December 9, 2025
Over the last decade I helped raise more than $100 million dollars for charities. Hundreds of causes. Hundreds of campaigns. Emergency appeals, medical interventions, orphan support, disaster relief, education, poverty alleviation. I saw the best of human generosity. I saw people give from their hearts with sincerity and sacrifice. And yet, at the end of all of it, instead of feeling prideful, I felt something I did not expect to feel.
Despair.
Not because the causes were not worthy. They were. Not because the donors lacked heart. They did not. But because the impact, relative to the scale of the suffering we were trying to address, felt painfully ineffective. I was spread too thin. Every year we pushed the same boulder up the same hill, and every year the hill grew steeper. The fundraising totals were rising, but the world was not getting better in any fundamental way. At some point, I stepped back. I stopped the frantic pace, the endless campaigns, the operational swirl. I asked myself a difficult question:
If I had to dedicate the rest of my life and all my resources to solving the one most existential problem for humanity, what would it be?
I expected that question to lead me to a familiar destination. Poverty. Education. Healthcare. Climate. Refugees. The usual catalogue of human suffering. Instead, the path led somewhere far deeper and far more uncomfortable.
I realised that almost every cause I had worked on was treating symptoms of a much larger disease. And if we did not address that disease directly, no amount of fundraising, no number of campaigns, no scale of generosity would ever solve the underlying problem. We would remain trapped in a system that converts human compassion into temporary relief but never into structural progress.
So I retreated even further. I tried to search for the root cause. The single failure point that sits beneath so many of the crises we see today. And the answer came from a place I did not expect. The true issue was not any individual social problem. It was the separation of money and morality. The rupture between finance and ethics. The quiet belief that money is a neutral tool with no moral architecture, no ethical responsibility and no spiritual weight. Once I saw that, I could not unsee it.
Every crisis I examined traced back to that same source. Inequality. Inflation. Corruption. Short-termism. Broken trust. Institutional decay. Asset bubbles. The erosion of savings. The weakening of families. The disempowerment of the poor. They all pointed toward the same underlying reality: we have built an economic world on top of a monetary foundation that is structurally dishonest and morally empty. Money is the bloodstream of society - we have poisoned the blood, and then we wonder why the organs are failing.
What follows is not an academic exercise. It is a justification for a life’s work. A roadmap for why I chose this path. I did not arrive at it through ideology, but through my own experience in the field, through years of confronting the limits of charity. Below I share with you the intellectual backbone for the decision I made: to spend the rest of my life working on the problem beneath all other problems; to restore morality to money. To repair the foundation so that every structure built upon it can finally stand.
This is an invitation for others to consider that the crisis of our age is not the absence of generosity or compassion from good people, but the absence of moral architecture in the very system through which we exchange value. And this is where the conversation must begin. Because long before spreadsheets, markets or economic theories, humanity relied on an older technology to regulate society - morality. And no one articulated that better than Adam Smith.
Contrary to popular belief, Adam Smith was not trained as an economist. He didn’t even consider himself one. He was a moral philosopher - someone who studied human behavior, empathy, sympathy and the psychology behind why we treat each other fairly… or don’t. Long before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments; a dense philosophical book about human morality. And if you read that book - really read it - you understand immediately that Smith believed societies only work when people behave with some sense of decency and mutual responsibility. He didn’t believe greed drives the world. He believed morality does.
Our civilisation behaves as if its problems are new. We imagine that the instability of our currencies, the fragility of our markets and the unease beneath our prosperity belong uniquely to the modern world. Seven hundred years prior to Smith lived another sage, a medieval one named Abu Hamid al-Ghazali - virtually unheard of in modern finance circles. He sounded warnings 900 years ago that eerily foreshadow today’s crises. Al-Ghazali, a renowned 11th-century Persian philosopher and theologian, believed money has a moral core. He warned that when wealth races ahead of wisdom, and when money is severed from morality, societies begin to rot from within. His insights, nearly a millennium old, felt to me like an uncannily accurate diagnosis of the societies I was trying to fix, characterised by financial upheaval and eroding trust.
