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Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

…and the Journey from “Notgeld” to World Reserve Currency in Under Two Decades

For a long time, anybody paying attention knew that central banks printing fiat money out of thin air, then lending it to nation states at interest and blowing it out into the economy would inexorably, eventually lead to such wealth disparity that the society would break down.

It would get to the point where popular revolts would threaten to overwhelm the position of the elite class; those Cantillionaires who lord over this phantasmagorical system that created value ex nihilo and caused, through inflation, the vast majority of wealth to accrue to society’s “capstone class”…

Class structure, now and future

One of my personal favourite quips is:

It’s been over three years since I released The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, and in it I laid out my base investment thesis that “The Great Reset” wasn’t actually anything to do with climate change or any of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – what it really was all about, is the debt:

(If you want a free copy of the entire manifesto, just sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list and we’ll send you the PDF).

“The Great Reset” and “Build Back Better” attempted to lay the groundwork for the eventual (and still somewhat inevitable) pivot of fiat money into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). They will almost certainly be fused with social credit systems denominated in carbon footprint quotas – and thus a mechanism to implement forced austerity across the debt-drowning economies of the world resulting in a kind of “monetary Apartheid”.

What I Got Wrong in My Manifesto

Aside from the fact that events I assumed would play out over decades happened within 18 months, there was another fundamental flaw in my analysis:

I first discovered Bitcoin during the Cyprus banking crisis of 2013 – when people began to understand that “as safe as money in the bank” didn’t quite mean what it used to anymore.

The Cypriots got hit with a 10% “bail-in”, but more ominously – bail-in provisions started showing up all over the place (from the Manifesto, again):

It was during the Cyprus bail-in that Bitcoin surged above $100 USD for the last time. It would never again trade at the double-digit level.

Even so,  I never thought Bitcoin would become the world reserve currency or even a component of whatever comes next after this post-post-Bretton Woods era we now live in.

My mental model for Bitcoin, right up until 2022 was as a kind of globally emergent “Notgeld” – a German term that came into being during their 1920’s Weimar Hyperinflation, and translates into English as “emergency money”.

In Germany, individual towns began printing their own scrip, during the Zimbabwe hyperinflation, people began using prepaid phone and gas cards. Every hyperinflation has its Notgeld, and until early 2022, that’s what I assumed Bitcoin was, on a global level.

Two things happened that changed my mind:

The first sequence of events forever changed the calculus that nations would employ for deciding how to allocate and hold their sovereign wealth.

The second did that for individual citizens. It alone orange-pilled Robert F Kennedy Jr, who two years later would make Bitcoin a US election issue when he opened his historic keynote at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami with the words:

From that point on – Bitcoin shifted from being “Notgeld” – emergency money amid a slow-rolling, global hyper-inflationary event, and it became inevitable component of a future, successor monetary regime.

The Next President of the United States Has Been Orange-Pilled

No matter what you think of Donald Trump, whether he induces either type of “TDS” (Type 1 = “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, Type 2 = “Trump Divinity Syndrome”), or  you’re more dispassionate and objective, the fact remains that a Trump-led GOP landslide is all but baked-in come November 5th.

Like RFK Jr., Trump has firmly jumped onto the Bitcoin bandwagon. He’s been orange-pilled (props to David Bailey Bitcoin Magazine for doing so).

Trump declared that he “wants all future Bitcoin to mined in the USA”. Granted, it doesn’t quite work that way, but he went on to reiterate that, and the right to self-custody at: the Republican National Convention:

The Big Announcement Will Drop on July 27th

This year Trump will be delivering the keynote address at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee. RFK Jr will also be on hand. Both candidates firmly on board with Bitcoin, albeit one destined for the Presidency more than the other (I expect RFK will land somewhere within a Tump administration come January 2025).

The inside baseball is that at that keynote address, Trump is expected to announce his intention to create a strategic reserve of Bitcoin for the US Treasury.

Doing so could be as simple as a stroke-of-the-pen on inauguration day, as the US is already sitting on about $5B worth of BTC:

Once that happens, we’re in a whole new ballgame. The Game Theory of Bitcoin will irrevocably change globally, and nation states will be incentivized to follow suit.

Regardless of how it plays out, Bitcoin has already crossed the Rubicon. It’s here to stay, it isn’t some kind of “emergency money” to temporarily sidestep the ongoing unraveling of the global fiat standard – it’s now part of the plumbing.

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Read my special report on what a Trump presidency means for Bitcoin, and which companies stand to win big right here. Join the Bombthrower mailing list and get a free copy of the Crypto Capitalist Manifesto here (and The CBDC Survival Guide once it drops) Follow me on Nostr or Twitter here.