Crypto Freedom

Can we escape fiat currencies?

We are on the cusp of a temporal revolution—perhaps we are already living through it. Our ideas about the future are changing, and fast.

Six months ago, I became a father. That’s when my perception of time changed radically. I started reflecting on my responsibilities towards a small creature who makes funny faces at me, and, of course, the need to provide for her. Time, as a value, became less relative and more urgent. I see my daughter growing as I get older by the day. The cycle of life is staring at me in the face, unflinchingly.

Time transcends the physical and metaphysical. Contemporary society presents the illusion of an eternal present, but our temporal choices determine our lives in ways that modern culture doesn’t always appreciate. Every generation is defined by the decisions of its predecessors: Is it better to cultivate land or to plunder another, as warrior cultures would have seen it? The answer to this question changed the course of history.

Today, our currencies represent how we create and exchange wealth in our economy. Understanding the value of these currencies and how they operate allows us to evaluate the options that lie ahead.

Fiat currencies, such as the dollar and the euro, created by our governments and central bank systems, follow a cyclical form of life: birth, hyperinflation, and death. After this process, a new system arises.

The US dollar is the fiat currency with the most longevity, but it has lost more than 96 percent of its purchasing power since the height of its glory. In 1925, a brick builder earned around 0.40 dollars an hour, amounting to an annual income of about 1,300 dollars. That may seem like little to us today, but it represented a dignified salary at the time. And it was proportional to purchasing needs: A Ford Model T cost around 320 dollars, a three-bedroom apartment with a small garden, around 7,000 dollars. Building a life was simple.

Monetary inflation resembles a watch with a battery that slowly drains—a quiet surrender of time to the thermodynamic entropy that erodes value. When a central bank introduces more and more units of currency within a system (some call it quantitative easing), money loses value: every unit is worth less than before, and we come closer to the point of transformation. The effects of this process are evident to all of us: an increase in prices and a decrease in living standards.

Our condition may seem dramatic, and it is. But we should remember what G. Michael Hopf said, “Hard times create strong men”. Technological acceleration is an ally in the war against time and the thermodynamic exhaustion of the fiat currency.

Cryptocurrencies represent a development in technology that offers us a new opportunity. It’s perhaps prophetic that blockchain, the technology at the basis of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, was originally called “timechain”, revealing the relation of the present to the future.

Bitcoin possesses properties that combine technology, computational work, and thermodynamic energy. Through its decentralized protocol, Bitcoin introduces a new mechanism that universally coordinates a global temporal consensus, forming a chain that traces the history of the network. Each block is a bundle of verified transactions that are cryptographically linked to the previous one, forming a digital chain that remains cohesive and is protected from forgery or hacking.

Cryptocurrencies suffer their own form of instability: critics often highlight their high volatility as a flaw, seeing them as an unreliable and speculative asset. However, I argue their price instability doesn’t stem from an inherent dysfunction but from their role as an emerging and disruptive technology and due to their residual ties to the legacy financial system.

It’s worth making a distinction between investing in cryptocurrencies, which requires knowledge and wisdom, and using them as currencies for transactional purposes. Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, can be highly volatile, but the most risk-averse individuals could pick stablecoins, like Tether (USDT), which, by definition, are immune to the same changes in value.

Investing in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to limit the effects of our expropriation by the traditional financial system may not be enough. We've seen how crypto markets reacted to the latest tariff war, but the key is that they offer an option.

The devaluation of our currencies is nothing new. The ancient Romans diluted metals in their gold and silver coins in times of crisis. As citizens grew desperate, they indulged in this practice more and more, rendering these coins ultimately devoid of value. Some argue that hyperinflation contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, but the Romans didn’t enjoy the alternative to the impending collapse that we are being offered today.

As a response to an inevitable historical cycle, cryptocurrencies and related technologies seem to herald an imminent paradigm shift; a way to escape the horizon of financial crisis threatening to engulf us and future generations.

During times of financial panic, time itself is compressed into a frantic present. In the 1960s, in the US, average personal savings were around 10 percent of disposable income. Today, they’re about 4.5 percent. Unfettered consumerism, debt, pollution, war, and violence are symptoms of a self-destructive society in which the present is more important than the future. This is evident too in the collapse of our birthrates.

Having children forces us to make decisions rooted in understanding the preciousness of time as a value that can be sustained: will I, today, be able to build an inheritance for those who come after me? If so, how? Is it worth worrying about the future, knowing that we will be even poorer next year? Such is the trap of time. Millennials and Generation Z are faced with shrinking options, just like the ancient Romans. But we are the generations going through hard times that will be able to create a better future for our children, if we choose to.

In this scenario, cryptocurrencies are not merely tools of financial investment, but malleable technologies that are creating economic contexts that could emancipate individuals from the mechanisms that are forcing the anxiety of a perpetual present upon us. Instead, we can create one where we feel hopeful that our temporal reality can be made longer.

It’s becoming increasingly easy to work remotely, travel the world, and be paid in crypto: no intermediary, no bureaucratic filter, or digital identity to limit its use. What is otherwise known as “digital nomadism”, but these roots may soon find fertile ground to grow. Borders can be reshaped. The internet may transform our real life. Crypto can allow us to create communities of our choice as financial systems limited by governmental decisions become increasingly unreliable. Crypto offers us a chance to control our financial destiny, and with it, what we leave on this earth.

My advice to you as a reader is to start learning about cryptocurrencies as an option to escape the financial chains of the present, to accelerate into this new digital reality, and to create trust and security for the people you love, for now and for what may come.

Matte Galt is a privacy and cybersecurity expert, author of Cyber Hermetica.

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