To understand the urgency of Al-Ghazali’s message, consider the world he lived in. Around the year 1100, his civilisation - stretching from Al-Andalus in Spain to Persia - was economically and culturally dominant, brimming with prosperous cities like Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. Trade routes spanning continents carried silk, spices, and silver through these cosmopolitan hubs. In contrast, much of Europe was impoverished and fragmented, still clawing its way out of the early Middle Ages. Indeed, from the 8th to 11th centuries the Arab world exerted “undisputed economic supremacy” over the world. Baghdad at its peak was the globe’s largest city and a center of commerce and learning. In this dynamic and unequal world, Al-Ghazali emerged as a rare voice questioning the ethics of this new wealth. Part jurist, part philosopher, and part theologian, he had the intellectual breadth to debate theology in the morning and the monetary system in the afternoon. And he had the courage to ask a question that rulers and merchants alike preferred to ignore:
What happens when a civilisation gets rich faster than it gets wise?
Al-Ghazali’s starting point was a concept striking in its simplicity: money is a tool, not the purpose of life. In his view, money should function as a mirror - reflecting the value of goods and services - rather than a golden idol worshipped for its own sake. He argued that gold and silver have no intrinsic worth; they are “useless by themselves; they are just like stones”, created only to circulate as a medium of exchange. In other words, a pile of coins is valuable only for what it empowers people to do - to trade, build, and cooperate. This idea might sound familiar to modern economists (who often insist money is just a unit of exchange), but Al-Ghazali articulated it in the 11th century, when many in Europe still thought of wealth mainly as land and loot.
From this foundation, he drew a sharp moral conclusion: hoarded money is dead money. Wealth locked away in chests or buried in the ground isn’t just idle - it’s harmful. Al-Ghazali likened a hoarder to a person who imprisons a wise ruler, depriving society of that ruler’s benevolence . Money sitting stagnant contributes nothing to the community; it neither feeds the hungry nor funds any productive enterprise. In modern terms, he believed that when wealth fails to circulate, it’s like cutting off the blood flow of an economy. The result is artificial scarcity - not because resources don’t exist, but because they’re not being used. Prices skew upward, markets seize up, and people suffer, all because some choose to freeze wealth instead of sharing it. In Al-Ghazali’s vivid metaphor, hoarding money was an act of tyranny against society, akin to locking away a public servant who is needed by all .
Yet Al-Ghazali’s critique went deeper than castigating greedy individuals. He saw systemic danger. When the wealthy few sequester money, they create a ripple effect of dysfunction: goods don’t find buyers, laborers lose jobs, families go unsupported. The economy may appear healthy on the surface in terms of riches accumulated, but beneath, the connective tissue of trust and exchange is decaying.
His writings implied a message I was hearing in modern debates about inequality: extreme concentration of wealth is unfair and it actively undermines the whole society. A millennium before today’s economists, Al-Ghazali intuitively understood the concept of economic circulation and the peril of what we’d now call inequality-induced stagnation.
Another of Al-Ghazali’s major warnings concerned how money is earned. He distinguished sharply between profit earned through contribution and profit gained through exploitation. He was not anti-trade or enterprise, but found it laudable - as long as they were honest. However, he had scathing words for merchants who manipulated markets, deceived customers, or profited from crisis and fear. He condemned those who would create artificial shortages or panic to drive up prices. In his eyes, speculative or dishonest gains were a form of moral corruption. “Whoever profits from the suffering of others,” he wrote, “profits from corruption.” Such behaviour, he believed, is not clever business acumen; it’s a cancer that eventually kills the very market that enables it.
