The 5,000-Year Curse : A History of Theft
The history of human civilization is, tragically, a history of currency debasement. From the clipped coins of the Roman Empire to the paper marks of Weimar Germany, the story remains the same. For 5,000 years, societies have struggled with a singular, fatal flaw : the money we use to store the energy of our labor is controlled by authorities who cannot resist the urge to steal it.
In ancient Rome, the denarius was once 95% pure silver. To fund wars and public spectacles, emperors began to “clip” the coins, mixing in base metals like copper. By the time of the empire’s collapse, the silver content had plummeted to 0.05%. The people of Rome thought they had money ; in reality, they held tokens of a dying empire. Their purchasing power evaporated, trade routes collapsed, and the greatest civilization of the ancient world descended into the Dark Ages.
This was not an accident. It was policy.
History is littered with the corpses of currencies that failed because governments or powerful authorities established absolute control over the supply. They printed it (or debased it) for their own purposes—usually to fund warfare or expand bureaucracy—and in doing so, they diluted the wealth of every saver in the economy.
When the supply of money expands, the value of each unit must mathematically decrease. This is not a theory ; it is a law of economics as rigid as gravity. Every time a central authority has had the power to print money cost-free, they have used that power until the currency collapsed. There is not a single exception in 5,000 years.
From the Roman Denarius to Bitcoin
Recently, cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin have become the main topics in the financial Industry. A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security. They are a type of digital currency that allows people to make payments directly to each other through an online system.
The first Cryptocurrency is Bitcoin which is technically, “an algorithm that records an ongoing chain of transactions between members of a decentralized peer-to-peer network and broadcasts these records to all members of the network » .
Bitcoin is the world’s biggest blockchain with a market capitalization of more than $189 billion . It was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 when he has published his white paper “Bitcoin : A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (Nakamoto, 2008).
Bitcoin has plummeted $60,000 from its dizzying all-time high of $125,000. The screens are red, the headlines are gleeful, and the skeptics are taking their victory laps. “It was a bubble,” they say. “It’s going to zero,” they promise. “The party is over.”
We have heard this eulogy before. We heard it when Bitcoin crashed from $30 to $2. We heard it when it fell from $1,200 to $200 in 2014. We heard it when it collapsed from $20,000 to $3,000 in 2018. And yet, every single time, the asset has not only recovered but also ascended to heights previously unimaginable.
At the end of the day, we could Ask ourselves these few questions : Why does this happen ? Is it luck ? Is it mass delusion ? Or is there a fundamental mechanical truth driving this asset—a truth so powerful that price volatility is merely noise in a signal that has been broadcasting for thousands of years ?
The answer lies not in looking at the charts of the last six months, but in looking at the history of the last 5,000 years. To understand if Bitcoin will come back, we must understand why it exists.
