We have published many articles, arguing that bitcoin is unsound. Yet for all those arguments, there is a bright side to bitcoin. It is exciting to see that there is an audience of millions of people—mainstream people, not wild-eyed End-The-Fed gold bug preppers who keep their gold hoards with their stockpiles of ammo—who are looking for an alternative to the Fed’s failing fiat currency. Or if not looking actively, at least receptive to it.

We believe that the most important force contributing to dollar inertia is not law (and it’s certainly not the US military). It’s in your head. And in the heads of everyone else. To see what I mean, do a Google Images search for “money”. You will see pages and pages of green printed paper. And you won’t see pictures of gold coins (for that, do a search for “bitcoin”!)

Even most of the gold owners who have an implacable hatred of the Fed, think of the value of their gold as measured in dollars. Indeed, the number one complaint in the gold bug community is that the banks are pushing gold down. Down? Yeah, reducing its price as measured in dollars. Less dollars exchanged per ounce means gold is less valuable—what else could it possibly indicate?

Money means the dollar, and the dollar means money. This is how people think, at the moment. It’s a perfect example of a phenomenon described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Sure, it’s good to get out of being a creditor to the Fed by owning gold or even bitcoin. But if you accept the Fed’s core principle—that its counterfeit paper is money—you are still trapped in their system. Your chains are self-made and self-imposed.

That said, we find it encouraging that so many people see at least some serious flaws in the Fed’s irredeemable currency, and its central planning. Social change is a non-linear process. It is expressed in an old (perhaps as old as a union speech in 1914) quote about social movements that is often attributed to Ghandi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”