This emphasis on honesty and transparency in trade was a practical insight. Markets function only when trust exists. If buyers and sellers cannot trust the value of goods, the fairness of prices, or the truth of what they’re told, commerce breaks down. Al-Ghazali knew this deep in his bones. In modern terminology, Al-Ghazali was alert to issues we now call information asymmetry and moral hazard - without using those terms. He understood that when cheating becomes common, people withdraw from the marketplace out of fear. In one of the earliest recognitions of moral contagion, he observed that corruption spreads: if rulers cheat the people, merchants feel entitled to cheat customers, and citizens are more likely to cheat each other. Before long, the entire economic order is poisoned by distrust.
We can see this clearly in how he viewed speculation. Buying goods to trade them fairly was fine, but making money off mere price swings - especially by causing those swings - was abhorrent to Al-Ghazali. Such profit was “money dealing in money,” wealth divorced from any real contribution or creation of value. He would have looked at the 2008 mortgage-securities debacle or the flash crashes of modern stock markets and seen the same pathology he warned of: people gambling on financial abstractions, oblivious to the real-world wreckage they leave behind. In his framework, those who got rich by financial trickery were immoral and undermined the foundations of prosperity. Once trust collapses, the economy collapses behind it, because trust is the invisible currency that underpins all the rest.
Perhaps Al-Ghazali’s most prescient warnings concerned the integrity of money itself. In his time, rulers often debased coinage - mixing precious gold and silver with cheaper metals, or shaving the edges off coins - to quietly tax the populace and stretch their budgets. Al-Ghazali unequivocally condemned this. To him, debasing a currency was nothing short of theft. He wrote that “it is great injustice to place counterfeited money in circulation. All those who have to accept such money in transactions are harmed”. Pushing bad money into the market was worse than common stealing, because a theft is a single act, whereas corrupt money continually harms every person who touches it. In fact, Al-Ghazali declared that “the circulation of one bad dirham is worse than stealing a thousand”. A thief takes once and the sin is done, but a debased coin multiplies injustice with each new transaction.
He was not alone among medieval thinkers in decrying coinage fraud, but Al-Ghazali’s reasoning stood out. He argued that sound money is the bedrock of a just economy: when the ruler or the mint cheats on the currency, trust in the market’s fairness evaporates. People who receive diluted coins have effectively been robbed of purchasing power. The poor suffer most, as they lack means to hedge against bad money. And once people suspect their money is a lie, they will simply abandon it. Al-Ghazali predicted that if a currency is debased too far, people will start doing business in more reliable foreign coins rather than the local sham - a scenario that has played out repeatedly in history, from Weimar Germany to Zimbabwe. When Zimbabwe’s dollar disintegrated from hyperinflation in 2008, the government had to abandon it entirely in 2009 after years of inflation had destroyed trust in the local unit. Citizens switched to U.S. dollars and other currencies, exactly as Al-Ghazali would have foreseen. Money, after all, is ultimately a belief system - it works only as long as people believe in its stability and honesty. Once that faith is shattered, the monetary system comes unhinged.
To Al-Ghazali, the lesson was simple: a society can survive poverty, but it cannot survive corruption. An economy rarely collapses because it runs out of resources or money - it collapses because it runs out of trust first. No stockpile of gold can save a nation if every measure of value becomes suspect. In modern times we’ve seen the same truth: Weimar Germany in 1923 had plenty of industrial capacity, but the Reichsmark became worthless paper. Venezuela in recent years sits on some of the world’s largest oil reserves, yet its currency lost meaning amid hyperinflation. In each case, the moral failure of dishonest money paved the way for disaster. Al-Ghazali’s words ring true: debasing money “spreads poison” through the market . What looks like a technical tweak to the currency is, in moral reality, a betrayal of the public. And once monetary rot sets in at the top, it seeps down to every level of society.
