July 9, 2025
A look at Bitcoin’s quiet superpower that terrifies elites; and spoiler, it has nothing to do with price.
Just weeks ago, Congress passed the so-called Big Beautiful Bill - a sweeping package framed as economic stewardship but structured to deepen deficits, entrench elite privileges, and defer consequences. It’s a striking case study in how modern governance routinely distorts incentives: rewarding short-term optics over long-term prudence, and enabling decisions whose true costs are quietly passed on to future generations. This isn’t dysfunction - it’s design. Policymakers, financiers, and institutions operate within systems that often penalise integrity and insulate power from accountability. In such an environment, outcomes that seem irrational on the surface are usually just the logical result of misaligned incentives beneath.
Bitcoin emerges as a quiet counterpoint to this logic. While Congress codifies consequence-free spending into law, Bitcoin enforces a different reality - one in which truth is embedded in code, incentives are aligned and consequences are inseparable from action. It doesn’t fight the system with slogans or partisanship; it simply operates by rules that can’t be bent. Bitcoin is a structural rejection of the very dynamics the Big Beautiful Bill represents. And it is precisely here where Bitcoin’s quiet superpower emerges: it realigns incentives so that doing the right thing finally makes sense, and it terrifies the elites; laying bare the moral bankruptcy of the world they’ve built and ruled.
Under today’s fiat monetary system, recklessness isn’t penalised - it’s subsidised. Consider the 2008 financial crisis: banks gambled with other people’s money, lost catastrophically, and were rewarded with taxpayer-funded bailouts. Risk was not punished; it was bailed out and encouraged. Economists call this a moral hazard - when those insulated from the effects of their decisions behave recklessly. With governments and central banks poised to rescue the “too big to fail”, every incentive drives major players to take ever greater risks. As Saifedean Ammous observes, the existence of institutions like the IMF, which can print money or lend endlessly, creates a permanent safety net for bad decisions. Under a gold standard or any hard budget, a bank or even a nation that went bust would suffer the consequences - leaders lost their thrones, banks and companies went under. But in the current fiat era, failure is papered over, not punished. The worse your bets, the more likely you’ll get a rescue (provided you’re big enough to matter). When debt is abundant and consequences are distant, why not leverage to the hilt? Why bother with prudence when folly is so handsomely rewarded?
This perverse incentive structure extends far beyond banks. Governments today can borrow infinitely, spend profligately, and print currency at will - knowing that the costs of their extravagance can be offloaded onto the public through inflation. Inflation is effectively a hidden tax on everyone’s savings, yet no politician has to hold a press conference to announce it. When things go wrong under fiat, no one in power is held directly responsible. Deficits can always be financed by debasing the currency, and by the time prices soar or financial crises hit, the architects of the fiasco are often long gone or already bailed out. A case in point is the cynically nicknamed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which makes costly tax cuts for wealthy interests permanent and piles on new giveaways - all while hiding the true price tag (over $3 trillion in new debt) from taxpayers. The bill is tremendously unpopular with voters and most prominently, Elon Musk - but because the costs can be deferred onto future generations via deficits and inflation, lawmakers faced little immediate repercussions for passing it. In the fiat world, discipline is not rewarded; it’s actively discouraged. Saving prudently becomes foolish when currency melts like ice; spending and accumulating debt become rational when money cheapens by the day.
As one scathing analysis puts it, what we call our modern economy is effectively a machine for boosting aimless consumption, primarily with uncollateralised debt, by destroying the price signals for capital and depleting its stock. In other words, the fiat system doesn’t just misallocate capital - it erodes our ability to even tell what’s valuable. It incentivises short-term highs over long-term prosperity, creating a culture that feasts today and forsakes tomorrow. Why invest painstaking effort in real innovation when easy money can goose this quarter’s numbers? Why balance a budget when you can print more funds at will? In a world of ever-flowing cheap credit, the sane decision is often to act insane.
