🚰 Fiat Needs Filtering

FIRE BTC #37 - How bitcoin purifies our money

I just got back from a 3+ week trip to Italy. Pasta, pizza, Barolo, ancient city streets, and an incredible beach in Sardinia. We wrapped up with a few days in Rome before flying home.

While we were there, a heatwave overtook the city. It was HOT. Like, 100-degrees-in-the-shade hot.

The remnants of the Roman Empire are awe-inspiring. We explored the Colosseum, wandered the Roman Forum, stood in the shadow of the Pantheon, and visited the Vatican…all while sweating our collective asses off.

The key was to walk in the shade, take frequent breaks, and of course, stay hydrated.

If you’ve been to Europe, you know the drinking water situation is different than in the U.S. In most restaurants, you order and pay separately for water. “One still and one sparkling, per favore!”

But Rome also has public fountains and spouts with clean, drinkable water — crucial on days like those. At the Spanish Steps, there’s often a line of people filling their bottles from the decorative fountain in the center of the piazza.

It all got me thinking about water purification…and what a massive unlock clean drinking water was for civilization.

Imagine trying to build a thriving society when every sip of water could bring disease or death. For most of human history, that was reality. Contaminated water ended lives early, spread sickness, and held societies back.

Until humans figured out how to clean it.

Today, we face a similar problem with money. We're trying to build a thriving global economy on top of a contaminated foundation — one riddled with inflation, counterparty risk, and political manipulation. Dirty money, like dirty water, quietly poisons the system from within.

This week, we're exploring how bitcoin is to money what water purification was to civilization: a way to eliminate hidden pathogens, protect people from economic disease, and unlock extraordinary progress.

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💧 Before the filter

For most of history, people didn’t understand what made water dangerous. Germs were invisible, microscopes didn’t exist, and water that looked clean could still kill you.

Contaminated water led to constant outbreaks of disease (cholera, dysentery, typhoid), especially in growing cities. It was truly a civilizational problem that capped how large cities could grow, how productive people could be, and how reliably societies could thrive.

Our money today is suffering from a similar kind of contamination. Fiat currency infects our culture with inflation, debasement, censorship, political capture, and counterparty exposure. It looks like money. It acts like money. But over time, it quietly drains your time, erodes your savings, and distorts the society around you.

Even if you don’t see the damage directly, people sense that everything feels more fragile, more expensive, more extractive. Our culture is contaminated. If our ancestors drank from a polluted stream, they faced disease and death. Polluted money fosters cultural rot and economic maelstrom.

Dirty money, like dirty water, holds us back. And until we clean it up, we’re stuck trying to build the future on a poisoned foundation.

🍺 Beer, wine, and alcoholic assets

Before humans figured out how to purify water, they came up with workarounds. Boiling helped. So did turning it into tea, beer, or wine. Heat and fermentation made it safer to drink, with the added bonus of better taste… and a bit of a buzz.

It wasn’t clean water, but it did the job. Good enough.

We do the same thing with money. Since fiat is fundamentally broken, people resort to alternatives: stocks, bonds, real estate, fine art, vintage watches, cars, baseball cards, you name it…anything but cash. They’re not money, but they’re tools to preserve purchasing power in a polluted system.

Like beer in the medieval era, these things work just enough to get by. But they come with tradeoffs: complexity, volatility, illiquidity, and the need for constant management. And they don’t solve the root problem — the money itself is broken.

As I lay out in Bitcoin is FIRE Friendly, the FIRE community recognizes this intuitively. That’s why so many plow excess savings into the stock market — not because it’s ideal, but because it’s the best alternative we have.

It’s a workaround for toxic money. And like alcohol, the volatility and risk can leave some people a little tipsy.

When your water is clean, you don’t need a workaround. When your money is sound, you don’t need to chase yield or add risk.

🛡️ The filtration revolution

Over centuries, humans developed many techniques to purify water. Ancient sand filtration, copper vessels, boiling, chlorination… Once we could remove the pathogens from our water, life expectancy shot up, child mortality fell, and cities could scale without collapsing under their own waste. Civilizations flourished because a core foundation for human health finally became reliable.

This was one of the most important public health breakthroughs in human history. It gave societies the ability to scale.

That’s exactly what bitcoin does for money.

Fiat money is full of invisible threats: inflation, seizure risk, counterparty exposure, political distortion. Bitcoin filters all of that out. It gives you monetary water in its purest form — neutral, incorruptible, and counterparty-free.

Bitcoin is the filtration breakthrough. It purifies the money itself.

And just like clean water enabled modern cities to rise, clean money opens the door for new systems of trust, savings, trade, and cooperation.

🌊 Clean water, clean money

The advancement of water purification bent the curve of human progress drastically higher. It changed what was possible and unlocked everything from modern medicine to urban infrastructure to global trade.

Bitcoin purifies our money, which will bend the human progress curve even higher. Adopting money that doesn’t leak value, distort behavior, or contaminate our culture unlocks possibilities that are hard to imagine.

One day, far into the future, people might look back on bitcoin’s rise the same way I found myself thinking about water purification in Rome…a breakthrough that changed the course of civilization.

Something so fundamental, so essential, that once it’s in place… you can’t imagine how we ever lived without it.

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That’s it for this week — thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Trey ✌️