It is striking - and sobering - how little human economic behavior has changed since Al-Ghazali’s time. We live in a hyper-modern, high-speed, algorithm-driven financial system; yet the same age-old vices and dynamics are on full display. Consider wealth hoarding and inequality. Today, global wealth inequality has soared to levels reminiscent of the 1920s Gilded Age - the concentration of income at the top “has risen to levels last seen nearly a century ago, during the ‘Roaring Twenties’”. A handful of billionaires control fortunes so vast it would make medieval sultans blush. Trillions of dollars sit in offshore accounts and tax shelters, effectively removed from productive use. It’s exactly what Al-Ghazali cautioned against: capital sitting idle, serving mainly as a status symbol. Meanwhile, average workers today see stagnating wages and communities feel the pinch of underinvestment. In many Western countries, young people openly doubt they will ever afford a home of their own, as asset prices soar far out of reach. Housing markets have become speculative bubbles, and the number of first-time homebuyers has plummeted to record lows - almost half the historical norm in the U.S.. The result is disillusionment: an entire generation feels shut out, their prospects “an unrealized dream for the foreseeable future”. Al-Ghazali would recognize this societal brittleness: it’s what happens when money pools in the hands of a few and fails to circulate for the benefit of all.
Now consider speculation and dishonest dealing, modern style. Our financial markets - for all their sophistication - often resemble casinos detached from real economic value. In 2008, complex financial bets (mortgage derivatives and credit swaps) enriched a few bankers and investors, but when the bubble burst it was society at large that paid the price. The global financial crisis wiped out some $19.2 trillion in U.S. household wealth and cost millions of jobs, sparking the worst recession in generations. Trust in banks and financial elites collapsed. By one account, at least 10 million Americans lost their homes, a quarter of American families lost the majority of their net worth, and 30 million people worldwide lost their jobs in the aftermath. Public confidence in the fairness of the system has never fully recovered. Surveys and studies over the last decade show a continued erosion of trust in banking and government financial authorities. This disillusionment has fed a wave of populism and anger across democracies. As Al-Ghazali would say, once people come to believe the economic game is rigged - that money has become a tool of tyranny rather than a servant of justice - the social fabric begins to fray, much as we are seeing today.
Even the realm of currency manipulation has a modern parallel in our fiat money system. While central banks don’t literally shave coins anymore, they do something Al-Ghazali would view with equal skepticism: they deliberately erode the currency’s value through inflation. Most major central banks today openly target a steady rate of about 2% inflation per year. They argue this modest loss of purchasing power is necessary for economic stability. But from Al-Ghazali’s ethical vantage, this policy looks uncomfortably like a slow-motion debasement. A 2% inflation target means that over the span of a generation, more than half the value of a currency is quietly siphoned away. The USD has lost over 95% of its value since its inception. Savers are punished as their stored wealth loses real worth bit by bit. The poorest, who can least protect themselves, feel the cost of living pain always just ahead of their paycheck. One might call it a “hidden tax,” but Al-Ghazali would likely call it what it is: a sanctioned form of theft from the public, a crime against humanity. And indeed, when taken to excess, the results mirror those of medieval coin debasement. In countries like Zimbabwe or Venezuela, rampant money-printing led to inflation so extreme that the currencies effectively died and trust was obliterated. Even in milder cases, like the steady 2–3% inflation in much of the world, the moral hazard is real: it tempts governments to live beyond their means, piles up public and private debt, and incentivises everyone to prioritise short-term spending over long-term saving.
In short, our world today looks hauntingly like the one Al-Ghazali warned about. We have soaring inequality (hoarding by another name), frenzied speculation and recurring bubbles (dishonest profit-seeking), and official policies that nibble away at the value of money (a genteel form of debasement). The consequences are all around us: asset bubbles inflate while ordinary salaries stagnate, inflation quietly gnaws at savings, young families struggle to get by despite material abundance in society, and public trust in institutions sinks to new lows. It’s as if Al-Ghazali’s legacy is whispering in our ear: “Where justice is lost, prosperity cannot remain.” In other words, economies don’t fall on their balance sheets - they fall on their morals. When money’s soul is lost, the collapse is only a matter of time.
