Signs of the Times: Crypto vs. Government Money

The US national debt just ticked over $30,000,000,000,000 a few weeks before this post. Inflation rates are hitting their highest levels in decades, due in part to the "stimulus" efforts in response to COVID-19. One of the more visible consequences is the change in pricing at Dollar Tree, a chain of discount stores where until recently, everything was $1.00. Now, most items are $1.25. As with other aspects of inflation, the hardest-hit are the poor and those on fixed incomes.

Additionally, the cost of housing is ballooning due to the combination of inflation and flight from more authoritarian states. The apartment I once rented in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho for $630 is now $1395, more than double in a decade. It has apparently been remodeled, but still, that is an insane change in that timeframe.

Governments and banks have debased money throughout history, first literally by alloying more base metals into precious metal coins, and then figuratively by printing more paper money than there was gold and silver to support it, and finally now through pure fiat that somehow still imposes debts and taxes upon us in the process. As I write today, financial institutions and governments are also trying to seize monetary and cryptocurrency assets of protesters in Canada.

Cryptocurrency is governed by code, not the short-sighted greed of politicians. We are free to choose which to use. Decentralized finance, non-custodial exchanges, and other tools have been built by the people who had the foresight to anticipate these problems. Like the gold bugs, these are people who saw problems with the financial status quo.

Now that the problems they foresaw are here, the governments will start to present us more and more as the enemy. We are. We have an alternative to their monopolies and control schemes. That is a real threat, unlike the majority of protests and petitions. Be prepared. We may face hard times on two fronts, first with a recession in the open economy, and second with the need to resist regulatory impositions on our alternative system from the people who broke the existing system for their own gain.

Maybe I'm another prophet of doom predicting more nothingness than the 2012 apocalypse hype, but I urge you to take what precautions you can as the chaos from government, banking, and COVID continue to play out. Store some food. Make sure you have backups of your keys. Consider buying needed durable goods now lest increasing prices and disrupted supply chains make them harder to obtain down the road. Don't overextend, but don't be oblivious to the potential dangers either.