If you work for your money but somebody else can just print it, you’re getting robbed. You don’t need an economics degree to feel this in your bones. You show up, do the work, collect your paycheck - and meanwhile someone with a printing press conjures more of the stuff out of thin air. Every dollar they print makes yours worth a little less.

Let’s call this person Mr. Money Printer. He has a nice setup. As long as he’s the only one with a printer, he can always cut in line ahead of you. Need a house? He prints and outbids you. Want to invest? He prints and gets there first. A new car? He’s printed the full sticker price and driven it off the lot before you even get a chance to talk to a salesperson. Your labor earns; his printer simply takes.

Your first instinct is obvious: get your own printer. But Mr. Money Printer thought of that already. He enjoys a privileged position precisely because he’s the only one printing, and he’ll spend whatever it takes to keep it that way. In the United States, for example, the Secret Service was founded in 1865 - before they ever guarded a president - for the sole purpose of making sure nobody else gets a printer. Counterfeiting is a federal crime because competing printers threaten the monopoly that makes the original printer valuable.

So you can’t print. What now?

Find Your Own Money

If Mr. Money Printer’s money is rigged, stop using it. Find something else to use as money - something he can’t print. What you’re looking for has two properties: it should be impossible (or at least very, very expensive) to create, and the only realistic way to get it should be to earn it from someone who already has it.

Ideally, you want a truly fixed supply. No new units, ever. Failing that, you want the supply to grow as slowly as possible - slowly enough that Mr. Money Printer’s advantage is negligible.

Humanity spent thousands of years on this problem, and the best answer it found was gold.

Gold: Pretty Good

You can technically create gold via nuclear transmutation. It costs orders of magnitude more than the gold is worth. So for practical purposes, the only “printer” for gold is mining, and mining is slow. Annual mine production adds roughly ~2% to the existing above-ground stock. The total supply doubles about every ~50 years. In monetary terms, gold’s stock-to-flow ratio is around 50 - meaning it would take 50 years of mining at current rates to match what already exists.

That’s pretty good. It means gold miners are, functionally, operating a very slow money printer. Slow enough that for most of human history, gold held value remarkably well across generations. If you want the full treatment of why gold emerged as the dominant money across civilizations, Saifedean Ammous’s The Bitcoin Standard does excellent work.

The Problem With Useful Money

Gold is useful. Electronics, aerospace, medical devices, AI chips - industry and technology consumed about 326 tonnes of gold in 2024. That’s a modest share of total gold demand, because gold is one of the rare cases where the monetary use still dominates the industrial use. The problem isn’t the size of gold’s industrial consumption today; the problem is the structural tension it creates.

Industries that use gold as a raw material have every incentive to make gold cheaper and more abundant. Better extraction techniques, more efficient recycling, new deposits - all of these are just good business for a chip fabricator or a jeweler. But for everyone holding gold as money, every incremental improvement in gold production is functionally identical to money printing. The interests are irreconcilable: people holding gold-as-money want maximum scarcity, and people using gold-as-input want minimum scarcity.

For gold, this tension is manageable because the “printing” has stayed both slow, and constant. The industrial tail doesn’t wag the monetary dog… But look at what happens when the balance tips the other way:

Silver: What Losing Looks Like

Silver was money for millennia. The word “dollar” descends from “thaler,” a silver coin. Major economies ran on silver standards. And then industry ate it alive.

In 2024, total silver demand reached 1.16 billion ounces against global mine production of just 819.7 million ounces. Demand exceeds what miners can pull out of the ground by over 40%. The market ran a structural deficit for the fourth consecutive year, burning through 148.9 million ounces of existing stock. The cumulative deficit from 2021-2024 totals 678 million ounces - equivalent to ten months of global mine production.

Industry didn’t just nibble at silver’s monetary function. It devoured it. Solar panels, electronics, electric vehicles - silver’s physical properties make it genuinely irreplaceable in applications that have nothing to do with money. No major economy uses silver as a monetary standard anymore. The utility won.