Having learnt this, I decided that if the diagnosis is a deep moral failure at the heart of money, then any real cure must address money’s ethical dimension, not just its technical details. This understanding has given rise to a powerful slogan among some monetary reformists today: “Fix the money, fix the world.” The idea is that by restoring integrity to our monetary system, we create the conditions for broader social repair. Sound money - meaning a currency that is honest, stable, and resistant to manipulation - is not merely an economic ideal but a moral one. When money holds its value and cannot be tampered with at a ruler’s or central bank’s whim, it restores society’s trust, forces them to live honestly within their means and rewards long-term thinking. In a sound-money regime, there is little incentive for governments to run up obscene debts or for speculators to chase quick gains by inflating asset bubbles, because money can’t be magicked out of thin air or quietly degraded in value. Money that restores morality, trust and that tells the truth incentivises productive, truthful behavior.
Contrast this with a corrupted monetary regime. When the currency can be diluted at will - via printing presses or quantitative easing - it subtly encourages collective irresponsibility. Why save diligently when your savings earn near-zero interest and inflation eats them away? Why should politicians make hard budget choices when they can borrow and print their way out of trouble? Easy money policies can lull everyone into a false sense that resources are infinite and trade-offs aren’t necessary. Al-Ghazali observed how a dishonest currency erodes discipline and virtue: it “punishes the poor” and rewards those who know how to play the system. In our time, we see how cheap credit and periodic bailouts have fostered a culture where risks are taken recklessly (with the public often left holding the bag), and where “too big to fail” institutions expect rescue no matter what they do. The end result is a fragile system, propped up by ever-expanding money supply, and a public that grows cynical that the whole game is stacked in favor of the powerful. It’s precisely the scenario Al-Ghazali would predict: warp the money, warp the incentives - and watch society slide toward dysfunction.
Restoring sound money, then, is about restoring truth and trust in economic life. It means creating a monetary order where money is a reliable measure of value rather than a constantly moving target. Historically, the gold standard was one attempt at this - tying currency to a metal supply to prevent unlimited issuance. But gold had its drawbacks (inflexibility, susceptibility to government confiscation or debasement through coin clipping). In the 21st century, an intriguing new candidate for sound money has emerged: Bitcoin.
To me, Bitcoin represents a return to the principles of sound moral money in digital form. It is often described as “digital gold,” but in some ways it goes even further than gold in embodying Al-Ghazali’s ideals of a moral economy. Bitcoin has a fixed supply, hard-capped at 21 million coins, governed by algorithm rather than any human authority. This programmed scarcity means Bitcoin cannot be debased - no politician or central banker can print more of it for expediency. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, making it the only asset in the world with a fixed terminal supply. This fixed supply cap gives societies trust and confidence the value of the underlying asset will not be diluted by an increase in supply.” In Bitcoin’s realm, two plus two will always equal four; you cannot secretly shave the coin or mix in tin and copper. The rules of its monetary supply are transparent and unalterable. This kind of predictability and integrity is precisely what Al-Ghazali insisted money should have - a trustworthy foundation that everyone can rely on to be fair, unchanging and honest.
Moreover, Bitcoin operates on a decentralised ledger (blockchain) that is fully transparent. Every transaction is verifiable by anyone with an internet connection. This tackles another moral weakness of our current system: the opacity that enables corruption. In the conventional financial world, much happens in shadowy corners - off-balance-sheet liabilities, hidden bailouts, complex derivatives no one understands until they implode. Bitcoin, by contrast, is an open book. While users remain pseudonymous, the flow of funds is visible and auditable in real time. This means no single institution can easily cook the books or hide a trillion dollars in new money; if someone tried, the network participants would reject the invalid transactions. Al-Ghazali’s ideal was that money be a trusted medium that facilitates honest trade. A system like Bitcoin, immune to debasement and rooted in transparency, aligns with that ideal. It removes the temptation for authorities to exploit the currency, and it removes the fear among citizens that their hard-earned savings will be furtively stolen by inflation or policy sleight-of-hand. In short, it reintroduces truthfulness and fairness to the monetary foundation. Bitcoin alone is not a panacea, of course. It is a tool - a very powerful one - but what matters is how we use it.
