TheFiatMind

We speak about solutions all we want — sovereign money, Bitcoin — but the average person has no grounding in their own thinking. No awareness of how it’s been influenced, where the norms come from, what the basis of their paradigm actually is. Until they can conceive of the problem themselves, bringing Bitcoin into their mind is the cart before the horse.

Fiat money creates a fear mindset. The money is always devaluing. It creates a state where people act without consciousness — so jumbled they cannot pause, contemplate the structure of the destruction, and recognize that there is even a mindset about the money. There is only a sense, a feeling of unease. People look every which way to feel better, to find a quick solution — when what they need is not even that much time, just the effort to understand. The unease is already there. They look everywhere except at the system itself.

The frantic prevents the seeing.

And until you can see it — until you can name it — you cannot comprehend Bitcoin. Bitcoin runs on opposite assumptions. False assumptions baked into how you think about time, money, and what lasts — that’s where the disconnect comes in.

It is the individual’s responsibility to care for themselves and their mind. Nobody at the institutional level does it for you. These institutions exist to perpetuate their own existence. That is the end goal, however it comes out. Sometimes you squeeze some benefit from it. But most often you are irrelevant.

Once you can name it, you start seeing it everywhere. I see it in a building. I see it in my industry. I see it in the products. And I see it in the people who think they’ve already escaped.

The Building

There was a Johnny Carino’s on Military Drive, San Antonio. My wife and I loved eating there. Beautiful building — built in 2002. Operated about fourteen years. Not old. Not broken. Beautiful.

The parent company mismanaged the business into the ground. That killed the tenant — not the building. The building was fine.

Fired Up, Inc. — the parent company — didn’t fail because people stopped eating there. Guest counts actually went up their final year. They failed because cheap money after 2008 made aggressive borrowing look rational on paper. When the Texas oil bust hit in 2015 and new federal mandates landed at the same time, revenues dropped over twenty million dollars in one year. Twenty-three million owed against six million in assets. No real property to sell, nothing to refinance against. The fiat system handed them cheap rope, and they used it.

It sat empty about a year. Then they tore it down completely. Razed it. And Olive Garden built a brand new restaurant on the exact same lot.

Their excuse: they couldn’t fit their breadstick operation in the existing kitchen. They needed the footprint. And the building wasn’t energy efficient enough.

But here’s the thing. When I saw the new Olive Garden go up, it shocked me. Because the new building looks — okay. Maybe slightly more energy efficient on paper. But you never recoup the energy destroyed in that demolition. You’re tearing down a fifteen year old building to build a new one and calling it environmentally responsible. That math doesn’t work in the real world. It only works on a spreadsheet.

The accounting made destruction more profitable than preservation. New construction means new depreciation schedules. New writeoffs. The tax code rewards starting over and penalizes maintaining what already has value.

The building wasn’t the problem. The fiat system’s perverse incentives were the problem. Accounting gimmicks destroyed real value.

How often are you in a hurry to lend money to someone for three, four, five years and receive zero, two, or even three percent interest for that loan? Reality distortions. What’s your rate?

The Industry

On the used car side — the only way to get people into these vehicles is to finance them. You take a seven, eight, ten year old vehicle, and the vast majority of people don’t have the purchase price saved up. So they finance it. And all of the financing falls on a schedule that is incongruent with the longevity of the vehicle.

The vehicle depreciates much faster than people pay for it. I might fix a problem for three, four, five hundred dollars in-house. But when that customer goes out into the real world, they pay three times that amount. And they will not have the money to repair it.

I won’t finance longer than two or three years, trying to match the time period I believe the vehicle holds up with significantly little issues. Even then, it’s a probability game. You see vehicles with sixty, seventy, eighty thousand miles needing a transmission — fifteen years ago that was unheard of.

And the customers themselves are conditioned. They view financing as a partnership in which you should be making repairs and maintenance while it’s financed. I’m not in the warranty game. I sell you the vehicle, make sure it’s the best it can be, and disclose anything I know about it. But the asset belongs to the customer.

It’s a round robin of perverse incentives all coming together to continue TheFiatMind.

The Product

It goes back to a time when manufacturers built quality. And I speculate this is the reason Cash for Clunkers was even implemented — to remove quality vehicles from the road that could last two, three hundred, four hundred thousand miles and replace them with new vehicles that would only last half or even a quarter of that time. And the new repairs tie into software that locks you into going to the dealer or somebody that can afford a ten to twenty thousand dollar a year subscription.

Manufacturers cannibalized their own market. If they make a vehicle that’s too good, people understand — buy quality, buy it once. So they took a switch. Quality vehicles were everywhere. People didn’t need new vehicles. Why would a manufacturer want a vehicle to last seven or eight years? By the time reliability ratings come out on a new model, it doesn’t matter — they’ve already sold the next vehicle to the next customer. The third owner? Definitely not their concern. If somebody buys used, at least they can tie them into the service side at their dealership through software locks.

How many manufacturers are there? Not that many. It’s a cartel. But who writes the legislation? Who lobbies for the regulations? Lobbyists write the regulations for our industry on behalf of the large manufacturers. It’s a circular game again. CAFE standards, emissions regs, software IP protections — written by the people who benefit from disposability. The regulations ensure that durability becomes economically impossible for the independent operator or the consumer who wants to repair.

It’s not a bug. It’s baked in.

The Maximalist Paradox

Bitcoin may have opened your eyes to everything I’ve described above — the buildings torn down for spreadsheet logic, the vehicles designed to fail, the products engineered for disposal. Or perhaps seeing those things first is what opened your mind to the idea of Bitcoin. Either way, there’s a difference between being exposed to the truth and letting it actually change the operating system you think with.

The Bitcoin maximalist understands Bitcoin. Some can even tell you every technical detail about the protocol. But understanding the protocol is not the same as running the installation.

TheFiatMind is not just a condition of the uninitiated. It runs antivirus. And that antivirus keeps recommending you purge the update.

We’re conditioned to believe the shift happens to everyone — buy the asset, update complete. But the update only runs on the individual’s system. And only if they choose to install it. The purchase is the download. The installation must be intentional — another step. And even then, the antivirus software running in your mind fights the update. Most people don’t even know it’s running.

Look at the maximalist who rails against altcoins, shitcoins, even Bitcoin Treasury Companies — whiners, worried about other people’s new installations — wasted energy still operating within fiat logic. Still frantic. Still in scarcity mindset. They’ve swapped the object of their fear but they’re still running inside the cage. The money changed but the mind didn’t.

The exit isn’t winning the argument. It’s naming the condition and stepping outside the frequency. Are you still fighting? Are you still giving energy to things outside your circle of control that do nothing but take from you and give you nothing in return?

Deep philosophical discussions, deep technical arguments, deep conversations about economic and financial transitions, political structures — all of it can meld into binary. False dichotomies. Inhibiting the mind from its own free life.