The Energy of Money: How Scarcity, Technology, and Time Shape a Meaningful Life

Before we go anywhere, I want to share the video that best explains what I eventually came to learn about money.

“What’s The Problem?” by Joe Bryan. You can watch it below.

It isn’t required for reading this piece, but it will radically accelerate your understanding of what I’m about to describe.

What's The Problem? - Joe Bryan

The world feels like it’s heading in the wrong direction—rising costs, declining standards, and growing instability. The root cause? Our money is broken. Learn more at https://www.satsvsfiat.com/ In this video, Joe Bryan uses a unique and engaging story to demonstrate how the root of most of our problems lies simply in the quality of our money. Accessible to everyone, everywhere, this video connects the dots between today’s challenges and their root cause, introducing the solution: Bitcoin. Please learn about Bitcoin - Fix the Money, Fix the World 🧡 ---------- PLEASE NOTE - This video is a charitable endeavour, not a commercial one. Any and all support is much appreciated! Please like, subscribe, and—most importantly—share it with people you care about 🧡 Together, we can help everyone understand why the world is this way and how we can fix it. *** We are adding more native subtitle translations quickly! *** If you are a native speaker of a language we don't have and want to help them contact us via https://www.satsvsfiat.com/support-form. ---------- Join the Conversation: 🌍 Learn more at https://www.satsvsfiat.com/#learn 📘 Follow us on X: https://x.com/satsvsfiat 🏠 Join us: https://x.com/i/communities/1886120957644881967 🤝 Meet Fiatello at https://fiatello.com 🌐 What's The Problem? at https://www.whatstheproblem.org/ Connect with the Creator, Joe Bryan: X: https://x.com/satmojoe LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-bryan-/ ---------- Chapters: 0:00 – Introduction 1:33 – The Problems We All Face 2:20 – The Island: A Story of Two Sides 5:54 – A Free Market with Perfect Money 9:06 – The Government Arrives... 11:25 – Manipulation of the Money Supply 20:00 – An Ever-Growing Crisis 23:36 – The Inevitable Collapse of Government Money 30:40 – The Real World Problems with our Money 35:57 – What's the Solution? Bitcoin 37:45 – How to Learn More about Bitcoin and Stay in Touch - https://www.satsvsfiat.com/ #fixthemoney #fiatello #bitcoineducation #bitcoin #bigredbutton #soundmoney #perfectmoney #satoshi #fiatmoney #wealthinequality #healthcrisis #homelessness #costofliving #inflation #lynalden ---------- ABOUT: Welcome to "What's the Problem?": A thought-provoking exploration of one of the most critical yet often overlooked challenges of our time: the quality of money and its far-reaching impact on our lives, economies, and societies. In this video, we explore the root cause of many global issues—rising inequality, declining trust, inflation, housing crises, health epidemics, and more. Through a relatable analogy of two isolated societies, we show how flawed monetary systems fuel economic instability, social breakdown, and government overreach. This isn’t about politics or ideology—it’s a universal story for anyone with life experience. Stripped of hype, this presentation links monetary policy to personal freedom and societal prosperity, offering clarity and actionable insights. Key Themes Explored: - The Root Cause of Today’s Problems: How unchecked money printing, distorted price signals, and government overreach create cascading challenges, including wealth inequality and declining living standards. - The Characteristics of Perfect Money: Discover the essential traits—durability, portability, divisibility, scarcity, fungibility, acceptability, and censorship resistance—that define sound money. - A Tale of Two Economies: A fictional yet insightful analogy of two societies—one with sound money and another with an unchecked "Big Red Button" for money printing—revealing the consequences of poor monetary decisions. - The Solution: Why separating money from the state is crucial and how Bitcoin, as censorship-resistant, uncorrupted money, offers a pathway to a brighter, fairer future. Why Watch? If you've ever felt that life is becoming harder, not easier, this video explains why. It offers a clear lens through which to understand the flaws of fiat money and how Bitcoin can empower individuals, rebuild trust, and create a sustainable economic future. Who Is This For? This presentation is for everyone—whether you’re: - Curious about the role of money in society. - A seasoned Bitcoin advocate seeking to deepen your understanding. - Someone trying to make sense of why the world feels increasingly off balance. Get Involved: - Learn More: Visit https://www.satsvsfiat.com/#learn - Share: Help spread awareness by sharing this video with friends, family, and your community. - Invite Us to Speak: Bring this presentation to schools, universities, workplaces, or conferences to educate and inspire others about the importance of sound money. - Join the Conversation: Follow us on X (Twitter) https://x.com/satsvsfiat & https://x.com/satmojoe to stay updated, ask questions, and engage with the community. - And one for fun - Fiatello represents the system. Meet him at https://fiatello.com (https://fiatello.com/about) Fix the Money. Fix the World. Thank you for being part of the change🧡

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It explains something most people feel but can’t quite describe:

America is the richest nation on earth, and yet millions struggle to get ahead because the money itself is broken.