Perverse incentives have even corroded the world of philanthropy and public service. Large NGOs and charities routinely raise billions through heart-wrenching appeals and glossy marketing - yet face minimal accountability for actual results on the ground. The system rewards looking like you care more than actually solving problems. Donors, moved by emotional stories, pour in money, but rarely are there mechanisms to punish failure or waste. As development economist William Easterly famously noted, these organisations suffer a fundamental principal-agent dilemma: the supposed beneficiaries (impoverished communities, disaster victims, etc.) are not the ones paying the piper. Instead, it is distant donors and governments who fund the projects - so NGOs ultimately answer to pleasing those donors, not the people they serve. The outcome is predictable: projects are structured to generate headlines and satisfy grant requirements rather than to create self-sustaining long-term change. Feeding the hungry or healing the sick often takes a back seat to pleasing the bureaucracy and keeping the donations flowing. In this “misery industry,” as Ammous dubs it, success is hard to measure and failure carries no clear consequences - a recipe for endless initiatives that spend huge sums and achieve little. Like the fiat banks that never face the full cost of their gambles, the aid sector floats in a bubble of consequence-free funding. The common thread? Fiat money enables a world without consequences - a grander and more polite kind of corruption where nearly everyone is playing a game of make-believe. It isn’t true capitalism, because true capitalism rewards prudent use of capital. Instead, it’s a perverse theater where consequences are deferred or deflected indefinitely - until reality eventually intrudes in the form of crashes, crises, and lost decades.
If fiat life is a dreamland where actions float free from outcomes, Bitcoin is a cold splash of water - a hard awakening to cause and effect. Bitcoin’s monetary system operates by rules that nobody can cheat or bend, not even governments or billionaire bankers. Where fiat central banks can conjure trillions out of thin air, Bitcoin says “no.” No money printing. No do-overs or secret bailouts. Every coin must be earned - either through mining (expenditure of real energy and computation) or by receiving it in exchange for goods and services. In Bitcoin’s world, you can’t get something for nothing. This simple constraint changes everything.
In the fiat system, the winners are often those best at avoiding “skin in the game” - those who can privatise gains and socialise losses. In Bitcoin, by contrast, everyone has skin in the game. To participate profitably, you must put in real work or real capital, and you bear the consequences of your choices. Miners invest electricity and hardware to secure the network, and they are rewarded only if they follow the protocol’s rules faithfully - a cheater finds only wasted energy. Node operators verify every transaction and enforce the network’s honesty, not out of charity, but because it protects the value of their own holdings. Investors who HODL Bitcoin do so knowing there is no central bank to bail out the price - if they overextend or panic-sell, only they suffer. Thus, Bitcoin aligns each participant’s self-interest with the health of the overall network. It makes theft (like inflation or fraud) extremely difficult and makes responsible behavior the rational choice. In short, it renders honesty profitable. As Robert Breedlove quipped, Bitcoin makes “time incorruptible” - it links money firmly to reality, ensuring that over the long run no one can steal the time and productivity of others by debasing the currency.
Under a Bitcoin standard, financial reality could no longer be pushed endlessly into the future. Politicians wouldn’t be able to spend money they don’t have or saddle unborn generations with hidden debts; if they wanted a new war or welfare program, they’d have to actually tax citizens for it - an ask most leaders dread. The Big Beautiful Bill’s trillions in new promises would be unthinkable without a fiat central bank enabling Congress to push costs onto the public later. Under a Bitcoin regime, such fiscal trickery simply wouldn’t be available - leaders would have to face voters with the true price tag up front, meaning boondoggles like that bill would likely never even be proposed. Businesses and banks, for their part, couldn’t rely on central-bank life support; they would have to behave prudently or perish. The chronic inflation that fiat systems impose - eroding your savings year after year - would be stopped in its tracks, because Bitcoin’s supply cannot be increased on a political whim. Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy, vividly described this difference: he likened Bitcoin to a steel-hulled freighter built to weather any storm, whereas fiat currency is like an inflatable raft and gold a rotting wooden ship in rough seas. The metaphor is striking: which vessel would you trust to carry your precious cargo (your wealth) across tumultuous decades? The raft may be convenient and the old wooden ship comforting in its familiarity, but only the solid steel freighter is truly seaworthy. Bitcoin’s design forces you to confront the elements of economic reality rather than hide from them.