Al-Ghazali taught that money, at its heart, is a social contract - a bond of trust - and that when this bond is abused, societies unravel. Money encodes the values of a civilisation. If their money is extractive, elitist and dishonest, you will find these traits prominent in their societies. If their money is honest, fair and moral, equally, you will find these traits permeate through society. Looking around today, from debt-laden governments to disenfranchised youth to polarised politics, it’s hard to deny that our money is a reflection of a morally bankrupt money system. The lesson of Al-Ghazali’s life and our own times is that we cannot compartmentalise economics and ethics. When we divorce money from morality, treating finance as a value-neutral game, we sow the seeds of our own decline. Conversely, if we reaffirm that money has an ethical life - that concepts like honesty, justice, and responsibility do apply to currency and commerce - we open the door to genuine reform.
Al-Ghazali’s legacy poses an uncomfortable question across the centuries for all societies to reckon with:
“Has your money been a servant of justice or a tool of tyranny?”
He challenged me to reflect on whether our wealth - as individuals, institutions, and nations - is being used to build or to destroy. The encouraging news is that solutions are within reach. Technologies like Bitcoin are enabling us to hard-code honesty and fairness back into the financial system. They are trying to fix the money so we have a chance to fix the world. Adopting sound money alone won’t instantly create a utopia; human greed and fear will always be factors. But it will remove a foundational and monumental source of distortion and deceit that plagues our current life. It will force us to confront economic reality as it is, rather than as we wish it to be under an endless flow of cheap credit. And in doing so, it can revive the “vital connective tissue” of trust that no society can survive without.
In making my decision on where to devote my life’s work, Al-Ghazali’s warnings resonated deeply with me louder than ever: money must have a soul - a moral backbone - or else it becomes a nation’s undoing. We have ignored his wisdom for too long. It’s time now to listen, and to act. By insisting on integrity in our currency and accountability in our finances, we honor a timeless principle and take a concrete step toward a more just and stable world.
What finally crystallised this for me was understanding the concept that modern economists and monetary reformists like Saifedean Ammous have popularised as ‘time preference’. Time preference is simply how much you discount the future relative to the present. A high time preference society grabs now and worries later. A low time preference society sacrifices now to build for later. Ammous argues that our monetary system is not a reflection of our time preference, but in fact manufactures it.
Fiat money institutionalises high time preference behaviour, and high time preference is the beginning of the end for a functional and moral society. Fiat encodes impatience into every transaction. By design, new money always enters the economy through those closest to the monetary spigot: governments, large banks, big asset owners, the already powerful. They get to spend it before prices adjust. By the time it reaches workers and savers, the new money has already bid up the price of housing, education and assets. Economists call this the Cantillon effect. Morally, it is nothing more than a slow, deathly transfer of real resources from the periphery to the centre, from the poor to the rich, from the productive to the politically connected.
Once you see this, you understand that fiat money is not neutral infrastructure. It is a hierarchy. It is an immoral pyramid encoded in code and law. At the same time, the inflationary state grows fat on its own monetary privilege. When a government can fund itself through debt and debasement rather than honest taxation, it will always be tempted to grow beyond what its citizens would willingly pay for. Programmes and promises multiply. Responsibility diffuses. Families and communities are slowly crowded out by distant bureaucracies. Charity becomes a line item in a budget rather than a virtue in a heart. The very moral fabric that once held people together is replaced by an impersonal apparatus financed by claims on unborn taxpayers and monetised by the central bank.
