a coordination tool.
Societies converge on the hardest available money because it best preserves time, labour, and energy.
Throughout history, money has followed a pattern:
• Collectible goods become media of exchange.
• The most durable, scarce, and verifiable forms outcompete the rest.
• States later monopolise issuance.
• Debasement follows.
• Trust erodes.
• The system resets.
This cycle has repeated for thousands of years.
Gold was not chosen because it was shiny.
It was chosen because it was hard to produce, difficult to counterfeit, and costly to debase.
Those properties constrained rulers and protected savers.
The abandonment of hard money did not happen because it “failed.”
It happened because it limited political spending.
Fiat currency is not money in the historical sense.
It is a credit instrument backed by future taxation and enforced by law.
Its supply must expand to service the debt it creates.
This is not a flaw. It is the design.
Credit creation changes behaviour.
New money enters the economy through specific channels:
• Governments
• Banks
• Asset markets
Those closest to issuance benefit first.
Those furthest away pay through rising prices and declining purchasing power.
Productivity gains no longer flow primarily to savers or workers.
They are absorbed by asset inflation.
This is why wages lag prices.
This is why savings no longer work.
This is why speculation outcompetes production.
Austrian economics does not oppose growth.
It explains growth.
Real growth comes from:
• Capital accumulation
• Productivity improvements
• Time preference discipline
Hard money forces growth to appear as falling prices and rising purchasing power, not monetary expansion.
Under sound money, progress benefits everyone.
Under fiat money, progress is unevenly distributed.
Bitcoin is not an innovation in finance.
It is an innovation in monetary integrity.
Bitcoin did not invent scarcity.
It enforced it digitally, without trust.
Bitcoin is:
• Fixed in supply
• Permissionless
• Verifiable by anyone
• Independent of political systems
It does not promise yield.
It does not promise returns.
It does not guarantee adoption.
It simply removes monetary discretion.
Bitcoin does not succeed because its fiat price rises.
Its fiat price rises because fiat units lose purchasing power and more fiat flows into a fixed system.
Price is not value.
Value is preserved purchasing power over time.
Bitcoin exposes this distinction.
Most confusion comes from mixing frameworks:
• Treating Bitcoin as an investment instead of money
• Measuring success in fiat terms
• Expecting monetary neutrality from a debt-based system
Paper Bitcoin, custodial claims, ETFs, and derivatives reintroduce the very trust Bitcoin was designed to remove.
They may increase liquidity and price discovery, but they weaken monetary sovereignty.
Self-custody matters.
Running a node matters.
Using Bitcoin matters.
Money that is not used eventually becomes controlled.
The long arc is clear:
• Fiat systems require perpetual expansion.
• Expansion erodes trust.
• Trust loss drives capital toward harder money.
This is not ideological.
It is structural.
Bitcoin is not a revolution.
It is a reversion.
A return to money that cannot be altered, censored, or debased.
Whether it succeeds depends not on price, institutions, or narratives,
but on whether people choose to use it as money.
Hard constraints produce honest systems.
Honest systems produce long-term progress.
That is the conclusion.
#Bitcoin #AustrianEconomics #HistoryOfMoney #Money