Crucially, Bitcoin’s architecture enforces a long-term perspective. There is no deus ex machina to swoop in and rewrite the ledger if things go awry. You can’t inflate away your debts in Bitcoin; if you borrow and bet big, you alone face the consequences of a bad bet. You can’t perform the fiat magic of fractional-reserve banking (creating 10 IOUs for every dollar on hand) without the market quickly sniffing it out and penalising you, because Bitcoin’s transparency and fixed rules won’t let the illusion last. In a Bitcoin economy, you either save and invest prudently for the future or you’ll simply have no future - there is no other way. The system raises the cost of irresponsibility and lowers the cost of honesty. High time-preference behavior (living for today at tomorrow’s expense) becomes obviously self-destructive when your money doesn’t steadily lose value. Low time-preference behavior (delayed gratification, saving for later) once again makes sense, because the currency holds its value. In essence, Bitcoin reintroduces consequences into finance: it re-weds risk with reward, action with outcome. That may sound harsh to those accustomed to the cushioned world of fiat, but it is far more equitable than a system where the rules are constantly bent by those in power. In Bitcoin’s world, no one can change the rules on a whim - not presidents, not central bankers, not miners or developers - the consensus protocol binds them all. Everyone plays by the same rulebook, not because they’re saints, but because the network permits no cheating. It’s enforced by unyielding code and decentralised consensus. And paradoxically, that rigidity is what creates a fairer, stabler game for all. Unlike the current system - where insiders thrive by changing the rules to their advantage - Bitcoin’s unbreakable rules mean your only way to win is to play well.
The psychological shift this induces cannot be overstated. When you know bailouts are impossible, you tend to be more careful. When you know your money won’t decay in value, you are more willing to save and invest in the future. When you realize no authority can arbitrarily seize or freeze your wealth, you gain the confidence to plan for the long term. In short, Bitcoin aligns our incentives with reality. It forces us to face the truth of our choices, for good or ill. If fiat is an opiate that lets society live in denial, Bitcoin is a mirror that forces us to confront the facts. It’s not just a new form of money - it is a new form of global accountability.
Much ink has been spilled about Bitcoin’s technical breakthroughs - its fixed supply of 21 million coins, its decentralised network of nodes, its cryptographic security, its censorship resistance. These features are certainly important, but they are outcomes of something more fundamental. Bitcoin’s true genius lies in its incentive structure: the way it harmonises self-interest with the collective good. Every participant in the Bitcoin network, from miners to developers to savers, is economically motivated to make the network stronger and more secure. And they do this not out of altruism or blind faith, but in pursuit of their own selfish benefit. This is a radical and powerful departure from the legacy financial system, which relies on trust in authorities and is continually subverted by those seeking to game the system for private gain. Consider how corporate lobbyists routinely bend tax and regulatory policy to their advantage - Big Tech firms spent millions cozying up to politicians for the Big Beautiful Bill, and were poised to reap billions in special tax breaks as a result. That’s the legacy system in action: the few rigging the rules at the expense of the many. Bitcoin flips this script by aligning individual incentives with collective integrity.
To appreciate the brilliance of Bitcoin’s incentive alignment, consider the miners. In Bitcoin’s early days, miners were hobbyists running the software on home computers. Today, mining is a global industry involving billions of dollars of equipment and energy. Why do miners do it? For the reward: newly minted bitcoins and transaction fees. The software protocol dangles an economic carrot to anyone willing to contribute computing power to validate transactions and secure the ledger. But here’s the catch - the only way to earn that carrot is to play by the rules. If a miner tries to cheat (say, by falsifying a block), the network will reject it and that miner wastes their resources for nothing. Honest mining is profitable; dishonest mining is ruinous. Thus, greed is harnessed to produce integrity. Every miner’s pursuit of profit leads them to collectively maintain a truthful ledger that everyone can trust.
The same principle extends to Bitcoin’s users. As a holder of bitcoins, it’s in your direct interest that the network remains robust and trustworthy - it protects the value of your own wealth. So users are incentivised to run nodes, scrutinise the code, and even reject software changes that might compromise the system. Developers, too, gain reputation (and often payment) by improving the network’s security and usability, not by sneaking in backdoors - any such attempt would be caught by the vigilant global community, destroying the developer’s reputation and the value of their own coins. In short, Bitcoin aligns the incentives of all stakeholders in a way no monetary system has before. The result is a kind of antifragility - the network thrives under pressure. Attacks and challenges (whether technical, economic, or political) tend to make Bitcoin stronger in the long run: miners reinforce security in response to attacks, developers harden the code after bugs, and holders double down with conviction whenever skeptics howl. Unlike a fragile fiat system that must be propped up by ever more debt and ever more interventions, Bitcoin uses stress as fuel for growth. The only way to truly “win” with Bitcoin is to contribute to it - to mine honestly, to hold through volatility, to build useful services atop it. Any action that undermines the network tends to get swiftly punished by the market or by the protocol’s rules. This is incentive alignment at its finest: individual selfish actions inadvertently end up benefiting the whole.
