First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight at you, then they add you to their Long-Term Capital Markets Assumptions paper and predict you'll be the best-performing asset of the next decade.

⚡️The real shift is that money itself is about to become an autonomous software decision. Humans currently decide what counts as savings through culture, institutions, fear, habit, regulation, career risk. Machines do not inherit those attachments unless humans deliberately hard-code them. Give an autonomous agent revenue, expenses, liabilities, a treasury balance, and a long enough planning horizon, and eventually it has to answer one primitive question: Where does unused purchasing power live? That question gets answered millions of times per second by policy, not emotion. For operating capital, dollars win. Stablecoins are machine-readable dollars with instant settlement. For yield-bearing reserves, tokenized Treasuries win a large share. For capital that needs to survive outside an issuer, jurisdiction, maturity schedule, or discretionary monetary policy, Bitcoin becomes the obvious candidate. That creates a monetary stack that looks increasingly machine-native: stablecoins for transactions tokenized government debt for yield Bitcoin for sovereign reserve And here is the part that could become enormous. Once agents become economically autonomous, Bitcoin demand can detach from human attention entirely. An agent earns $100,000. Expenses require $40,000. Liquidity buffer requires $20,000. Treasury policy automatically allocates some fraction of the remaining $40,000 into long-duration reserve assets. Then another agent does it. Then ten million. Then industrial robots. Autonomous companies. Personal AI corporations. Machine-run marketplaces. Software entities earning from other software entities. Nobody needs to wake up bullish. Nobody needs to watch a halving. Nobody needs Michael Saylor to explain anything. The accumulation becomes background computation. That is a radically different monetary regime because human speculative demand is episodic. Machine treasury demand can be continuous. The deepest implication is that Bitcoin may eventually become the first major asset whose marginal buyer is partly nonhuman. And once that happens, the old framing of Bitcoin as a human belief asset starts breaking down. Its monetary premium begins coming from something colder: software choosing the asset because the rules survive inspection. Fixed supply. No issuer. No bankruptcy. No board. No country. No closing hours. No maturity. No permission required at the protocol layer. A machine does not need the mythology of digital gold. It can simply compare monetary objects. That is where this gets almost eerie. Bitcoin was designed before autonomous economic agents existed, yet its architecture happens to look unusually compatible with an economy populated by them. A bearer asset that machines can verify themselves. A monetary policy expressed in code. A settlement system that never sleeps. A supply curve requiring no trust in another mind. That combination may turn out to have been waiting for a user class that did not exist when Bitcoin was created.

⚡️The real risk is Bitcoin gets paperized before it gets fully monetized. Wall Street can build layers of derivatives, loans, custodial claims, rehypothecation, and synthetic “BTC exposure” around the real coins. That can suppress price discovery because scarcity only bites when demand reaches the scarce object. If a pension wants $500 million of Bitcoin exposure and a bank manufactures the exposure without buying $500 million of spot BTC, the 21 million cap never feels that demand. That is Gromen’s real signal. But financialization does not erase scarcity. Bitcoin can move globally, settle directly, and be independently verified. Gold never had that. The financial system can manufacture unlimited claims. It cannot manufacture another satoshi. So the larger the paper layer becomes, the more dangerous the mismatch underneath it becomes. Everything works while nobody asks for the asset. Then sovereigns want custody. Corporations want reserves. Funds demand redemption. Counterparty trust weakens. Claims start trying to become coins. That is when the synthetic layer discovers what fixed supply actually means. And because Bitcoin settles at internet speed, that reconciliation could be violent. The likely path is: Bitcoin gets absorbed into traditional finance. Synthetic exposure dampens volatility and reduces spot pressure. The market starts looking domesticated. Then settlement stress reminds everyone that the underlying asset is radically different from the credit built on top of it. The paper layer can postpone the encounter with scarcity. It cannot erase it. Bitcoin may eventually become base money beneath a credit system: Base asset: fixed, scarce, final settlement. Credit layer: elastic, expandable. Gromen is touching something real. He is describing how Bitcoin can be temporarily tamed. But the same mechanism can eventually create the mother of all scarcity squeezes. Wall Street may spend years pretending 21 million is more elastic than it really is.

