THE RUINS OF THE FIAT
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Sometimes all it takes is a step back to see what no one wants to look at. The fiat world isn't simply struggling, or even in a chronic crisis: it's in ruins. Not a spectacular ruin, not a Hollywood collapse with crumbling skyscrapers and fleeing crowds. No. A slow, gray, bureaucratic ruin. A ruin of forms, debts, bailouts, cobbled-together reforms, and forgotten promises. A ruin so vast that it now serves as a backdrop, to the point that no one even notices its decay anymore. Fiat collapsed long ago; it simply keeps moving by inertia, like a body still warm even though life has left it.
To understand Bitcoin, you must understand this: it doesn't replace a healthy system, nor does it compete with a functioning architecture. It arises from a field of ruins. It emerges in a world where institutions have lost their substance, where currencies have lost their function, where citizens have lost trust. Bitcoin didn't appear as an alternative. It appeared as a reminder: something had to exist in place of the growing void. A foundation, a basis, a measure was needed. Fiat was no longer sufficient.
From an anthropological, almost archaeological perspective, we can observe the present era as a civilization attempting to maintain structures that have already collapsed. Like those late societies where empty temples continue to be erected, where rituals are preserved whose meaning is no longer understood, simply because cultural inertia is stronger than lucidity. The fiat has become this: a ritual without essence, a ceremony without truth, a currency that no longer conveys anything real.
Look around you: persistent inflation, no longer treated as a scandal but as a natural phenomenon; central banks speaking like modern-day shamans, invoking instruments whose effects they no longer control; governments spending as if debt were a mere abstraction with no consequences. None of this constitutes a functioning system. It is a slow disintegration, a structural crumbling, a façade held up by the scaffolding of communication.
Human beings adapt to everything, especially the worst. That's why an entire civilization was able to become accustomed to living in ruins without even realizing it. Generations born into the fiat era have never known anything but monetary instability, gradual confiscation, and steady depreciation. They take this for granted, as an eternal economic climate. They don't grasp that in the past, money actually served to measure value, not to organize dependency. They fail to see that the ruin in which they live is not an accident: it's the logical outcome of a system that can only self-destruct.
The collapse of fiat currency is not merely economic. It is psychological. It is moral. It is existential. A failing currency produces failing individuals, erratic behavior, and a fragile society, incapable of planning for the future. For when the unit of value is unstable, everything becomes unstable: work, savings, confidence, life plans. The fiat individual lives in short-termism, in fear, in dependence. They are deprived of one of the fundamental pillars of civilization: the ability to plan for the future without being consumed by uncertainty.
The ruins of fiat currency are not visible because they have no broken stones. They are invisible, yet omnipresent. They reside in behaviors, in institutions, in digital infrastructures collapsing under their own weight, in over-indebted states, in fragile banks, in credit that has become a collective drug. Every citizen feels the effects, but the mechanisms are so abstract that the wrong targets are blamed: merchants, “rising prices,” stagnant wages, companies laying off workers. The root cause is never seen: the currency itself, eroded by its own architecture.
Fiat, in order to survive, has had to transform itself into propaganda. It can no longer be explained; it must be justified. It can no longer be loved; it must be defended. It can no longer be used with confidence; it must be accepted by default. Central bank communication campaigns now resemble sermons. Political promises about purchasing power sound like prayers. “Support plans,” “stimulus plans,” “exceptional measures” resemble incantations. Everything is linguistic, symbolic, theatrical. As always in collapsing societies.
Fiat currency can no longer function because a system based on perpetual debt inevitably reaches the limits of its own absurdity. A currency that must be created ex nihilo to repay the currency already created can only drift toward infinity. And when it reaches its limits, it is not reform that saves it, but a headlong rush into the abyss. Monetary creation becomes cyclical, obligatory, permanent. We print yesterday's money with tomorrow's money. And when tomorrow arrives, we start all over again. It is no longer an economy, it is perpetual crisis management.
This is where Bitcoin arrives, like an anomaly in the archaeology of the present. An artifact unlike anything else around it. A technology that rejects manipulation, debt, illusion, and lies. A clock that runs according to its own laws, indifferent to governments, banks, and electoral cycles. Bitcoin doesn't try to fix fiat currency. It proposes transcending it. It is a way out, a return to a primitive but superior form of economic truth.
The ruins of the fiat are irreparable. You can't reinforce a structure that's collapsing from within. You can't restore a cathedral whose foundations are made of sand. The fiat cannot become what it never was: an honest currency. But civilizations have always functioned this way: one structure collapses, and another emerges, sometimes silent, sometimes misunderstood, sometimes ridiculed at first. Then it grows, irresistible, until it becomes retrospectively undeniable.
The future will view fiat currency the way we view past monetary systems: not as stable forms, but as historical curiosities. As transient, imperfect, chaotic devices. Bitcoin, on the other hand, will appear as the first monetary form truly aligned with physics, with truth, with time. A currency that doesn't beg for trust because it doesn't need it. A currency that doesn't collapse because it isn't backed by any fiction.
The ruins of fiat are here. They cover everything. They cause silent tremors, invisible fractures, strange behaviors. But beneath these ruins, something is growing. A solid foundation, an artifact from the future, a mathematical structure that does not age. Bitcoin did not come to save the old world. It came to build another. It is by observing the ruins that we understand the need to rebuild. And it is by observing Bitcoin that we understand how to rebuild.
Fiat currency no longer functions. Bitcoin, on the other hand, doesn't need anyone to function. That's the whole difference. And that's the whole story.
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