Think of Bitcoin not just as digital gold or a payment network, but as a new organising principle for society. It replaces trust in elites with trust in open-source code and mathematics. It replaces centralized power structures with distributed competition and cooperation. It’s often said that “Bitcoin has no CEO” - no central authority who can decide to inflate the currency or confiscate your funds - and that is true. But that doesn’t mean Bitcoin is a free-for-all; rather, it operates by a stricter natural law of incentives. In a sense, it does have a ruler: reality itself. The laws of mathematics and economics are Bitcoin’s governing forces, and no decree or lobbyist can sway those. The system is designed so that honest behavior is the most rewarding path. As author Allen Farrington notes, if you only look at Bitcoin through a narrow lens - say, just as an investment or just as a technical innovation - you “miss the forest for the trees.” Bitcoin is all of those things, but also something bigger: a network that merges technology, economics, game theory, and human nature into a self-regulating whole. It turns the base metal of individual self-interest into the gold of collective benefit. This incentive alignment is Bitcoin’s defining innovation, more than any line of code or cryptographic trick. It’s what differentiates Bitcoin from every monetary experiment that came before. Under fiat systems, the winners are often those who excel at manipulation, exploitation, or skirting the rules (the ones with the best lobbyists or the most political pull). Under Bitcoin, the winners are those who build, contribute, and uphold the rules. It is a system wherein virtue (in the form of honest work and long-term thinking) isn’t just its own reward - it’s the only reward.
For a concrete example of incentive alignment at work, consider the realm of charity. Traditional philanthropy, for all its good intentions, has been plagued by the same misaligned incentives we discussed earlier. Nonprofits compete for donors with tear-jerking narratives and shiny promises, because donations depend more on marketing than on measurable impact. Donors, in turn, fixate on easily quantifiable metrics like the infamous “overhead ratio” (how much a charity spends on administration versus programs) rather than demanding evidence of real-world outcomes. And since most grants and donations come with the expectation that the money be spent within a year or two (to show activity), charities have little incentive to invest in long-term projects that might take years to bear fruit. The result is a kind of hamster wheel: nonprofits are always fundraising for the next year, always under pressure to show quick wins (however superficial), and rarely able to build something that lasts. Success in this distorted game means surviving and looking good, not necessarily solving problems. As a cynic might say, there’s more money in managing poverty than in ending it.
Now enter EverGive, a new philanthropic platform that applies Bitcoin’s principles and incentive logic to charity. EverGive turns the typical donation model on its head. Instead of asking “How can we spend this donation immediately on a short-term fix?”, EverGive asks “How can we make this donation and its impact last forever?” When you contribute through EverGive, your funds are not instantly disbursed in a flurry of feel-good spending. They are invested into a strategic reserve - held in Bitcoin - and only a portion of the growth may be paid out to the charity on an ongoing basis. In practical terms, your donation becomes more like an endowment. It’s not a one-time gift that briefly splashes and evaporates; it’s the seed of a forever-fund that will support the cause indefinitely. EverGive acquires and holds Bitcoin, even using it as collateral to borrow funds for charitable projects, thereby making every donation infinite in both time and value. If Bitcoin’s value appreciates over the years (as it historically has), the effective impact of your donation grows. Even if Bitcoin’s price is volatile, the key is that the principal capital is not consumed; it remains an asset generating aid year after year.