Copper: The Endgame

If silver is what losing looks like in progress, copper is what it looks like when it’s over. Copper was among humanity’s earliest monies - commodity currency in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago, cast into bronze coins across China and Rome. For centuries, copper coinage was the everyday money of ordinary people across empires.

The most spectacular failure was Sweden’s copper standard, which ran from 1624 to 1776. Sweden had Europe’s largest copper mines and not much silver, so they made copper their monetary standard. Since copper was far less valuable by weight than silver, high-denomination coins had to be enormous. The 10-daler piece weighed 44 pounds! Citizens needed sleds to go shopping. When global copper prices shifted, the coins’ monetary value kept collapsing to their commodity value. The government “printed” more. The central banker responsible was eventually beheaded for his trouble.

Today nobody even considers copper as money. It’s too easy to produce, too industrially consumed, too abundant. The endgame of utility winning is total demonetization.

These three metals form a gradient:

1. Copper: utility won completely, demonetized centuries ago.
2. Silver: utility winning right now, functionally demonetized within living memory.
3. Gold: utility nibbling at the edges, still mostly monetary but structurally vulnerable to the same force that killed the other two.

The only difference is timescale.

Real Estate: The Contemporary Version

You can watch this same dynamic play out right now, with something that was never intended to be money at all.

As printable monies lose purchasing power (on account of, you know, the money printing), people flee into scarce assets. Real estate is a favorite: “they’re not making any more land,” the reasoning goes. Scarcity? Check. Can’t be printed? Check. People are monetizing houses - buying them not to live in but to store value.

The result is that housing becomes unaffordable for people who need it as housing. This is what happens when you use a useful thing as money: you create a zero-sum fight between people who need it for its purpose and people who need it as a store of value. The act of monetizing something useful degrades the utility for everyone else.

The Ideal

So we arrive at an initially counterintuitive conclusion: the best money should be totally worthless… for everything except being money.

If your money has real-world utility - if it’s a good conductor, a pretty necklace, a place to sleep - then somebody, somewhere, has an economic incentive to figure out how to make more of it. They’re not trying to undermine your savings; they’re just trying to get their raw materials cheaper. But the effect on you is identical to money printing.

You want your money to have no industrial applications, no decorative appeal, no physical utility whatsoever. You want something that nobody would ever bother producing except to use as money.

The Paradox

This sounds impossible. Scarcity usually arises because something is useful:

1. Things are useful because they have properties people want.
2. People expend effort to acquire things with properties that people want.
3. The low-hanging fruit is acquired, and now it takes more effort to acquire more of the things.
4. Effort to acquire is what we call scarcity.

Useless things, almost by definition, tend to be abundant. Nobody corners the market on sand in a desert.

You need something that is scarce and useless, but scarcity without utility has precious little, if any, natural precedent. So you’re looking for something that shouldn’t exist.

Bitcoin

In 2009, something that shouldn’t exist was invented.

Bitcoin’s supply is fixed at 21 million. Not approximately fixed, not fixed-unless-we-find-a-new-deposit, not fixed-but-growing-at-2%-per-year. Fixed by protocol. The issuance schedule is enforced by mathematics, not geology or policy. No amount of investment in “Bitcoin mining” can increase the supply beyond what the protocol dictates - miners compete for a fixed reward that halves on a known schedule until it reaches zero.

And bitcoin is, by any traditional measure, completely useless. You can’t build circuits with it. You can’t wear it. You can’t live in it. There is no industrial demand for bitcoin, no sector of the economy trying to figure out how to produce it more cheaply as a manufacturing input. Nobody has a balance sheet with “bitcoin costs” as a line item they’re trying to drive down.

“You can’t do anything with it” is the feature. Every prior form of money has been locked in a structural conflict between its monetary users and its industrial users, and the industrial users have won every single time given enough time. Bitcoin has no industrial users. There is no conflict. There is nothing to win… so you don’t have to lose.