It happened: Bitcoin bested the nice, round number of $100,000. Of course, with continuous monetary expansion in the dollar, this was — sooner or later — the only logical outcome for any such unanchored fiat currency.

Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but the Bitcoin world feels remarkably calm even at six figures. There are no Max Keisers screaming “F*ck Elon” to ecstatic crowds, no degenerate gamblers buying bitcoin on 100x leverage with absurd government stimulus checks or loan shark money. 

It was a similar feeling earlier this year when bitcoin first breached its previous all-time high a few months after ETF approvals — and then again on election night, when the bitcoin price was the first to indicate Trump’s victory was incoming. 

Still, mostly crickets. Compared to 2021 and 2022, when Bitcoiners were all drunk in vertigo, confused at how fast this had all happened and awash in sh*tcoin scams and various Ponzi debacles (FTX, BlockFi, Three Arrows Capital), all is now pretty calm in this the West’s monetary frontier. Back then, those of us knee-deep in the Bitcoin space were ambushed by comments and messages from friends and family: “How does this work? Is this a bubble? Are you retired now?” Wen Lambo? 

This time around, bitcoin isn’t trading on low market liquidity and questionable financial engineering, but serious inflows from the ETFs, from savers wanting to escape the dollar-debt-real-estate trap, and from what seems to be several sovereign wealth funds steadily acquiring. 

Now it’s all “whatever, man; back to work.” Bitcoin’s purpose isn’t some quick financial return in an ordinary pump-and-dump scheme; it’s here to fix the broken monetary world. The number of companies building critical uses (insurance, hardware wallets and apps your grandma can use, fraud detection, home heating, election result verification) truly matches the aspirations of this revolutionary technology. 

Wrote AIER’s Pete Earle on December 5 when the bitcoin exchange rate against the dollar first surpassed 100,000: 

Its rise to $100,000 demonstrates how decentralized, permissionless innovation can challenge, improve upon, and surpass legacy systems — including those in the monetary realm.

Still, it feels remarkably quiet; everyone is just working away, one step at a time. 

We all did our homework by reading, learning, podcasting, publishing books and articles, and thinking about the nature of money in society. On our commutes, on our lunch breaks, before bed, at bathroom breaks, we contemplated the consequences of a fixed-supply money that couldn’t be messed with. We dragged our significant others to conferences — sometimes starkly empty bear market events — opting for Miami, Prague, Lugano, and Madeira instead of Yosemite, Cape Cod, London, or Marseille. 

We learned more about our dysfunctional political, economic, and monetary regimes. After a decade or more of insane and irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies, we saw our rulers go nuts during ‘rona, and the broken political system unabatingly displaying its flaws as if they were virtues. We saw them print, spend, inflate, censor, block payments, seize assets, and kick wrong-thinkers off platforms left and right. 

In that world, it’s just obvious and unavoidable that bitcoin (and its informational counterpart, Nostr) succeeds: Bitcoin, the apolitical money, was made for this. Nobody should be surprised that boatloads of people voted with their depreciating dollars — first at the bitcoin markets, and secondly on November 5. It’s clear that Americans want out. 

Bitcoin is a vote of no confidence in the fiscal and monetary mess our officials made for us. We want rules, not rulers. 

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If you overconsume media and read too many legacy headlines, until its recent price action bitcoin had been stone-cold dead. Boring. Irrelevant. A fancy scam, really, born out of a cheap money regime. In fact, it has died hundreds of times; those of us who have spent enough hours to truly investigate bitcoin have heard that talk so many times we’re sore from rolling our eyes. 

When bitcoin briefly hit higher highs in the spring, longstanding gold bug Peter Schiff called it the “ultimate bubble” and hurled “insane” at Michael Saylor for his billion-dollar-cost averaging. Most amusingly, bitcoin died in February at the hands of two ECB economists who declared it worthless and dangerous. Those same dudes were back in the fall, worrying about the “distributional consequences” for society if bitcoin keeps appreciating forever (what’s it gonna be?). Even the Financial Times’ Alphaville authors, no friends of bitcoin, ridiculed the hypocrisy on the pages of an institution — the ECB — that stands to lose the most in the event bitcoin succeeds: “obviously, nobody in the year of our Lord twenty twenty four really cares what the ECB says about Bitcoin.”

How bitcoin resurrects itself is less frequently covered. Like a cockroach — the epithet The Economist gave bitcoin in December last year — it comes back, over and over, each time stronger and better than before. With more users, more people capably wielding it and accepting it in trade, with more hash rate securing it, and more products integrating it. 

In 2024, it’s better embedded into the nation’s electrical infrastructure and its financial markets. It’s a money challenger routinely disparaged by establishment economists and instead embraced by outsiders and unconventional political figures like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei (and apparently even Vladimir Putin), in addition to the “plebs” and basket of deplorables that otherwise were likely to look into it.

Bitcoin’s ascent isn’t a mere profit-seeking triumph, but a reflection of people’s ability to discern truth among faulty economic conditions. Price matters, and honey badger should care. Its growth stands as a testament to the desire for decentralized, reliable, and inflation-resistant assets.

Whatever your opinion of bitcoin, whether you’ve ignored it or studied it closely, whether you think it’s unlicensed gambling, irrelevant noise, or the best thing for humanity — as the legacy monetary system gets observably worse, bitcoin gets comparatively better.

Bitcoin’s all-time high isn’t just a milestone for this novel currency; it signifies a broader shift in how individuals perceive and interact with money. The financial system and the monetary conditions we live under are in dire need of exit ramps, and the revolution is here for it.

Keep calm and keep building, my friends.