This model realigns the incentives of everyone involved. Donors can take satisfaction not just in a one-off act of giving, but in empowering a charity with a lasting financial engine. Charities, for their part, can shift their thinking from hand-to-mouth budgeting to true long-term planning. If a charity knows it has a growing Bitcoin reserve backing it, it can afford to invest in more ambitious solutions - the kind that might take time to develop but could create real, sustainable change. They are freed from the trap of having to “spend it all” each budget cycle just to justify next year’s ask. In fact, EverGive’s approach rewards efficiency and patience: the less frivolously a charity spends any payouts and the more impact they deliver per dollar, the more the remaining reserve can grow to support future efforts. It’s a virtuous cycle - something almost unheard of in traditional aid circles. And importantly, EverGive’s use of Bitcoin provides transparency and trust in a way fiat donations often lack. Every donation and payout can be tracked on the blockchain, reducing the opportunities for funds to be siphoned off or misreported. The fundamental incentive is to solve problems sustainably, because doing so increases the chances that the reserve will grow and continue to fund its mission. Compare this to the old model, where a charity that miraculously did solve the very problem it was founded to address might put itself out of business (and thus has a perverse incentive not to solve it completely). EverGive hints at how Bitcoin’s ethos can permeate even the nonprofit sector: by enforcing financial discipline and rewarding foresight, it channels human efforts toward real results rather than appearances. In short, it’s philanthropy done right - or at least, done better - by aligning everyone’s incentives with lasting impact instead of momentary optics.
Bitcoin doesn’t just promise to fix the money - it compels us to fix the incentive structures that underpin our economy and society. It addresses the root cause that broke so many things in the first place: the ability to offload consequences onto others. When currency is tied to reality and scarcity (instead of the whims of politics and central bankers), capital naturally flows to projects and people that create genuine value. Productivity and thrift are rewarded, while grift and recklessness are punished. This sounds obvious, even banal - shouldn’t it always be that way? - but recall how far we’ve strayed. In our current fiat paradigm, entire empires have been built on faking value (through money-printing, financial engineering, endless debt) and avoiding consequences (through bailouts, subsidies, and accounting trickery). Bitcoin threatens to topple those empires, not by force, but simply by offering an alternative system where such distortions are impossible. It is dangerous precisely because it demands responsibility. Those who have benefited from the old game - who profited from bailouts, inflation, or regulatory capture - instinctively see Bitcoin as a threat. And they’re right. Consider how the insiders who pushed through that Big Beautiful Bill full of tax giveaways know they could never operate so freely under a hard-money regime that demands transparency and accountability. Bitcoin is an existential challenge to any institution or individual that relies on being above the rules. It levels the playing field in a way we’ve not seen in modern history.
This transformation will not happen overnight, and it will not happen without resistance. There will be volatility - both in markets and in political reactions - as the world adjusts to a harder, fairer form of money. But the genie is out of the bottle. For the first time in living memory, we have a monetary system that runs on aligned incentives rather than enforced trust, on rules rather than rulers. Its growth thus far - from an experiment in cyberspace to a multi-trillion-dollar asset touching millions of lives - is a testament to the power of those incentives. People are opting in not because they are ideologues, but because it works. It allows the average person to save without their wealth being silently stolen by inflation. It allows entrepreneurs to plan in years and decades instead of quarters. It even allows communities in unstable countries to transact and save in a currency that their own governments cannot debase or manipulate.
If we want a society based on truth, we need a base layer incapable of lies. The true impact of Bitcoin’s incentive alignment may be least appreciated today, but it could prove to be its most revolutionary trait. By fixing the incentives, Bitcoin indirectly promises to fix much of what has gone wrong - not just in finance, but in governance, business, and culture. Sound money curbs the excesses of war and welfare by forcing us to bear costs upfront rather than hide them. Stable value storage rewards diligence and deters the instant gratification mindset. A transparent monetary network builds trust among strangers through code, reducing the need to trust corruptible intermediaries. None of these changes come easy, but all of them become possible when money is anchored in truth.
In the end, Bitcoin’s greatest gift is a refreshingly moral one: it gives us a world where actions have consequences again. Provocative as it may sound, Bitcoin matters not because it’s trendy, high-tech, or because number-go-up - but because it realigns our incentives. Bitcoin provides a firm foundation - a monetary bedrock as solid as mathematical law - and with it, the chance to realign our civilisation’s drift. Like gravity, Bitcoin doesn’t negotiate - it simply exists, silently pulling every dishonest system toward reckoning. If that idea spreads, it won’t just transform money - it will rewrite the rules of civilisation.