Once you see that clearly, it becomes obvious that the standard advice to work hard, save dollars, invest in a 60/40 portfolio, and hope for the best doesn’t produce the life people imagine. Your savings leak. Quietly, relentlessly, decade after decade.

This article is my attempt to tell the story of what I learned after going down this rabbit hole and discovering that money is much more than just dollars in a bank account.

Money is a technology for storing human energy.

Some technologies leak. Others hold. And choosing the right one can fundamentally reshape your future, your time, and your ability to create meaning in your life and community.

Money Is a Technology, and Ours Is Faulty

Money has two jobs:

1. Let us transact today.
2. Store the value of our work for tomorrow.

Dollars are excellent at the first task. But they fail miserably at the second. Their supply grows every year, often dramatically, and every new dollar issued silently erodes the value of every other dollar you’ve saved.

This is not a subtle point. It is the core of why life feels harder even when wages “go up.” If the unit you store your effort in is constantly weakening, you’re sprinting on a treadmill.

When I understood this, I stopped asking, “How do I grow my money?”

I started asking: “Where should I store my energy so it doesn’t leak?”

Why Gold Once Worked (And Why It Still Matters to This Story)

For thousands of years, humans solved the “storage problem” by converging on gold. Not because it was mystical, but because it was physically reliable:

• scarce
• hard to counterfeit
• divisible
• corrosion-resistant
• globally recognizable

Gold’s value was a collective belief anchored in physical reality. A rare blend of psychology and physics that made it humanity’s dominant store of value for centuries.

But that system eventually buckled.

Fast-forward through the monetary chaos of the 1930s, when gold certificates, bank runs, and a suspension of convertibility drained trust from America’s financial system.

The old gold standard starts coming apart, which brings us to 1944.

At Bretton Woods, right here in New Hampshire, world leaders tried to rebuild stability. They anchored the global economy to the U.S. dollar because the dollar itself was anchored to gold. It was an attempt to restore the reliability people had trusted for millennia.

But that anchor didn’t hold forever.

By 1971, the United States severed the link. The dollar became pure fiat: money backed not by scarcity, but by policy.

WTF Happened In 1971?

Visit the post for more.

wtfhappenedin1971.com

From that moment on, all of us were asked to save in something that could be expanded at will.

And in a surface-level way, it worked. Expansion satisfies a certain psychology: in dollar terms, everyone’s account balances drift upward. It feels like progress. Stocks go up forever.

But beneath the surface is a quiet cost. Inflation steadily dilutes the very thing we are trying to store: our time. It takes more time to earn the same money to buy the same groceries, rent, healthcare, or education. Your life energy buys a little less each year.

When you measure investments in real terms—not in dollars, but in purchasing power—an uncomfortable truth emerges. Most assets have gotten weaker over time, not stronger.

Just look at equities priced in gold since the 1970s: essentially flat. Bonds: even worse.

Measured in dollars, you feel gains. Measured in purchasing power, you discover stasis.

That was my wake-up call.

The Leak And the Search for Scalable Scarcity

Gold still stores value well, but it doesn’t scale perfectly in a digital, global world. It’s heavy, expensive to move, and as its price increases, so does the profitability to mine it out of the ground.

Real estate stores value too, but it’s fragile and subject to local risks, political whims, and changing zoning.

I needed something with gold’s strengths but without its limitations.

Something provably scarce, easily verifiable, portable, divisible, and global.

That’s when Bitcoin stopped being a “speculative asset” to me and became something else entirely.

Bitcoin Is a Philosophy, Secured by Energy

This is the part critics consistently miss.

Bitcoin is not merely software. It is a philosophy: the collective belief that money should be scarce and that no single institution should control its issuance.

The Bitcoin protocol laid out in the original 2008 whitepaper (which you should absolutely read) is simply the engineered embodiment of that philosophy.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The 21,000,000-coin cap is not a marketing gimmick. It is a social contract encoded in software.

And here’s the poetic part:

Bitcoin is secured by energy itself.

Every block is discovered through proof-of-work: trillions of mathematical hashes that require real energy to compute. That energy expenditure anchors Bitcoin to the physical world. It creates an unforgeable chain of history. No shortcut, no political decree, no insider privilege can rewrite it.

Every two weeks, the network automatically recalibrates the hardness of its puzzle so that blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes—no matter how many people join the network, no matter how much energy is thrown at it.

Bitcoin adapts to the world, but cannot be diluted by it.