Seen through this lens, it is no surprise that our culture feels impatient, indebted and brittle. We have built a society around a form of money that trains us to live as if tomorrow will always bail out today. We bailed out the banks because they were too big to fail. But now that governments are failing, we are doomed, because they are ‘too big to save’.
We are shocked by rising anxiety, loneliness and despair, but much of it Ammous aruges is the psychological imprint of a high time preference monetary order. When money is engineered to die, it is very hard for society to plan as if their future matters. Sound money does the opposite. In a sound money system, where the supply of money cannot be expanded at will, no one has a shortcut. To get richer you must serve others, not front run the printing press. Saving becomes rational because what you save today is unlikely to be devalued tomorrow. Investment becomes disciplined because interest rates emerge from genuine time preferences of savers. Families and communities regain agency, centrality and importance in society because they are once again the primary vehicles for long term security, rather than the balance sheet of an inflationary state.
The argument eventually became disarmingly simple to me - I grew up thinking money was no more than a technical instrument: I am now convinced it is more than that - it is a vital moral foundation. It is a behavioural script. A civilisational agreement. A belief system. A quiet teacher that shapes how we treat one another long before any law, religion or government attempts to do the same. When the script is corrupted, the behaviour follows. When the institution loses integrity, society forgets what integrity looks like.
After raising more than $100 million for causes that deserved every ounce of human compassion, I now choose to devote my life not to any one of those causes, but to the architecture beneath them all. Because I came to see what Al-Ghazali saw a thousand years ago, what Adam Smith insisted upon centuries later, and what Ammous maintains today: money carries moral weight. Money trains a society in either virtue or vice. It cannot be neutral. It cannot be empty. It cannot be dishonest without making us dishonest.
A civilisation’s moral character is downstream of the character of its money. It represents its bloodstream. The bloodstream does not merely transport nutrients. It carries instructions. Similarly, money carries instructions to society on how to behave.
Al-Ghazali warned that when money loses its moral core, societies rot from within because people internalise the logic of a corrupted system. Smith understood that markets function only when our exchanges are framed by conscience. Both recognised that regardless of what societies print in law, the ethics of a society are encoded in its money. If money teaches us to cheat, then we should not be surprised when corruption becomes normal, trust becomes fragile, and cynicism becomes rational. People are merely acting out the incentives they have been given to survive.
Fixing the money is not about purchasing power - it is about moral power. It is about creating a system in which the pursuit of economic value reinforces, rather than erodes, human virtue. A system where the incentives themselves point toward responsibility, transparency and fairness. A system where the rules do not incentivise every participant to “do what you can get away with,” but instead: “do what you can stand behind.”
That is why sound money matters. Not because of its ‘number-go-up’ technology, but because it makes the society around you morally resilient, stable and sustainable. It aligns human behaviour with moral truth. It rewards patience, contribution, craftsmanship and service. It starves parasitism, manipulation and deceit. It rebuilds the invisible scaffolding of trust upon which every civilisation depends.
I call upon myself and the reader to restore money’s morality. You do this when you examine the money you use. Examine the incentives it creates. Examine the kind of person it quietly asks you to become. And then ask whether a society built on top of that script can ever truly flourish. If you come to the same conclusion as me, find a way to leverage your resources, your friends and family to pull society back to a moral standard.
If we want a world where freedoms matter, where institutions stand on something solid, where human dignity is not subtly undermined by the very system meant to support it, then we must begin where all moral architecture begins: with the foundation.
That is why the debate about Bitcoin for me is not really a debate about a new asset class. It is a lot more personal than that - the stakes are too high. It is a debate about what kind of human being our money is training us to be. Bitcoin is woefully misunderstood as a new investment asset. It is better understood as a new moral foundation.
I have chosen to spend the rest of my life on this single problem. I am convinced it is the quietest, most misunderstood but most dangerous existential risk we face as humanity. If money is the daily teacher of our habits, our priorities and our sense of duty to one another, then repairing the morality of money is not an economic preference. It is the defining cultural and ethical task of our civilisation.