Surprised at the reaction to this post. Here is the thought that generated it: 1. I logged onto Coinbase recently to buy more BTC, & was struck that unlike when i first bought BTC on Coinbase in 2013, Coinbase now offers all sorts of BTC derivatives, offering varying degrees of leverage, all cash-settled (not BTC-settled). 2. BTC peak-to-peak CAGR returns have collapsed in the 2 cycles since cash-settled** BTC derivatives began trading (**"cash-settled" is key, because it means the owner of the biggest printing press increasingly sets marginal prices over time, NOT physical supply & demand. In most cases, the owner of the biggest printing press is the very fiat system BTC was designed to escape from) 👇 As a BTC holder since 2013 (and still), this collapse in peak-to-peak CAGR of BTC troubles me greatly. I would be happy to have anyone explain why peak-to-peak returns have collapsed in the past 8 years & why they think this trend will stop despite the seeming continued expansion of cash-settled BTC derivatives and cash-settled betting markets on BTC. Thank you. 🙏❤️

$100,000 held in cash since January 2020 now buys what $77,010 would have then. That’s $22,990 of purchasing power erased—about 608 hours of average private-sector work at today’s $37.81 hourly rate, or more than 15 full-time weeks of life spent earning money that can no longer be spent.

New essay in @WSJ today Bitcoin is freedom money ✌️ partners.wsj.com/the-nakamot…

Bull Market vs Bear Market

Reminder: inflation is a relatively recent phenomenon. When the dollar was on a fixed gold standard we had no persistent inflation. We can go right back to price stability the moment we choose.

Don’t blame baby boomers because they could buy houses for $20k and pay for college with a summer job. Blame the politicians who printed money from thin air for half a century to fund expansion of government, war and grift. The money is broken. Fix the money. Fix the world.

WOW: The gap between government-reported inflation and REAL INFLATION just hit 300 PERCENTAGE POINTS! The government says prices are up 96% since 2000. The money supply says, “Hold my printer.” M2: +396%. CPI: +96%. Gap: 300 points. INFLATION IS THE BUSINESS MODEL. THIS IS WHY WE BITCOIN:

Most people picture a Bitcoin payment like a bank transfer. Money leaves one account and lands in another. That's not what happens. Here's what actually happens, because once you understand the process, half the FUD surrounding Bitcoin disappears.

Bitcoin is Freedom I spent the last few weeks in my motherland, Vietnam. The country has transformed since my family escaped in 1978. It is more prosperous, energetic, and ambitious than the Vietnam I left behind. A young population, rising investment, and global aspiration have created extraordinary momentum. And yet one thing remains clear. For many in Vietnam, the ultimate dream is still America. And if they cannot make it to America, they want to wear American brands, eat American food, listen to American music, and exude American confidence. My trip to Vietnam reminded me of this, and the World Cup has made it visible on a global stage. America remains not only a country people admire, but a place people still want to reach, represent, and belong to. The United States remains the land of the free, the Wild Wild West, and the home of the American Dream. Walmart and Waffle House. Boston and Austin. Silicon Valley and Wall Street. A country where people can still rise from welfare to extraordinary success through hard work, ingenuity, risk taking, and some luck. My family experienced that promise directly. We arrived in America as refugees, sponsored by a Catholic church in Syracuse, New York. We received public assistance, food stamps, and free school lunches. My father worked three jobs. We lived frugally and dealt with poverty and racism. America was not easy, but it was open. It gave us a system where effort, education, entrepreneurship, and perseverance could compound. This is America. The world still aspires to be like us. What has made America successful over the last 250 years is not accidental. It is a principled Constitution, geographic scale, abundant resources, and a culture of liberty, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and reinvention. Other nations try to replicate the recipe, but often waver. Interventionism, bureaucracy, corruption, and ego get in the way. Which brings me to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the United States of money. It aspires to do for money what the American Constitution aspired to do for government: create a system governed by transparent rules rather than the discretion of individuals. Built on a principled white paper, digitally enforced scarcity, and proof of work, Bitcoin is digital capital governed by code, energy, and consensus. But beyond that, Bitcoin is hope. It provides hope for those who have worked hard for their money and want to protect it from monetary inflation. It provides hope for those born in countries without reliable rule of law or economic freedoms. It provides hope for anyone seeking protection, opportunity, and a form of property that does not depend on geography, politics, or permission. I was born in the year of America’s bicentennial. Fifty years later, the future of American dominance is being questioned. I have no question. The United States of America is the greatest country in the world. My life is proof of what America makes possible. I left Vietnam as a refugee, grew up poor in America, built a career through education and hard work, and now have a wonderful wife and three children. That is the American Dream to me. It is not just wealth. It is freedom, family, opportunity, and the ability to determine your own future. That is also why Bitcoin resonated with me. I found Bitcoin because it reflected the same principles that shaped my life: clear rules, individual sovereignty, property rights, resilience, open competition, and long-term conviction. America gave my family freedom through a country. Bitcoin offers individuals monetary freedom through a network. One opened the door for me. The other opens a door for anyone, anywhere, to protect the fruits of their labor. That is why Bitcoin is freedom.