This is why it is often described as “digital gold”:

• Gold is expensive to mine because nature made it scarce.
• Bitcoin is expensive to mine because humans engineered it to be scarce.

One is scarcity from nature. The other is scarcity from code. Both require energy as proof.

And because Bitcoin is decentralized, its rules aren’t preserved by institutions. They’re preserved by consensus. If quantum computing ever threatens its cryptography, the philosophy doesn’t break; the protocol will evolve. Millions of participants voluntarily upgrade their software to protect the shared value of the network.

Bitcoin is antifragile—rooted in belief, reinforced by energy, and adaptive by design.

And once you understand Bitcoin as a philosophy of monetary integrity, it becomes obvious why so many people choose it as the container for their economic energy.

Relearning Portfolio Construction: Energy First, Dollars Second

After immersing myself in this world, my perspective on portfolio design flipped.

Traditional portfolios (60% equities, 40% bonds) assume dollars are a reliable measuring stick. But if you measure assets in purchasing power, you start thinking differently:

You divide your life’s energy into functions, not tickers.

• Scarce Assets — Bitcoin, gold, real estate. These are the vessels that store energy.
• Productive Assets — equities. Shares in human innovation and creativity.
• Defensive Assets — cash, treasuries, money market funds. Liquidity and stability.

The goal is not to gamble, not to speculate, not to chase whatever CNBC finds sexy this week.

The goal is to protect the energy you’ve worked so hard to accumulate and then deploy it intentionally.

This is also why “I can’t afford a whole Bitcoin” is the wrong lens entirely.

Units don’t matter. Percentages do.

A portfolio is just a pie chart.

The key is to divide the pie according to your beliefs, your risk tolerance, and your philosophy of the future.

What matters is how each piece relates to the whole, its weight in your total portfolio.

Once you build your portfolio as a set of balanced sleeves of scarce assets, productive assets, defensive assets, two beautiful forces appear:

Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA): By investing steadily over time, you automatically buy more during downturns and less during peaks. Volatility becomes your ally.

Rebalancing: Over long horizons, periodically restoring your target percentages forces you to sell small amounts of winners and buy into losers—the exact opposite of emotional investing.

The magic of investing happens at the portfolio level, not the asset level.

Owning “one full Bitcoin” is psychologically satisfying, but from a financial perspective, meaningless.

Owning the right percentage of scarce assets for your goals? Now that’s how ordinary people build extraordinary long-term resilience.

Technology as a Freedom Multiplier

One of the most optimistic parts of this journey is realizing that technology has democratized tools once reserved for the ultra-rich:

• You can self-custody digital scarcity with a hardware wallet.
• You can automate disciplined buying through DCA.
• You can borrow against your assets without selling them, preserving exposure.
• You can hold Bitcoin directly or inside a Roth IRA through ETFs for tax-free compounding.

You’re no longer stuck with the leaky bucket.

You can choose the container you want to store your energy in.

This is how regular people create multi-decade resilience in a world where everything feels unstable.

Wealth, Time, and Meaning

Money is not evil.

Money is stored potential: the capacity to reshape your life and your community.

But because society has mostly seen wealth accumulated by people who used it poorly or selfishly, many grow up believing money is inherently corrupt.

I reject that fully.

Wealth is agency.

It lets you stop selling your time to someone else and start using your time for what matters.

Wealth lets you:

• create scholarships
• fund local food banks
• help a family member in crisis
• invest in your town or state
• build a school
• sponsor art
• enable scientific research
• donate anonymously and generously
• create lasting change in your community

Money is not the enemy.

Disconnection from money is the enemy.

Saving in a leaking asset makes people cynical because their effort evaporates. Saving in scarce assets makes people optimistic because their effort endures.

Wealth is not how much money you have when you die.

It’s what you do with your stored energy while you’re alive.

The Next Monetary Chapter + Why It’s Personal to Me

In 1944, world leaders met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to decide what global money would be. The dollar, anchored to gold, became the central pillar of the world.

That monetary era is ending.

Individuals, not governments, are now making the next choice. Quietly, voluntarily, digitally. Bitcoin didn’t ask permission to exist. Scarcity doesn’t need approval.

The next Bretton Woods will not take place in a hotel ballroom.

It will take place across millions of wallets, nodes, and minds.

We’re deciding, together, how to store the energy of our lives.

And for the first time, regular people have the tools to choose sound money.

Closing Reflection

My optimism comes from a simple truth:

We finally have a way to store our time and energy in something that does not leak.

That’s not about price predictions or getting rich.

It’s about regaining control of your future, freeing your time, and building a life filled with meaning. Then, using your surplus energy to uplift others.

Money is a technology.

Time is a technology.

Scarcity is a technology.

And when you align them, you unlock the greatest freedom we have:

the ability to live intentionally and to help others do the same.