Decades of currency debasement through money printing have made asset ownership essential for wealth preservation. Since a house is the most intuitive asset for the average person, owning one transformed from a component of the American Dream into a compulsory defense against inflation.

Not all debt is negative. Using leverage to acquire assets that generate returns—like real estate, inventory, or business investments—is a smart wealth-building tool. Conversely, financing depreciating lifestyle items ('flexing') creates a financial hole that's nearly impossible to escape.

Bitcoin's core properties (fixed supply, perfect portability) make it a superior safe haven to gold. However, the market currently treats it as a volatile, risk-on asset. This perception gap represents a unique, transitional moment in financial history.

The SVB crisis wasn't a traditional bank run caused by bad loans. It was the first instance where the speed of the internet and digital fund transfers outpaced regulatory reaction, turning a manageable asset-liability mismatch into a systemic crisis. This highlights a new type of technological 'tail risk' for modern banking.

Gold excels on four of the five properties of money but fails on portability. Bitcoin digitizes and perfects all five: divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, and scarcity. This makes it a fundamentally superior store of value for the digital age.

Governments fund wars with opaque money printing. Because Bitcoin cannot be printed, it would force leaders to use direct taxation, which citizens would resist. Its unseizable nature also removes the economic incentive of conquering nations for their reserves.

While convenient, the decline of physical cash risks locking the economy into tech platforms and creating barriers for the unbanked. Cash represents an open, uncontrolled system whose loss has significant societal and class-based downsides, concentrating power in the hands of platform owners.

The system often blamed as capitalism is distorted. True capitalism requires the risk of failure as a clearing mechanism. Today's system is closer to cronyism, where government interventions like bailouts and regulatory capture protect established players from failure.

As governments print money, asset values rise while wages stagnate, dramatically increasing wealth inequality. This economic divergence is the primary source of the bitterness, anxiety, and societal infighting that manifests as extreme political polarization. The problem is economic at its core.