What a decade of debasement looks like

I do not start with a price.

A candle is a record of who was impatient. The thing I want to see is slower: how a treasury funds itself, what the real rate is after inflation, and whether the stock of sovereign debt can be rolled without the currency giving way. Bitcoin sits in that picture as a fixed-supply claim. It is not a personality, and it is not a trade I am calling.

Debasement is the quiet tax. When the unit of account is expanded to carry a growing stock of promises, purchasing power is the residual. You can watch it in the price level, in asset prices that capitalize the extra money, and in the interest bill a government pays to keep the stock afloat. Liquidity decides the path. Rates decide the cost of waiting. None of those are a slogan. They are a mechanism, and an issue from this desk will show the mechanism before it offers a conclusion.

A real issue will carry a chart, and the chart will name its source underneath: a treasury series, a central-bank balance sheet, a published inflation print. This sample does not invent a figure to look rigorous. If I do not have the source in front of me, the number does not go on the page.

The risks are part of the reading, not a footer I hope you skip. A fixed supply does not mean a stable price. Liquidity in Bitcoin can vanish. Custody can fail. Policy can change the pipes around the asset without touching the protocol. A decade is long enough for several of those to happen, and for the thesis to be early in a way that feels, for years, like being wrong.

I am not asking you to do anything with that. Long time preference is a way of looking, not an order. If you want the newsletter when the issues are real, the list is on the front page.